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Jazz Jackrabbit IBM PC MS-DOS Epic MegaGames 1994


Jazz Jackrabbit



Epic MegaGames released Jazz Jackrabbit for IBM PC MS-DOS 5.0 in August of 1994. Jazz Jackrabbit is a six-episode platform and run and gun game notable for its precise controls and high-speed screen-scrolling and sprite-shifting.

Jazz Jackrabbit also features 3D texture-mapped bonus stages with sprite-scaled objects and actors.

The object of Jazz Jackrabbit is to rescue princess Eva Earlong from the turtle terrorist, Devan Shell.

Jazz can move, jump and fire five different weapons, which require ammo. A blur effect is applied to the sprite when Jazz reaches top-speed. There is also a slo-mo toggle and four difficulty levels.

Some aspects of Jazz Jackrabbit were influenced by Gremlin Graphics' Zool of 1992 on the Amiga, which was influenced by Sega's Sonic the Hedgehog of 1991. However, Sonic lacks run and gun gameplay. In 1990-91, the apex of fast-paced platform-gunners was not Zool, but Turrican.

Jazz Jackrabbit is the type of game that could have been made, and should have been made, three years earlier.

Jazz Jackrabbit displays in 256-color VGA 320x200. However, Jazz Jackrabbit's active drawspace is only 320x168 because it doesn't overlay its score panel like proper arcade games and Amiga games did dating back to 1988. In addition, Jazz Jackrabbit does not exploit the VGA palette to the halfway mark -- 32-color Amiga games look better. And Jazz Jackrabbit manages only one layer of parallax whereas Shadow of the Beast employed 13 layers in 1989.

I find it odd that Jazz Jackrabbit was not coded to display in non-standard square-pixel VGA 320x240. By 1994, at least seven other arcade games were displaying in 320x240.

However, Jazz Jackrabbit was designed to run on a variety of systems and appeal to a general audience -- it was not designed to appeal to run and gunners or push VGA chipsets to their limits. Jazz Jackrabbit is technically rock-solid but lacks innovation, artistry and memorable music.

All that said, Jazz Jackrabbit is not a bad game, it's quite a good game. It is proof that VGA PCs could replicate Sonic-like scrolling speed and smoothness. But again, 1994 is too late, we needed to see super-scrollers in 1991. However, I myself never liked Sonic or its clones: Turrican is where it was at. And if I want pure platforming action, Taito ports were King on home computers.

Jazz Jackrabbit requires an i80386DX 33 MHz CPU, 2.5 megs of EMS/XMS RAM and 1 meg of vRAM, but a Pentium 100 MHz CPU and 4 megs of RAM is recommended. Jazz Jackrabbit is a protected mode run-time.

Jazz Jackrabbit audio supports medium to ultra-high quality stereo audio via Sound Blaster, Sound Blaster 16, Sound Blaster Clone, Sound Blaster Pro, Gravis UltraSound and Pro Audio Spectrum.

Jazz Jackrabbit controls support keyboard, 2-button joystick or Gravis Gamepad.

Jazz Jackrabbit was distributed on 4x 3.5" 1.44MB HD diskettes 1x CD-ROM and extracts and installs to hard disk drive via Epic MegaGames Installation Program and PKSFX Fast! Self-extract Utility v2.04g by PKWARE. The install size of the CD-ROM version of Nov. 1994 is 18.5 megs and consists of 333 files.

Jazz Jackrabbit supports English, German, French and Spanish languages.

Jazz Jackrabbit was programmed by Arjan Brussee and designed by Cliff Bleszinski. Jazz Jackrabbit graphics were drawn and animated by Nick Stadler and composed by Robert A. Allen and its Cybersound Music System was developed by Joshua Jensen.

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