Jazz Jackrabbit 2: the Anniversary Bash 24 Experience

Well hello; it’s a lovely day in April and here I am with a new post before “Con Prep Hell” season rears its head back into my life.

Lately I got back into putting various old computer games onto my retro Windows 2000 rig, and after installing the DOS classic Jazz Jackrabbit onto the machine, I got motivated to try out its sequel Jazz Jackrabbit 2 and spent quite some time in the single-player after buying the game itself for a shockingly cheap value of… two dollars. And… wow, I was not ready for just how feature rich Jazz 2 really was.

Take the first game, expand the character and weapon roster, add in full-blown multiplayer plus support for custom levels, and boom. That’s Jazz Jackrabbit 2 in a nutshell, and it even got an update patch thanks to a number of passionate fans in the form of Jazz Jackrabbit 2+, adding further improvements and bug fixes while keeping the general core of the game the same. This drove me further to try the online multiplayer and it honestly reminds me of the Battle Mode from Super Mario Bros. X as well as Super Mario War, but faster and with a greater excuse for players to play more offensively (especially compared to SMBX).

And to my surprise, there was a four-day event occurring just a few weeks after. Titled the “Anniversary Bash” (though I had the urge to call it the “Birthday Bash”), this yearly event brings forward fans of Jazz 2 from across the world to celebrate the game’s anniversary. The format was simple. The first two days would be dedicated to the game’s most popular multiplayer modes: Day 1 was based around Match, a basic free-for-all deathmatch mode where the goal is to build up weapons and frag other players. Day 2 was Capture, otherwise known as Capture the Flag, and if you’ve played CTF in other games you know how it works here, and it translates surprisingly well to 2D.

The final two days of the event went absolutely nuts with the game modes. Day 3 featured a variety of free-for-all modes in addition to basic vanilla Match, while Day 4 branched out from just Capture the Flag to include a bunch of team games. Highlights across these final three days include Match with random events gradually going off as the game progresses, a mode in which players must survive a crumbling structure and can use TNT to destroy it quickly and put other players (and themselves) in danger, and a variation of Capture where players score points by accumulating kills in addition to capturing flags.

Overall it was a fun time, and it gave me my largest exposure to the potential of online Jazz Jackrabbit 2. Following the event, I begun working on what I thought of the event:

The good:

• A very large variety of modes in rotation, some of which are fun in a crazy kind of way, especially during the second half of the event when the events were turned up to 11.
• A meaty number of maps featured in the event to sink your teeth into.
• A killer selection of songs for the aforementioned maps, including some recognizable themes from other games.
• Custom weapons, some more chaotic than others (including a powerful flamethrower that outpaces the base game’s Toaster, fireworks, a drill gun to destroy a large amount of destructible blocks at once, a literal nail gun to scale vertical surfaces, and hornets).

The bad:

• Most servers you see on JJ2, including the Anniversary Bash, are based in Europe and use a system that’s built from functional but rather dated net code. if you reside in the Americas like I do, other players will appear to warp everywhere on the screen and hit you constantly with a stray shot while you struggle to shoot someone even at point blank rage, and unlike other games.
• The Jackrabbits’ signature abilities aren’t exactly perfectly balanced to each other, as Spaz’s double jump is much more useful for traversal compared to Jazz’s high jump, Lori’s quick lunging melee, and Jazz and Lori’s heli-ear abilities. Thankfully Spaz’s moves isn’t an outright game-breaker compared to multiplayer modes in other games released at the time, so you should still be able to play well as Jazz or Lori.
• Some of the modes on offer didn’t seem like they reached their full potential, but I can’t exactly decipher which ones and how exactly they could be improved.
• Other, smaller general issues baked into the game due to how it was designed back when it first came out and is no fault of the Anniversary Bash itself.

I think my main gripe with the event was my inability to play it optimally due to the increased lag in how the game registers character movement. While you appear to move, jump, and shoot just fine, that information is not always relayed exactly as they appear on your screen, leading to the scenarios mentioned under Bullet #1 in “The Bad” and some unintentional comedy in the process. I was given advice and strategies to circumvent the lag and use it to my advantage but it still left me confused and dumbfounded and I usually just sprayed and prayed projectiles while running at full speed for entire matches in hopes that I'd snag a frag.

The Anniversary Bash got me wondering how different the online would feel with a more local connection, and to that extent, the possibility of hosting an occasional server from my residence. While not something that I’m considering right away as, well, I don’t exactly have the strongest PC or network, it is definitely something that I’d love to make happen once I improve my PC rig and especially once I start streaming games in my downtime.

So that’s all I really have to say about Jazz 2 and the Anniversary Bash. I’d go on but I have a convention at the end of the month and I’m currently putting focus on prepping for it as much as I realistically can.