I was about 10 when I first heard about Jazz Jackrabbit from my friends - never played it though (perhaps that's for the best, as I was just the right age for Eva Earlong's low-cut dress to have made a furry out of me). But so many of my PC-gaming friends loved this game - the PC library at the time heavily leaned towards slower and more strategic titles, and to my friends Jazz Jackrabbit felt like a statement of intent that showed the PC could pull off mascot platformers just as well as the consoles could. And to that I say... were we playing the same game?!

To be fair, I can kind of understand the fan hype around this game; if you owned a PC and didn't play Sonic all that regularly, Jazz Jackrabbit certainly looks the part. While the limited DOS palette means it doesn't look as good as its console contemporaries, it has an anthropomorphic animal with 'tude (and a gun!) running around themed levels, each with their own unique gimmicks and a nice nonlinear structure with ample secrets to discover. Also, a real head-bopping toe-tapping soundtrack!

Unfortunately, actually sitting down to play the thing quickly reveals that this doesn't have the open-ended flashiness of Sonic CD or the polish of the first half of Sonic 2 - this is 3 and a half hours of Metropolis Zone. The haphazard and cheap enemy/hazard placement is certainly an issue, but it's exacerbated by lots of weird quirks like oversized hitboxes and Jazz immediately jumping after landing if you hold down the jump button for too long. Perhaps the worst part of the game feel is how Jazz hits full speed and momentum after moving in a direction for less than a second, and combined with the obscene screen crunch this forced me to slowly and painfully inch my way through every level by tap-tap-tapping the arrow keys.

There are some good mechanics here (different weapons with subtly different firing arcs add a bit of nuance), and the beginnings of good level design (which I hope the sequel built up on). But the frankly junky game feel means that Jazz Jackrabbit is a 'nostalgia goggles only' play.

sure, maybe flexing on your competition in-game is a little gauche, but really how much more beyond the pale is it than doing it in magazine ads, and anyway, you get a pass when you're, yanno, actually as good or better than the thing you're ripping off. cliff had the right idea; amiga platformers looked amazing and boasted incredible music, but they were boring, doofy, repetitive, and too hard with too little payoff. console wars rhetoric and american attitude may be unpleasant and toxic, but given how fun and playable jazz is, it's hard to argue that they weren't precisely the steroid shot the amiga platformer template needed. I'd rather play this than 90 percent of sonic games; nearly every world is an aesthetic treat, the soundtrack is all killer no filler, it does sonic cd's bonus stages better than sonic cd did, and if you have to deal with some hacky crap like how low eva earlong's dress is cut or a boss that's literally just a mashup of sonic and zool, well, at least those things are easier to explain than figuring out whatever the hell puggsy is.