For the last time, the Atari Lynx, Epyx, and Data East are not shitty, you ungrateful bastard. You love the game, and this is how you repay the developers? How would you like it if I called Windows 95 shitty, or Nintendo and the NES and GameBoy shitty? 😡
4:30 I recall being able to do exactly that - Kill the "core" boss from the outside using weird wall hitbox glitches. It might have been just one of the two? Or it might have been with a specific weapon(RF missile?). I wish I could play around with that but I haven't had access to the game in 15 years.
9:30 It's like that one Chip's Challenge level, Cipher? I think. Or something similar. It was a 4x4 grid that spelled out passwords for future levels, but you could only really understand that if you mapped out the level.
As much as it might try to be an Amiga game, Jazz was *absolutely* marketed as the Sonic to Keen’s Mario. And Captain Comic, in this case, is basically our Dizzy.
I don't think I've seen a Pez dispenser in a few years, somehow. Anyway, brief spoiler for the CD episodes (I think Roundy knows this already, but for people who don't, and would care to call that a spoiler): This planet's music track is the one that gets recycled in Episode C.
Is it fuel, or is it Dreem, the latest probably nontoxic drink sensation? I remember getting stuck in this level at some point... I don't remember the exact circumstances, though.
You can accidentally shoot the buttons out of order causing a softlock. It's normally fine to skip a couple buttons in those sequences, but intentionally going back and shooting an earlier button that was skipped will cause the water to change to a lower level and lock you out instead.
Being a teacher in Texas, you are truly doing the Lord's work. Best of luck to you and your charges. Anyway, I feel like talking about brown for a while. See, for me, one of the big problems of brown is that there was a period where a lot of games were way too brown. Including Epic's own later Gears of War (a game that was probably unfairly dogged on, mostly because I feel like there's generally been this huge belligerence between shooter fans and non-shooter fans starting in the aughts if not earlier), which I think was one of the first to become really infamous for it. There was this whole tidal wave of games that were very, very brown in an attempt to be realistic. It generally always felt like a very... like a very brown brown. Mostly to the exclusion of other colors. Sluggion I think passes both because it's still colorful at times even while brown, but also because it's a nice brown. It's a different brown! It looks like a coffee with a good amount of cream in it, or like those cola-flavored Bottle Caps. I think those were the cola-flavored ones anyway. Unfortunately, from a gameplay perspective, Sluggion feels like one of the hardest points in the game, so on that level, sluck Fuggion and why would you want to spend more time there than you HAVE TO even if you want to see The Coffee Bricks?
Dang, I forgot Cracked was an actual physical magazine at one point. Robert Evans wrote for Cracked! He's the host of the podcast Behind the Bastards, which is highly informative, often pretty funny, and only makes me deeply upset about how absolutely vile humans can be like once or twice an episode. It's great! Otherwise, though, I can't name any of the old Cracked authors off the top of my head.
I love Ted Woolsey's localizations. I'm probably one of only a few people who will openly stan him all that hard, if only because his reputation has become weirdly awful over the years. I maintain that people who complain about Woolsey's localizations really don't know what the point of localization is or what a good one is, or grasp enough about language, slang, idioms and tone of voice to even be able to. Possibly one of my spiciest gaming takes, if not THE peak of spice from me. Also, good reminder to go see if I need to clean out the inside of my computer case, just in case it's full of dust.
Wow, the fact that the shield doesnt come with you to the next level really makes you wonder why they put it there. Its like those DOOM maps where theres more than one Computer Map.
The shareware episode was a wonderful sampler, capping it off with the sinister red castle and the perfect ominous track to go with it! It was definitely one of Jazz's high points that each world gets its own track (sans boss), to where remixes are still being made, especially Medivo's. Picture a graphical remake for our green friend, enemy shadows adorn the walls, with the braziers flickering as you run past, the rain drenching Jazz and then dripping off his fur each time he comes back in from an outdoor section - we could only imagine.
You'd be sitting at your Packard Bell multimedia center, with your Encyclopedia Britannica CD-ROM going, learning about endangered species while your sound card crunched out some low-bitrate classical music, with Jeeves waiting to answer any questions you had in another window.
"I should just be shooting at all times." Dawg. When I played this game back in the day, I would either tape down or lean a stapler on the Space Bar and just let Jazz fire all the time while I focused on jumping and running around. It meant I would blow all the ammo, but it was generally fine.
Oh god ABSOLUTELY Medivo was PEAK back in those shareware days. There was always something really off about those synth chants and how they cut off super early but I think it's kind of cool in a way - sounds like a really old synthesizer sound like you'd get on probably some of the music that inspired Robert Allen when he was composing this soundtrack. And the flashing turtle silhouette in the background? The swords? The red, the apparent lava in the background? Yeah. This level oozes malevolence. This is how you super extra knew the villain was absolutely NOT fuckin' around anymore and you were about to have a bad time. And then you get a typical Jazz Jackrabbit boss that you just completely vaporize in like 20 seconds if that. (re: cheats: I don't remember if you had to do anything like that for Jazz. I remember you had to do it for Crystal Caves in the final episode because whoever designed the overworld did the oh-so-classy move of making it impossible to return from certain areas (without cheats), effectively creating a forced level order in something that otherwise had a completely open level select up to that point)
Wow, the first world IS that short, huh? Tells you how much I remember this game. Anyway. "short" Amiga-remarks commentary follows based on my admittedly minimal experience with Amiga games: Amiga is kind of a mixed bag like anything else. Mostly I find they suffer a bit in the control department nowadays, but if I was playing them on an actual Amiga with a period-accurate joystick, maybe I wouldn't agree. Unfortunately, the prices on those on eBay are LOL NO. Most of what I've played for the Amiga are shmups, mostly because that's a lot of what Psygnosis did before Lemmings - but I do know a few platformers. Most of my Amiga experience is from devs from the British Isles (concurrent PC experience for US games is DOS or Windows-based, and for concurrent Japanese games, you're looking at PC-98xx models) and there are a few unifying aesthetic choices through a lot of them: -Garish, high-saturation color palette -Often fairly goofy characters outside of the shmups -Bizarre collectibles in platformers -Pop cultural references that may be a little odd or out-of-place, with that frequently being the joke -Music frequently goes way harder than it needs to for these games (but not in an RPG-ish way; they often felt more informed by either new-wave or metal, and I assume the guy who composed Menace's theme practically mainlined Venom's *Black Metal* constantly since release), with great sound quality for the era (sound hardware sounds better than the Genesis, and probably also the SNES - but uh, I guess I'd have to hear more direct AMI-to-SNES song ports) and pretty good sampling (although also, it's not unusual to see Amiga games with absolutely tiny soundtracks. When I did a video about Blood Money (a DMA Design shmup that they released after Menace and which had concepts during dev that eventually led to Lemmings; why they didn't make a custom map for that one I don't know, Psygnosis even published it!) back before I bombed my channel because I thought everything I ever did was crap, Ray Norrish (the composer for the game) had to helpfully remind me that the reason why the game contains only two (I think it's two?) pieces of music that are replete with samples is because they didn't have a ton of space; I think Amiga diskettes are less than a megabyte each). Not truly CD-quality, but very good. -Occasionally carried over the strongly violent themes of the older generations of British games, but frequently not as gory (though not without exceptions). Obviously, this is not true of all Amiga games, so please don't hit me, Amiga fans. I had DOS PCs and a Genesis growing up and am just now trying to make up for lost ground over the past couple years. Jazz Jackrabbit definitely has a lot of the vibes of an Amiga game combined with various other things that CliffyB thought was cool at the time, most of which happened to be pretty similar in a lot of ways. The Zool comparison is right on the money; I actually forgot how blindingly fast Zool moved until you brought it up and I looked some stuff up again and yeah, this is kind of more... Zool with a gun than Sonic with a gun. It's just that the end results of either kind of resemble each other strongly; Sonic lacked some of the defining features of Amiga platformers, but it DID have the high-saturation color palettes, and some levels greatly resemble places Sonic might hang out. Which here means the first level looks like -Hill Top Zone- Green Hill Zone but blue (have to remember, nobody remembers anything past the first level of any retro video game, whoops).
WHY ARE YOU MAKING ME FEEL OLD I think the charter itself was taking inspiration from sonic but for sure, the gameplay is amiga inspired I...had no clue puggsy and wizz and lizz were amiga games. Puggsy is pretty slow (on megadrive) so i don't think that's it. I know Dizzy had great amiga ports.
