Cliffy B. Jokes about a new JJ game
 

While browsing twitter, I thought I'd do a search on "Jazz Jackrabbit", and found a mass of posts about Cliff Bleszinsky announcing a new JJ. It perked my interest so I looked into it. It seems it stems from a tweet he posted a few days back, regarding what his announcement was going to be on the Jimmy Fallon show

http://twitter.com/therealcliffyb/status/12086249046

Which turned out to be a GoW 3 announcement.

And here's a parody of the Gears of War 3 anouncement, done by IGN
http://xbox360.ign.com/articles/108/1082387p1.html

[IMG]http://xbox360media.ign.com/xbox360/image/article/108/1082387/gears-of-war-3-20100407024913939.jpg[/IMG]

No JJ3 yet. But it's interesting to see this stuff pop up.

love it! :D

Like CliffyB, I understand that JJ3 would be hard to make place for in the current industry. So these jokes at least keep the idea alive.

Also notice that CliffyB is saying the name 'Jazz Jackrabbit' as one of his creations in almost every interview, including his new ones regarding GoW3, like in the 'Epic Tour' on the Xbox 360 Dashboard. Bam! Everyone hears Jazz Jackrabbit again, who said we were dead..? :p

You know, if Jazz Jackrabbit ever came back again I suppose they'd try marketing it towards a slightly older age group, maybe teens or something. No, not like this. :lol:

Or maybe Cliffy is just fooling around with us that he hasn't forgot about Jazz and is working on something to do with it. *hint hint*

Given the state of his latest games I'm not sure a JJ3 made by modern day Cliff would really cater to us at all.

And by us I mainly mean me but I'm sure there's someone else here who hated GoW with a passion.

It's all about the swag. The Jazz swag.

I love the smell of turtle intestines hanging from a tree in the morning

A small twitter I picked up:
http://twitpic.com/1igyxa

Cliffy can just go to hell.

Let's keep it civil, okay?

He went there, came back with GoW :P

I wouldn't lay the blame on CliffyB, he's the design director; Mark Rein is the guy that does make me furious!

Remember what message appears when you exit Jazz Jackrabbit Shareware Version?
:r

It's a video game company, they only think about money, even if it means to create a myth and then to let it die.

...civility...

How dare a then small and independent shareware company try to make money with a somewhat humorous line on the exit screen of one of their better games.

THE SHAME.

I really like the poster tho xD

I wouldn't call it "one humorous line". Always in the shareware demo, when you finish the game, there are 22 screens (2 of them unavoidable) publicizing the other Jazz 1 episodes; when you quit the game, other 3 screens (1 of them unavoidable, 2 if you use DOS).
So whenever you play the game you have to see all those advertisings, and if you pay attention, you'll see how cunningly they are written and placed: in most of the cases sooner or later they start to convince you to buy. Now try to imagine the effects they would have on a six-year-old child that plays this game quite often: of course, it isn't brainwashing, but it still remains a merciless half-subliminal advertising, in my opinion. Am I wrong?

But this is only an example: there's another one you all know.
Jazz Jackrabbit has been abandoned since a lot of time: now Epic Games develops much more advanced games (Gears of War, Unreal, etc.). So, now the Jazz Jackrabbit 2 engine is completely useless, since they don't develop side scrollers anymore and anyway it's quite buggy. But then why the hell don't they release the source code? Because, as someone said, their lawyers say they must defend the intellectual properties of Epic Games? Even if they are of no use? (I mean, the intellectual properties, not lawyers, that's quite a different matter)

At least they make good posters! :D

Yes, you're wrong. It's called "shareware". It's a method where you give people part of the game for free so they can try it out and let them purchase the rest if they like it. A very big portion of PC games from the JJ1 and pre-JJ1 era did it this way.

Regarding the source code: It's far more complicated than just putting the .c files in a zip and uploading it to J2O. There's legal issues involved, it was made by separate companies that are now more or less competitors, it's questionable whether the full source code even still exists, they'd have to get permission from all parties involved, there's probably contracts with companies that licensed the source code, they'd need to decide on an appropriate license to distribute it under, and so on. There's no gain in it for Epic (except some goodwill perhaps), and there's not quite a huge demand for it either.

A lot of them were even worse. Remember nag screens? When you'd start up the game, it would force you to wait 30-60 seconds while staring at some annoying message, telling you to buy the full version to make it go away. I think a few even put these in between levels.

And then when you finally bought the full game, the copy protection was "Please type in the eleventh word in the third paragraph on page 162 of the manual."

Epic was one of the better companies back then. As far as I know, none of their games had that kind of crap.

I remember one of my old DOS games I downloaded, the word was copyright. I found that very ironic...

quite a few games back then did the "keyword-in-manual" thing. Wasteland/Bard's Tale referred you to Paragraphs in a book to expand the story and important passwords to get through the game were in there.

Apogee games were okay, but Commander Keen 6 had a "Identify the Monster" check that was annoying.

What really frustrates me was games that only covered part of the game. Interplay's Descent was also notorious for this, but the most infuriating incident I remember was when found a copy of Deus Ex in a flea market.

nowhere on the case, disc or game itself did it say it was a demo, and it ended after the missions in New York were done. >:(

Okay, okay, I know what's shareware and I know about the legal issues (I had given a brief read to previous threads about the source code). But I'm not criticizing the advertisings themselves, I'm criticizing HOW they were made: that game was made for children, I find it kinda immoral to put those kind of messages in a game like that, knowing what kind of psicological impact they would have on the young players. If what Evilmike said is true, things are a bit different, though.

About the source code, I know that it's not as simple as it may look at first, but I also know that Epic was e-mailed by many people asking for it, and they replied either that they couldn't because their lawyers didn't want them to do it, or simply that they didn't want to. As far as I know, they NEVER replied that they couldn't because of legal issues with other companies. I think Mark Rein knows that a JJ2 forum still exists, and I think he knows that a message like this would silence most of those e-mail thanks to it.
But maybe you know more than me?

P.S.: I'm leaving for 3-4 days now, so I won't see your replies before Sunday. ;-)

How is "our lawyers don't want it" not about legal issues?

I said:

Epic's lawyers didn't like the idea because of all the time and money that would be put into dealing with the remnants of other companies that became their competitors over the ownership for the now-outdated engine as it wouldn't bring in any money for anyone.

It would bring reputation. Reputation = money, in the end..

Haha that way of thinking is not even fully related to the subject. I don't think Epic really cares about the small Jazz2 fan population compared to the massive Gears fandom.. Well, I'd say most of them (if they lurked J2O) would at least see us as loyal fans of a game that shaped their company, but nobody appears to take responsibility for the source code, because there is little reason to care for it.

Couldn't we leak the source code somehow? I know there are other people than Epic Games who have it. Wasn't one of those, the one who made the MacOS port, a community member? I do remember something like that.

The plan is ready, let's do it!

Go for it! :devan:

Ok, I'll propose :/

To CliffyB?

Nah, to Grytolle

In the unlikely event the source code was released (let's assume under a liberal license), what use would it be?

Are you a programmer?

Yep.

We could fix bugs, add features that were never finished, and create more total modifications (perhaps implementing a scripting system).

I thought "bugfixing" at first, but then I realised that you said "under a liberal license". A liberal license would allow people to do more with the source - they could use the JJ2 engine for their own games, much like what's done with the Quake and Unreal engines. That does assume that the source lends itself to such - it could be a wonderful example of flexible code with a cleanly-defined separation between game-specific and game-independent modules, or it could be a mess of hardcoded spaghetti logic.

Battery Check, Gigantic Adventure, and all the stuff we can infer about the code from surface effects suggest it's flexible enough.

Making new events would be awesome. But is there actually any remote chance of ever getting it? I get the impression that people have been over this multiple times.

People have. And chances that J2O will ever get the source code are very slim, while it's most likely not impossible, of course. That's all depending on the actual existence of the source code in today's world.

Just wait until April 1st rolls around again. It seems someone always manages to get a hold of the source code around then.