So it's way past the bedtime for a responsible adult like me, but I'm feeling nostalgic for the good old days. It's really comforting to see this community is still alive and around - maybe a little less active, something I certainly am not blameless in - but still here.

I've been getting hyped about Super Mario Maker, watching game reviewers stream their level creations, and thinking that as fun and accessible as it looks to create a Mario level, they cannot possibly stack up to the amazing creations we'd been creating since 1998 in JCS. (17 years ago... holy crap - how has it been so long?) I thought the same thing when Little Big Planet first hit on PS3 too. No level designer since JJ2 has ever granted the same amazing flexibility of creating a completely custom tileset, crafting a complex level with 8-layers of foreground and background, tons of possible events and custom animations, and putting the whole thing to a custom soundtrack. (Sadly most of the good old mod sites are long since gone). JJ2 looked and sounded absolutely beautiful in 1998, and still does today - it represents the very pinnacle of 2D game design, something which was going out of style back in 1998, but has really come back in a big way more recently.

And I remember being there, back in the very beginning, avidly posting on the original Epic MegaBoard, a big fan of Jazz Jackrabbit 1 hyped for the release of Jazz Jackrabbit 2. Eagerly devouring the demo when it first came out. Ordering the full game immediately by combining my allowance savings with my younger brother's. Downloading every level, tileset, and other creation posted back on Jazz 2 City (before J2O came into existence). Excitedly trying my own hand at both - even learning to create a few tilesets in MS Paint, since that is the software I had at hand. Heck, one time when I was spending a day at my grandma's house I designed a whole tileset on paper with colored pencils, and then painstakingly reproduced it in Paint. I had decided that race was my favorite multiplayer mode, and one that was badly underrepresented in custom levels, so I decided to take it on myself to create a pack of 10 race levels. And somehow I actually finished that project and released the Race Tournament Pack (using exclusively MEZ tilesets, because MEZ came out of nowhere in the early days of JJ2 and release 3 absolutely amazing tilesets that would be worthy of having been official, and then vanished again never to be heard from again). And I remember the amazing online games, the creativity of all the people who designed entire new game modes (I loved Survivor when that came out), and all the people who discovered new tricks that broke the level designer wide open.

So while I should've been getting myself to bed tonight, instead I dug up some of my unfinished single-player creations in JCS to play through them again. I'm surprised my own self at how far I was able to take the tool, and I don't remember many of the old tricks any more, but I really ought to polish them off and release my single player episode (Devan's Secret Weapon) one of these days. Goodness knows it's been over a decade since I've even touched JCS! Where has the time gone? (Boring real life answer: college, job, house, adult life - and plenty of videogaming and tv to distract me from trying to be creative). Perhaps this time I'll feel inspired again to finish them off; or perhaps it's just another trip down memory lane.

So, how has everyone been? Any interesting developments in the world of JJ2 in the past few years?

And seriously, how is it that the Jazz Jackrabbit games aren't on GOG yet? These games are timeless, and deserve to be available through legal means. (Thankfully I've saved my official copies - migrating all my files from PC to PC over the years).


~AJ2f (haven't used that name in awhile)


BTW, I'm happy to say that I saw Alexander Brandon at a convention (Magfest) earlier this year, and got to thank him for his amazing music (citing Tyrian as the first game that really made me appreciate videogame music). And I've really been enjoying his recent amazing original album of vg-inspired music: Just Fun. Also enjoyed what I played of Dean Dodrill's creation Dust: An Elysian Tail. The animation really reminded me of JJ2.