9 ms·
Jazz² Resurrection: Open-source Jazz Jackrabbit 2 reimplementation
- henriquez 3y agoHell yeah! Jazz Jackrabbit 2 was amazing and I always thought it was sad it became abandonware.
- leni536 3y agoSame. I tried playing it on wine, but it was always a bit unstable for me and crashed. I never knew that there was a FOSS reimplementation. edit: Looks like this project started in 2017, but it made leaps in the last year. http://deat.tk/jazz2/release-notes http://deat.tk/jazz2/release-notes
- Waterluvian 3y agoI’ve always been curious… are there concrete definitions of “abandonware” in the various major jurisdictions? Or is it just a loose concept that remains legally dubious? I feel like “Adopt an Abandonware” would be a pretty great source of meaningful, educational, and productive projects for devs with extra cycles or looking to refine skills.
- fruckyt 3y ago[dead]
- qbasic_forever 3y agoThere's mention of it in the DMCA if I remember correctly. It says DRM can be cracked if something isn't available to be sold anymore or something similar: https://www.wired.co.uk/article/dmca-game-preservation-exemptions-abandoned-games https://www.wired.co.uk/article/dmca-game-preservation-exemp...
- the_af 3y agoThere is no legal definition of abandonware and everyone in the community knows and understands this. It's just a case of "the lesser evil": preserving games when nobody who owns them cares enough about them to sell them or make sure they can still be run. But legal? No.
- stephen_g 3y agoI think few people would say it's a "lesser evil" but something that is morally fine and should be legal (when no money is changing hands). If you were, say, selling abandonware that's much more of a murky area, but just downloading a copy or giving people a copy of some data that is no longer sold - whoever has ended up with the copyright shouldn't be able to complain if they are not actually making it available for purchase - they shouldn't be able to claim any loss since by not selling it they are not being deprived of any revenue. Of course, part of this is only a problem because copyright terms became absurdly long - if we had sane copyright terms like strictly 25 or 30 years from publication a lot of this stuff would be public domain by now anyway.
- the_af 3y agoI don't disagree that it's morally fine -- after all, the abandonware community wouldn't make the downloads available otherwise -- but it's still not legal. Home of the Underdogs used to get tons of aggressive cease and desist emails from ESA (then named IDSA), the group representing game publishers legally, and who supposedly are on the "side" of games. So aggressive in fact they sometimes got it wrong (like sending a C&D for a game which was public domain). And who was willing to take a stance and chance it? Back then the abandonware community was one of two things, I think: people who just wanted to download games (Warez or abandonware was the same to them) and proper members of the community, who'd rather see these games either commercially supported or made public domain. Both HOTU and Abandonia replaced download links whenever someone found a legal way to buy the games.
- jsheard 3y agoDoes it count as abandonware if you can buy it on GOG today? https://www.gog.com/en/game/jazz_jackrabbit_collection https://www.gog.com/en/game/jazz_jackrabbit_collection https://www.gog.com/en/game/jazz_jackrabbit_2_collection https://www.gog.com/en/game/jazz_jackrabbit_2_collection Maybe it was abandoned for a time until GOG picked it up.
- WorldMaker 3y agoThough there's the fun twist that Epic has their own competing storefront now and it doesn't include either Jazz Jackrabbit game. What does it say about a company like Epic that their own storefront doesn't include most of their back catalog? It certainly feels abandoned if not abadonware.
- egman_ekki 3y agoAnyone tried running it on SteamDeck?
- gambiting 3y agoRegular Jazz 2 runs great on the steamdeck btw :-)
- pawelduda 3y agoFYI, the original game can be purchased for few dollars and runs fine on Windows with coop and all - tested not so long ago and had a blast playing it
- tombert 3y agoI haven't tried coop, but it actually works reasonably well on PlayOnMac as well, at least for single-player.
- breakingcups 3y agoIt's worth mentioning that there's a dedicated online community over at https://www.jazz2online.com/ https://www.jazz2online.com/ and the linked discord, which maintains a community patch called JJ2+ (https://docs.jj2.plus/ https://docs.jj2.plus/) which does amazing things with the game, including online coop.
- anfractuosity 3y agoLooks very cool, fingers crossed multiplayer support gets added at some point (noticed it says 'Multiplayer is temporarily removed in version 1.0.0.' on the website).
- luchris429 3y agoSeems like the creator says it would take 300+ hours and they don't have time (on their discord).
- archi42 3y agoThanks for digging this detail out! I'm a bit disappointed since I was looking forward to playing this with friends again (fond memories), but I can totally understand how the dev might not have the necessary time to implement this.
- Japie 3y agoIf you want to play online, I recommend checking JJ2+, jazz2online.com and the discord link there. It's fairly easy to setup. You just need the base game, which is available on GOG and runs perfectly fine one modern Windows computers. Check gog.jj2.plus website for the installation process.
- Hydraulix989 3y agoLooks like their Apache server is struggling
- Aachen 3y agoResponds very fast for me! With an error page. I guess something else fell over and Apache is the component that's holding up here ;)
- w3abhishek 3y agoApache server isn't able to handle it.
- Aachen 3y agoApache is what's serving the error page. It's whatever is behind Apache that is failing I've had an Apache server running on a decade old laptop on the HN front page, serving a custom PHP+Mariadb blog without caching, works just fine. It's big projects like WordPress that reliably go down from more than a handful of visitors per minute with bursts to a few in one second, if you don't have a caching layer that turns it into the equivalent of a static page generator
- salgorithm 3y agohttps://web.archive.org/web/20230820203915/http://deat.tk/jazz2/ https://web.archive.org/web/20230820203915/http://deat.tk/ja...
- egonschiele 3y agoI wish Jazz had been more popular. I loved Jazz Jackrabbit 1 and 2, and I believe there were plans to make a third, but they decided it wouldn’t sell enough copies. If anyone here can recommend platformers similar to Jazz that run on a Mac, I’d love to play them. I never got into shooters or 3D games, but always enjoyed platformers like Mario and Contra, and Jazz felt perfect for me.
- system2 3y agoI thought it was popular. Nearly all my childhood friends played it.
- pengaru 3y agoMy friends at the time all played it, copies pirated from BBSes though. None paid for a copy AFAIK.
- blibble 3y agoa good chunk of the third exists and is playable it's not very good though (except the music, Alexander Brandon is still amazing)
- dale_glass 3y agoOh, thanks for that, I didn't know it existed. Found this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gckYADZp0A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gckYADZp0A Yeah, it's interesting, but I think it's not a huge loss. Early 3D games have aged very badly, while many from the 2D era are still perfectly playable. So a higher res 2D followup might have actually been better.
- ironSkillet 3y agoFor anyone who doesn't know, this is the same guy who did the Deus Ex soundtrack. He is a phenomenal electronic composer.
- durumu 3y agoI would check out Celeste or Shovel Knight. Neither is exactly the run and gun style of Contra or Jazz. However, Celeste is extraordinarily polished with best-in-class controls and movement, and Shovel Knight borrows heavily from classics like Mega Man while ditching the stuff that didn't age as well.
- dmk 3y agoThis is great! This brings me back to my childhood, I loved this game, really looking forward to trying it out.
- dottjt 3y agoAlthough I never played Jazz Jackrabbit, I remember in our town there was this guy (I think he was a picture frame-maker) and I think my dad was friends with him. I remember going downstairs into the work area and I remember he was playing Jazz Jackrabbit on his old computer, and I remember thinking that this game must be epic. Anyway, random story. It just evokes that memory for some reason.
- gcampos 3y agoTechnically you were right, the game is Epic ;)
- voisin 3y agoOk, now I just need Earthworm Jim, Commander Keen, Raptor Call of the Shadows, and Uncharted Waters and my childhood will be successfully recreated.
- paulryanrogers 3y agoRaptor is getting a remaster by the original author. It's taking him a while as it seems to be a side hustle.
- jadbox 3y agoLink to Rapter Remix project: https://www.mking.com/RaptorRemixed.html https://www.mking.com/RaptorRemixed.html
- tiku 3y agoYou would think current advances in game engines would make it a lot faster these days.. getting it just right like the old game is probably the most difficult part.
- dvasdekis 3y agoUnrelated blast from the past, it looks like Fragile Allegiance is getting a spiritual successor: https://www.fragilecontinuum.com/ https://www.fragilecontinuum.com/
- coryrc 3y agoI always thought there was an opportunity to make this game for the original Microsoft Surface (the touchscreen-in-table one).
- NetOpWibby 3y agoI have fond memories of playing Jazz Jackrabbit...and Commander Keen, Cosmo's Cosmic Adventure, Secret Agent Man, Jill of the Jungle, and so on. Epic Games and Apogee were the logos I remember seeing most often. OMG! Jetpack from Adept Software is still available?! https://www.adeptsoftware.com/jetpack/ https://www.adeptsoftware.com/jetpack/
- zactato 3y agoCan we all appreciate the fact that this game was developed/produced by Tim Sweeney, who is still very active in Video Game development. I don't know of anyone else who's tenure in the industry is 30+ years.
- Loughla 3y agoAll of those and gizmos and gadgets. God I spent so much time on that one. And the lost mind/island of Dr. Brain. I wish I could still play them!
- snypher 3y agoWe were allowed to play Castle of Dr Brain in class, but there was no save feature, so some of us got pretty good at speedrunning the first puzzles to spend the rest of class on the next one.
- predakanga 3y agoYou can play Island of Dr Brain on archive.org! https://archive.org/details/msdos_Island_of_Dr._Brain_1992 https://archive.org/details/msdos_Island_of_Dr._Brain_1992 They have Lost Mind as well, but not emulated because it's a Windows game. I wouldn't be surprised if it still runs, though.
- tetha 3y agoWine is suprising me more and more with running these early windows games.
- unixhero 3y ago
- paulryanrogers 3y agoTried this for recent DosGameClub and it's not quite perfect yet, though a huge step up from the original if you cannot stand how zoomed in the vanilla game looks. Similarly OpenJazz allows playing Jazz1. It has even more quirks than Resurrection, and can similarly allow zooming out with higher resolutions
- tylerjl 3y agoI loved this game growing up, I'm definitely going to give this a try. As a minor observation, I'm pretty (pleasantly) surprised that the project provides a NixOS package for the application. As somebody who tends to flit between Arch, Fedora, and NixOS, seeing packages for NixOS before Fedora availability is a very surprising signal in terms of Linux distribution popularity.
- madeofpalk 3y agoI loved this game as a kid. The bundled level editor was pretty good considering, I think. LAN play was loads of fun also.
- chubs 3y agoIn this vein, worth checking out similar source ports / reimplementations here: https://macsourceports.com https://macsourceports.com
- mmastrac 3y agoThis is wild. It used to take hours to download this game's deno, and now I can fire it up in a webpage.
- rdsnsca 3y agoBoth Jazz's have been ported to macOS at https://macsourceports.com https://macsourceports.com https://macsourceports.com/game/jazzjackrabbit2 https://macsourceports.com/game/jazzjackrabbit2 https://macsourceports.com/game/jazzjackrabbit https://macsourceports.com/game/jazzjackrabbit
- kzrdude 3y agoOh that site is a treasure. Lots of opportunity to "backfill my childhood" - playing games I never played back then.
- renewiltord 3y agoThis is incredible. Thank you! My brother and I played so much of this. I love this. You're my favourite.
- Tade0 3y agoI have fond memories of three player coop on a single keyboard - possible as long as at most one player was running. The music was always a strong point, especially that it was typically at most four voices at once due to the file format used.
- Kuraj 3y agoFun fact - the creator of Lori is none other than Dean Dodrill, who would later develop Dust: An Elysian Tail.
- theogravity 3y agoNeat, but doesn't work in mobile Safari on iPad. Screen will show initially, but then the screen is dark once you start.
- Nition 3y agoAs a kid, my family got a new PC and it came with the full version of Jazz Jackrabbit 2. Both the campaign and the local multiplayer were a lot of fun, but quite often the multiplayer crashed. I also read about the game having a level editor called the Jazz Creation Station, but my copy absolutely didn't come with it. I looked though the game files and all that. I loved level editors so I was really disappointed. We had a closer look at the disc and it was a mysterious "OEM Version" (I know what that means now, but none of us did back then). But it said version 1.0 so surely it was meant to have everything? We contacted Gateway, like "is there any way we can upgrade to the actual final version of the game?" And the answer was no. They were bundling an unfinished version of the game! ---- > OEM Versions > These beta versions were originally distributed alongside Intel's manufactured hardware, as a result of a partnership between Epic and Intel. While most people who acquired these versions assumed they were the same as the retail release, they were actually builds from halfway through the game's development. > Two OEM versions exist: 1.00g, which is the most common, and 1.00h. These versions have quite a lot of differences compared to the final release, such as different file formats, many levels use different tilesets or are in different orders, many sound effects weren't coded yet into the game, different screens for loading and menus and different and/or glitchy physics for weapons and objects.[0] [0] https://jazzjackrabbit.fandom.com/wiki/Jazz_Jackrabbit_2/Development_Versions https://jazzjackrabbit.fandom.com/wiki/Jazz_Jackrabbit_2/Dev...
- amacneil 3y agoSame here. I have a vague memory of the level editor being included in the OEM version but not being able to get it working. But I could be mistaken. Was very confused at the time that we appeared to have the full version but it was missing features. Still spent many hours playing it. Edit: Also some motorbike racing game that came with the same (probably Gateway) PC. Can't remember much about it, but many hours wasted.
- Nition 3y agoIf your game bundle was the same as mine, it was Redline Racer!
- jorl17 3y agoOne of my exes loved this game. I swear, it’s been so long but I’ve never had such an urge to share something with her. I love this game, especially because of the memories of her it brings back. We were just not a good fit (and I was too much of a child anyway). Amazing open-source work!
- lovegrenoble 3y agohttps://deat.tk/jazz2/wasm/ https://deat.tk/jazz2/wasm/
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- gitaarik 3y agoI loved this game when I was a kid. I created a huge map with the editor and I hosted a multiplayer server with this map and people would join and we would be running around this huge map with some players and have fun. People were impressed by the map and I was super exited about it. It was the first time something I created that was used by random people on the internet. I've long since lost that map of course, but still have good memories ^^
- sizzle 3y agoI loved this game, the feeling of zooming through levels while blasting turtles and collecting gems? was incredibly fun and no other game gave me this send sense of being on the edge of your seat fun gameplay.
- lycos 3y agoI have great memories of playing Jazz Jackrabbit 2 online multiplayer, if I'm not mistaken at some point the official game servers were killed and to still play online we had to patch it to connect to a server hosted by someone I only remember as being called Nimrod (I didn't remember that I knew this until I started writing my memories). I think he was from the UK. I met a friend by being in a "clan" in JJ2 who kind of introduced me to caring about music, and I went to my first concert with. We are no longer in touch, but I do have one pen pal friend from that "clan" from another country who I still exchange birthday/christmas cards and gifts with for over 23 years now (and occasional messages throughout the year). Having said all that, I haven't played the game in years though. I remember the excitement over Jazz Jackrabbit 3D that I believe never saw the day of light, or well I vaguely remember there being a playable demo. Not sure, I could probably quickly search for it online but I'll leave that to you, the reader.
- physicsguy 3y agoOh man, I totally forgot about this game. Played it a ton.
- MrJagil 3y agoI love projects like this. Personally i am beholden to Dungeon keeper (https://keeperfx.net/ https://keeperfx.net/) and Red Alert (https://www.openra.net/ https://www.openra.net/) and Populous (https://www.popre.net/ https://www.popre.net/).
- ravenstine 3y agoOne of my favorite games growing up! In high school, one of my earliest programming projects was a VB6 program that could unlock locked Jazz2 levels. I can't remember whether those levels were locked because you had to achieve something or if you had to buy them. In any case, I somehow figured out how to manipulate those files to make them playable. There wasn't any encryption or anything. It was just a matter of finding the right byte and changing it to something else. Something I liked about Jazz2 was how performant it was on my lousy Intel Celeron PC I had at the time. Strangely, I remember the menus and stuff being kind of laggy, but the game itself always worked really well. Jazz Jackrabbit is like if Sonic The Hedgehog was on acid had a gun! I never understood why the game wasn't more popular. Epic Megagames really underappreciated what they had.
- janci 3y agoOh the endless arguments with my little sister on which rabbit is the best one - Jazz or Spazz.
- ouraf 3y agoThe dev is using nCine as the engine to leverage its porting capabilities (it even has a Nintendo Switch homebre version). nCine itself can use SDL2, QT5 and GLFW as backends Interesting decision.
- Narishma 3y agoIt also means this port requires orders of magnitude more resources than the original game.
- jstarfish 3y agoWow. I remember the mid-90s as a brief blip in time where game music was out of this world and really added to the experience. Jazz Jackrabbit (Alex Brandon), Crusader: No Remorse (Andrew Sega), Earthworm Jim (Tommy Tallarico), and Top Gear (Barry Leitch) were the soundtracks to way more than just their respective games for me for upwards of two decades until Hotline Miami and Horizon Chase came along, and Allen Simpson crossed my radar with FNAF's "DJ Music Man." There are some really, really good remixes of Jazz's soundtrack on YouTube. I recommend SIDNIFY's "Laboratory Level" (https://youtu.be/UY-T6I0PxZs https://youtu.be/UY-T6I0PxZs) and Allan Zax's "Tubelectic" (https://youtu.be/3UTTduiX5bw https://youtu.be/3UTTduiX5bw).