Jazz Jackrabbit was one of the earliest games that I can recall playing, aside from the then standard early 90's titles by ID Software (Doom), Apogee (Duke Nukem II, Wacky Wheels), and Epic (Epic Pinball) and countless other companies that have unfortunately been forgotten; their titles lost to time except for those that remember them. I grew up with a PC and didn't get a console until my fifth birthday, so my Dad's PC back then was more or less treated like a 3DO or one of the other competing CD based consoles until the PS1 came along. And games like Jazz Jackrabbit helped with that, by adding a furiously fast home console experience on the PC. While Jazz seems to be, on the surface at least, of the "mascot platformer generation", he's a cut above. Being more akin to Battletoads or Earthworm Jim. I can best describe it as "a run n' gun game with sporadic platforming elements" that makes something like Sonic seem incredibly dated by comparison. With Sonic there's raw speed and meandering platforming that you have to do to get back to the "speedy bits". While I've heard and often agreed with the whole "donkey/carrot" analogy, there's still something about Sonic that's always felt off to me that I've never quite been able to put my finger on when compared to say Mario. And with Jazz being kind of a more "lovingly made" copy/paste of Sonic, he also kind of inherits some of the problems that come with "blazing fast speed"; colliding head on with your enemies and taking damage. With It's sequel, Epic improved the game somewhat by moving the camera back a little so you were able to see more of what's going on in the world. While it can be a deal breaker for some, I feel that Jazz has so much audio/visual charm going for him, that these problems are very easy to ignore
