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proud2beamerican

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Sep 18, 2015, 10:07 PM
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Different versions of Jazz Jackrabbit 2 - my perspective

Hi everyone! Jeff here. I have a very good memory and I love to store some beautiful moments in it. One of those moments is the time when I played this beautiful game back in 1998. Even though in those times there were already much more advanced games on the market, JJ2 still seemed pretty impressive. It had beautiful, yet simple, graphics, and very addicting soundtrack! It occasionally was appearing in my mind throughout the years, but I never really had a chance to re-experience the game. Till now - I downloaded the game and played it on my Linux machine using Wine. It was amazing to feel that bouncing magic again! But I've noticed that the things weren't exactly as I remembered.

Here are all the details that I can think of from the JJ2 that I've played for the first time back in 98:
  • the title graphic included Jazz & Spaz on some kind of purple background with a Windows logo somewhere in the bottom corner.
  • the background of the menu was all purple
  • there was no Lori
  • there were only 4 episodes and they were all playable one after another. There was no such a thing as a "Shareware" episode, nor the Homecooked levels.
  • the 1st Carrotus level was a night level, the 2nd one was during the day, while in the version that I played right now it is reversed.
  • you could easily kill the boss with 3 stomps or those special attacks (ctrl+arrow)
  • there was a different music in the 2nd level of Colonius than in the 1st one. in the version that I played now there is the same music throughout both Colonius levels
  • the boss of the Beach level was way different, at least I recall some different movements of it
  • there was no boss in the Medival level
  • Jungle levels were completely different - definitely the background was different and I believe there was a warp somewhere on the mere beginning of the 1st level
  • the final boss was different: Devan was just stuck in the ground and as soon as you started shooting at him he turned into that flying monster. He was way easier to kill
  • picking up the carrot generated exactly the same sound as picking up the gem
  • in general I recall that there were a lot of random missing tiles in the grounds etc. now it seems that everything is fixed.
  • there was no program to edit the levels

Can someone tell me what exactly version of JJ2 that could be? And how can I get it?
I did some research and I found out that there are different versions of JJ2, but there is info about new episodes like TSF, Holiday Hare, not necessarily about all those details that I mentioned.

Also, after trying this version of JJ2 that I've downloaded I tried to run JJ2+ with it on my Linux but things started to act really weird. And I had to use my friend's laptop with Windows 10