Jazz Jackrabbit Collection

My favourite game from childhood years. Amazing soundtrack, beautiful VGA graphics & unbelievable gameplay.

First of all, this game is pure genius. I give Epic a 10/10 for releasing this game to the masses in an easily accessible place. The game does have both Holiday Hare games (Holiday Hare '94 is on the CD portion, hence why it's not listed in the startup menu). However, not sure if it was Epic's choice to have CD Projekt to list it at 9.99 or if it was their choice to do so. I would wait for it to be on sale first if you are going to buy it, unless you are a young PC gamer enamoured by the classics and have to have it now, or you are seriously longing for a huge nostalgia trip.

I Dunno why it was fun to play JJ1 back then and now it's just boring. One reason may be the "technical edges" you may stumble about. When I first started the game I went to the setup - as I usually do - setting up the joystick. I may add I use a normal old x-box pad. nothing exotic. The timings of the game are that bad, the cursor flickered around like crazy. You can't cancel the calibration, so you have to go with the result. Unluckily the cursor flickered crazily through the whole menu, misadjusting all options. Nothing was controllable anymore. 15 Minutes later I finally found out, that you have to fiddle with the dosbox_jazz.conf to set timed intervals for the axis. After a successful recalibration I finally started the game to find out, its running a bit too fast. With the slow-motion option (you have to turn on every new level) its running a little bit too slow. Yes, you are right; its a DOSbox. I could configure the game like I wish. But to be true: since I pay for a 30 year old game I already payed for back then, just set in a Dosbox, I don't see it as my duty to and don't wanna mess around anymore. Alltogether I would say, this game was okay back then, but it would not be a big missing in a modern "golden age of gaming"-collection nowadays.

Saw the ratings and various rose-tinted nostalgic reviews and thought there might be something here. Unfortunately, it's a platformer/shooter very 'of its time' with fast movement, funky level design and inexplicable enemy types. I did actually enjoy the first few levels as I hadn't played this kind of game for a while, alas, this feeling did not last. I bought it on sale for pennies, so I guess it is worth that.

Both of the Jazz Jackrabbit games are great fun but why on earth is GOG charging so much for these? I legally downloaded Jazz 1&2 years ago for free and when I saw them being offered here I went to check and with a bit of searching they are still being offered for free. Come on GOG you probably got these for free too and there's no need to be so greedy about it:)