Jazz Jackrabbit

The Good
This game has a TONS of levels: to beat the game, you must fight in 57 levels in 28 different planets (of course in CD version). Not to mention secret levels and 3D bonus levels, where you have to collect gems to receive extra life. You will fight in medieval castles, jungle, cities and finally in Twin Battleships. Of course, you aren't unarmed: you can use blaster with infinite ammo, rockets, flamethrower, grenades and TNT, but it's better to conserve your arsenal for bosses and killing enemies by blaster. By the way, there are many different creatures to destroy, such as bees, turtles, scorpions, snowmen and big flowers. Technically, it looks wonderful. Lovely backgrounds, animals, sprites for 3D bonus levels and cinematics. Music is written for Sound Blaster with large amount of samples. And it changes very often, you won't get bored. Sounds are just good - there isn't anything brilliant.

The Bad
Unfortunately, there are some bad things in Jazz Jackrabbit. First, when you save your game, and you will load it later, you will be only warped to level, where you saved. Game "forgets" about your ammo, lifes, score... heck, it even forgets about your progress in level! Second, game is sometimes a way too hard. If you tried to beat Orbitus levels or this moment in Raneforus, where apes fall from the sky, you know what am I talking about. And finally, it's hard to run under Windows XP. If you will optimize DOSbox to run Jazz, it will be unplayable for other games. Personally, I use VDMSound, but it isn't perfect too. I can't select ultra-high quality sound, like I was used to in Windows ME, because game will slow down... I don't know, what problems are under Vista, but I just don't want to know...

The Bottom Line
If you're looking for a good platform game for DOS, "Jazz Jackrabbit" is something for you. There wasn't anything better than Jazz... until "Jazz 2" came out. By the way, you can freely download a shareware episode and two Christmas-themed episodes, which gives you 13 levels of fun. Get them immediately!