The level lists for this year’s Anniversary Bash have just dropped, and they are exclusively composed of questionably designed levels that appeal to the nostalgia of people who have been in the community since before you were born:
Battle
1: Bobo Meets Royalty
Making its seventh bash appearance, this level features a garish background, invisible warps, and too many powerups. There were six other Bobo levels, all dating back to mid-1998, but nobody remembers them anymore. But it’s all worth it for the layout, which can best be defined as a game of Snake.
2: Cold Day Battle
This map is clearly inspired by the Bubba boss arena from A Cold Day in Heck, but edited to make it ready for multiplayer gameplay. There are two ammo crates, for example! And……that’s it.
3: 48 Hour Protein Shake!!!!!!
Dethman’s “24 Hour Coffee!!!” is widely credited with starting the trend of using the MeZmErIzE tileset to reference different drinks and durations. But there was another one this whole time! The Protein Shake map was originally created for the CyberSpaz episode, and if you know what that means, it’s time for your hip surgery. Its signature charming 1999 design quirk is that the powerups don’t respawn.
4: Battle Game
A new edit of battle1.j2l which transplants the familiar layout into a new tileset. Which tileset? Who cares? The copters from the top left area have been replaced with the bubble launchers from Holiday Hare ‘24, in a shameless attempt to appeal to SP players and impress returning community members.
5: Bobo Eats Royalty
A spinoff that is the best-remembered map by the Vengeance Of Rabbits level making group. Its original filename was VORe.j2l, and it is widely credited with adding a new word to the English language.
6: Dungeon Dilemma
You can host any level in Battle, you know.
7: Kirbys like, 84th test
You can host any level in Battle, you know.
8: ELEKTREK SPACE DODECAHEDRON
Hold on, where’s my Geometry textbook?
9: EvilMike’s Neglected Doghouse
Honey, it’s 6pm, can you go feed the dog? What do you mean you’re too busy revolutionizing level design for PC Gamer’s 1998 Game of the Year? You can do that tomorrow, life will never change, you will go on making levels forever in the eternal present.
10: Non-Typical Battle
So here’s a question, if you host a level enough times does it finally become Typical? See also Unconventional Coffee, and to a much lesser extent, Unusual Pac Man.
11: Level with a Jazz 1 Tileset
Placeholder entry, but you know there’s got to be at least one! Maybe 2026 will finally be the year of Letni on the desktop.
12: J-Pop Devan Hunters
Get ready for Jazz to fire his pop gun! In this rare PvE battle level, players must decide whether to roast each other or to defend against the hordes of evil turtles. But beware, for one player may be a secret turtle!
13: Zappo Egypt
This Level takes you back 100000years when the piramids wour builted! Some levels are designed thoughtfully, with lots of attention given to gameplay and movement flow and ammo choices: others are designed by selecting the entire tileset and dragging it around layer 4 for a while. But this level has been hosted repeatedly for JDC events, so it might as well appear in a bash level pack too.
14-19: Foo Battle 1-6
An obscure part of the broader Foo Products multiverse, these six battle levels tell an elaborate storyline of the eternal war between typos and capslock. They all use the same weird castle tileset where all the pixels are 2×2 instead of 1×1 for some reason you don’t care about, key story beats are locked behind $100 coin warps, and most of them reference specific MSN conversations that were never released to the wider public. But it sure is convenient there are so many of them, it means that compiling this list took less time!
20: Bee Level
According to all known laws of aviation, there is no way a bee should be able to fly. Its wings are too small to get its fat little body off the ground. The bee, of course, flies anyway because bees don’t care what humans think is impossible. Yellow, black. Yellow, black. Yellow, black. Yellow, black. Ooh, black and yellow! Let’s shake it up a little. Barry! Breakfast is ready! Coming! Hang on a second. Hello? Barry? Adam? Can you believe this is happening?
Capture the Flag
1: Best CTF Party Good Luck
Originally created for the J2MC2 Contest, this level clocks in at a wild 1.04 kB and features two CTF bases maybe ten tiles away from each other. It uses the Antartica tileset, which is a slightly brighter recolor of Inferno that misspells the continent it’s based on.
2: Diamondus Warzone
For three perfect weeks in April 1998, Diamondus Warzone was the only CTF level anyone was able to play. Now it’s back! No upgrades here, this is the original immersive experience of the level, with the electro shield in the bottom right corner, and now scripted to restore the infamous “flag bug” which filled the chat with “captured the flag” messages the moment someone touched the top of the level.
3: Carrotus Clare
The forgotten cousin of Bash darlings Carrotus Clash, Carrotus Square, and Carrotus Squash. Expect a surprising number of Carrotus Pole events for a multiplayer level, and an uncomfortably long invisible maze sequence.
4: Level using Labrat
There are a dozen different identical-looking Labrat levels from around 2000, and in the process of copying down this list I already forgot which one this is. The layout is very confusing and you bump into a lot of strangely-masked tubes, does that help?
5: Nitrosity Non-Alternate Palette
Do you enjoy accidentally morphing into a bird? Unexpected sucker tubes? Experimental solid-color-based eyecandy? Doesn’t matter, because the terrible sprite palette will prevent your mind from processing anything that’s happening onscreen.
6. Bloody Bunny’s Lair
BloodBunny’s first-ever CTF level is a classic that needs no introduction. This year, we will remember it by redrawing its layout in Gartic Phone and then recoloring it to look like pepsi to celebrate a discord spambot which everyone will absolutely remember years from now.
7: Happy Waterslide CTF
Another pack that is best remembered for one standout level, stripe’s “HappyCTF” took players on a tour of the world with such familiar locales as Castle, Jungle, Hell, and Semiconductor. But it’s not too late to give some love to Happy Waterslide CTF, which put one CTF base at the top of the level and the other one at the bottom, because surely this time it’ll result in balanced gameplay.
8: War Tavern
Before the Hotel Heroes burst onto the tileset scene, people used other tilesets for their Hotel levels, like Haze and Kaven’s “The Tavern,” which was garishly colored but did include fluffy purple clouds, an originally drawn rabbit concierge, the Statue of Liberty, and a poorly dithered photo of a kitten. Nobody has looked at this tileset in years, but it does mostly share its name with the War Tavern, the setting for numerous long, heartfelt Jazz 2 fanfics which also nobody has looked at in years.
9: Server Never Wins
JJ2 has an obscure feature where people can host a server and actually play as rabbits in that server, instead of hosting dedicated servers and being idle like you’re used to. When people did this, they would get a bit of an advantage because they have less lag than anyone else. Some levels used to be named with that in mind. But not anymore! Thanks for nothing, Carrier-grade NAT!
10: Red Beret vs. Blue Beret
New version of the classic Bluez battle map, this time designed for team play. Actually I don’t hate this idea, is it too late to call dibs?
11: Red vs. Blode
Nowadays, levels can be based on (pictures of characters from) Japanese cartoons. In the early 2000’s, they could be based on Flash cartoons! Featuring such memorable characters as Blode, Blode with a different name, and the Woe Kitten with its eternal catchphrase “WOE UNTO THEE!” If you don’t know any of these references because web browsers don’t support Flash anymore, well, that’s your problem.
12: Red vs. Blue
Red vs. Blue, often abbreviated as RvB, is an American web series created by Burnie Burns with his production company Rooster Teeth. The show is based on the setting of the military science fiction first-person shooter series and media franchise Halo. The series centers on two opposite teams fighting in an ostensible civil war—shown to actually be a live fire exercise for elite soldiers—in the middle of Blood Gulch, a desolate box canyon, in a parody of first-person shooter video games, military life, and science fiction films.
13: RWBY
In the supernatural universe of Remnant, four strong girls are training to become Huntresses, which are humanity’s only hope of defeating the shadowy and threatening creatures known as Grimm.
14: Pinball Duel 2k25
This one’s fine, shoutout.
15: This Level is Adjective….ADJECTIVE!!
Haha! It’s cute how we repeat patterns across levels, like names and things. It shows that we’re a community! And everyone loves bao! bao!.xm. Anyone who does not love bao! bao!.xm, please report to your nearest Arby’s for reprogramming.
16: That One Time Noogy Drew Lori Topless
Well. That one time you know about.
17: Unregistered HyperCam 2
Okay how do I explain this one. So you know OBS, right? Imagine there was a program like that, but instead of being free, like OBS, it was free. Except you could pay them money if you wanted to remove the words “Unregistered HyperCam 2” from your video. Except nobody paid them money. So seeing those words all the time was normal. And, uh, I guess it was a JJ2 level, in the context of this list?
18: Springboard CTF
You know, it’s a little odd that Battle2, Battle3, Capture1, and Capture2 have never made it into a Bash. Does “The Lost Battle Game” count for Battle4? Probably. And does anyone even remember what HH98 and TSF’s multiplayer levels look like?
19: Firefly
A new animated TV series based on the space western from 2002, but without that one guy you feel icky about nowadays! No, not that one. No, not that one either.
20: Bobo YEETs Royalty
Rule of three, baby! That’s comedy! You’re laughing right now!
Clear your calendars for Anniversary Bash 28 from April 10th to April 13th! The annual event celebrating Jazz Jackrabbit 2’s shareware release (April 9 1998) is celebrated with a dedicated online multiplayer server, with a customized level list drawing from the last twelve months of community creations and from popular hits of years past, hosted all through the nearest weekend.
Visit the the JCF thread for the early details and to make any suggestions, and stay tuned!
Also, the results of the 2025 JCS Awards are in—congratulations to all the winners!
Whenever any of your uploads gets a review, J2O now sends you an email about the review! This means you don’t have to keep revisiting the Latest Reviews page every day hoping someone will have noticed your work!
By default, emails are turned off for users who self-identified as living in the European Economic Area, which is governed by Article 13 of the ePrivacy Directive, and turned on for everyone else.
Specifically, it’s turned on for non-EEA people because when I asked about this on the JCF, everyone was strongly in favor. This isn’t intended as a scam, it’s intended to make creators happy by telling them that people still like their work. However, because it’s legally required and because it’s the right thing to do, you can toggle this behavior from your edit profile page.
(The same profile setting also emails you when you receive private messages. This was a J2O feature already, but you couldn’t intentionally toggle it, and also the emails are much prettier now than they used to be.)
(I’ve tweaked other parts of J2O since OpenGraph support, this was just the first one that felt like it warranted a news post. You can track the rest [and future changes] in this thread.)
Now’s the time to vote for your favourite levels, tilesets and authors from the last year!
Please see the JCF thread for details. Use the Google Form to cast your votes or check out the JCF thread for additional options.
Voting closes on 8th March at 23:59 GMT+1.
Happy voting!
Jazz 2 has four known betas, and the gaming world was rocked in late 2024 by the release of Arjan’s original engine that became Jazz 1, but we’ve never had an unfinished version of Jazz 1 that actually includes Jazz… until now. Version 0.9.
Ian Nemec found a floppy labeled “JAZZ JACKRABBIT Confidential copy for reviewers,” and decided to put it on archive.org. He was then very generous with his time and resources when I emailed him for help getting the files and asking his permission to release them to J2O. Here’s Ian’s story in his own words:
So I remember Jazz Jackrabbit when I got a demo disk for it on my freshly built 486 back when I was 11. I played the heck out of that demo that I think I got free from a visit to the Palo Alto Frys when visiting my uncle. I didnt get the full version until several months later and I played through it quite a few times. When growing up I didnt have consoles I got PC games and components instead, so for me it was the closest to being Sonic the Hedgehog, but with a gun.
I found this review copy while working as an IT for a newspaper group in Livingston, Montana of all places. It was among a pile of ancient photo backup floppies for whatever reason. I snagged it and grabbed a trusty USB to floppy drive and had to wrestle it off of the aging disk. I finally got a clean copy when I dusted off an old Dell XPS laptop I had laying around still running windows 7, 10 and 11 right refused to copy it in its entirety.
You can download the Reviewer Copy here and run it just like your other DOS games, e.g. by modifying an existing DOSBox shortcut, or play it online if you don’t want to look at the individual files.
I’ve also created a JCF thread for listing differences between 0.9 and 1.0. Don’t read if you don’t want to be spoiled before playing!
A new album of Jazz 2 covers has just dropped on Bandcamp, with 26 songs!
Despite the “Tubelectric Guitar” album name, other instruments include bass, keyboard, and drums. It appears to be mostly the work of JCF user OmriLahav, who has been working on these songs for over a decade.
Unlike most Jazz fan works, this is a commercial release. The credits site notes that “Materia Collective takes great care to ensure that all cover song recordings are licensed and in full compliance with applicable laws,” and a preview yesterday noted that Alexander Brandon has provided “incredible support in this process.”
Version 6.6 of JJ2+ is now available! Today’s the 6th of 2026, what better date could you ask for?
Let’s have a history lesson. Here was the player list (in CTF) in vanilla JJ2:
This was the list from most of JJ2+‘s history. It added a lot of new information, but could be hard to read, with unexplained symbols like “M” and “S” and “A” and “*”. The asterisks were even drawn inconsistently in different gamemodes. It also drew “+” next to plus players’ names, which made sense in 2008 when running plus was rare, but is just unnecessary detail in 2026.
Version 6.4 started to tackle the problem of unexplained symbols, and moved the flag icon farther left, to a position consistent across gamemodes, so that it wouldn’t be obscured by other data. However, this led to the list being even more cluttered than before, and sometimes there was a lot of horizontal space between the flag (or other such icons) and the player’s name.
Following extensive community discussion and numerous public test builds, we’re happy to release 6.6 with a focus on being easy to read. The useless “+” symbols are gone; the redundant spectator eyes/scores are gone; the unclear “M” and “A” letters are replaced with graphics and moved to the right where less time-sensitive information goes; spacing is improved everywhere; and flags (and other such icons) are drawn immediately next to player names.
Because JJ2+ used to draw “*” in different positions in different gamemodes, some players may be more comfortable seeing icons on the right side of player names instead, so 6.6 has a new alternate display mode for those players who disable the new “Icons Left of Names” option.
As mentioned, this was the result of a long, very productive discussion in our issues tracker. There are about 90 different open threads at the moment, far more than we can possibly prioritize, so always remember to reply to the threads that have ideas that you want to see added/fixed in future. That’s the only way that JJ2+ developers can know which ideas are important to the community.
You can download 6.6 in-game or in-browser.
Jazz2Online now has some OpenGraph support for individual downloads, articles, and news posts. When you link to these pages in websites that support OpenGraph—such as Discord, Tumblr, or Facebook—you may now see a link title and description specific to that page, rather than the default J2O description. There’ll even be a thumbnail of the first screenshot if you link to a download with one or more screenshots.
ETA: Snippets now too.
Also, j2pe files (example) are now given proper file previews. Since August 2020, we’ve recommended using the file extension j2pe instead of j2e for new episode files, because vanilla JJ2 crashes if there are too many j2e files. JJ2+ treats j2pe the same as j2e, and now J2O does too.
Thanks stijn for graciously giving me edit access to J2O, allowing me to fix some little issues like these that have built up over the years! I’ll take a look at the Site and Forum Rules, Questions & Feedback forum for more ideas, and maybe post a changelog in there… not every fix is going to be a big enough deal to warrant its own news post.
Version 6.5 of JJ2+ is now available!
Today’s focus is Overtime. It could often come as a surprise whether overtime was enabled in online multiplayer, so now if you press F9 twice, there’s a new blue “OT” line among all the other advanced HUD info. If that line says “On,” you’ll know that the game will enter overtime if the time runs out and there’s a tie among winning players/teams.
Besides that, the rules have changed in Battle, Team Battle, Pestilence, and Team Battle: if there’s a tie for first place when the time runs out, and overtime is enabled, then the max score during overtime will be two points more than the highest current score. For example, if the max score is 10 but the two leading players only have 5 points when the time runs out, then the max score will be reduced to 7 (5+2) for the overtime period, and this reduced max score will be previewed in blue in the HUD.
(Overtime max score rules have not changed for other gamemodes, but we’re open to ideas.)
These visual changes only apply when both clients and servers are running the current version of JJ2+, 6.5, instead of older versions. We’ve also patched several bugs resulting from up-to-date clients joining older servers, but there are still more out there.
You can download 6.5 in-game or in-browser.
Version 6.4 of JJ2+ is now available.
6.4 is focused on helping newer players understand JJ2+‘s vast array of multiplayer gamemodes. First, instead of ambiguous * and S symbols next to players’ names, we’ve added a series of graphical icons to signify different possible player states, such as a padlock for jailed players in Jailbreak. Second, the Esc menu now includes a new “Help” option which explains the current gamemode’s rules and objectives, styled after the official JJ2 manual. Mutators may add to or even overwrite the standard Help manual screens to explain their own gameplay, so players won’t have to constantly ask each other for instructions.
In Single Player or Cooperative, the Help option instead explains normal Jazz 2 gameplay and any pickups, objects, or enemies in the current level, based on language from the JJ2 manual and from the Prima strategy guide.
Finally, we’ve implemented a temporary alternate logo in the menu system to commemorate Burger, who ported Jazz Jackrabbit 2 to Macintosh computers in 1999, who died yesterday.
You can download 6.4 in-game or in-browser.
