Jazz Jackrabbit 2 Collection: the turtle who tried to rewrite the history of Carrotus

Reissued on GOG and patched by its own community, the rabbit-led platformer collection fixes the game's display — and shows why sharing a screen is still such an ordeal.

A turtle with a time machine, and the rabbit left to stop history from changing

In a review written in Polish, a player recounts that nearly a third of the code that unlocked the game's original resolution came off his own son's keyboard. That's no figure of speech: it's the Jazz Jackrabbit 2 community patching, decades after the original release, a collection that GOG merely put back on the shelf.

The premise is a piece of classic villainy: the turtle Devan Shell builds a time machine to rewrite Carrotus's past, and it falls to you — playing the rabbit Jazz, with his bouncy, scatterbrained brother Spaz at his side — to keep that history from being erased. The collection gathers the two episodes the series picked up after the original game: in Secret Files their sister Lori joins in, gifted with uncommon athletic powers, across an adventure through a haunted house, a city and an Easter stage that stretches toward a secret code leading to Valhalla; in Christmas Chronicles the three rabbits swap their usual adventure for snowy landscapes. A built-in level editor, dubbed Jazz Creation Station, lets any player build stages of their own — and the mode for several people playing together runs from two sharing one screen to 32 sharing a single match over the network.

Credited with the reissue, as both studio and publisher, is Epic Games — the same company that returned the title to GOG's catalog on November 30, 2017. For genre, the listing settles on action, platform and adventure: the rabbits run, fly, swim and teleport across dozens of stages, with three playable characters, each with an ability of their own.

Mods of this game on Clairo

• Jazz Jackrabbit 2 Plus

Each of them requires this game, according to the store itself.

From father to son: the player who fixed the screen himself

The group that reviewed the game on November 30, 2017, the date of the GOG reissue, keeps returning to the same scene: someone who played as a child, next to a brother or a sister, finding the title again after years of hunting for a copy. If you grew up sharing a keyboard like that, you'll know the scene. This group's gratitude isn't only for the game — it's for the publisher that chased down the rights and put the title back in the catalog.

A review in Polish, from that same launch batch, goes further than the usual praise: it describes the level design, the enemies and the bosses as surprising for their time, and credits the goodwill of a community that, over the years, built its own maps and character art — the same community that unlocked the game's original resolution with a homemade patch, written in part by the reviewer's own son. The caveat he raises is the most concrete of the group: the game still won't fit on a wide screen.

Two reviews written more than a year later, the launch enthusiasm already gone, confirm the Polish player's finding: they credit that same community patch, named JJ2+, with getting the game to run and respond better than the original release did, and recommend the company of family or a physical controller to enjoy it. On GOG, the store that returned the collection to its catalog, those who got past that installation stage came away recommending it; those who stalled along the way tripped over exactly what the community celebrates so much.

The same fix, a screen full of black borders

The file gathers only one dissenting review, published on December 30, 2018; in it, nostalgia didn't survive the technical trouble. You boot the game expecting the full screen you remember and find black bands along the edges and no sound at all; the fix came from switching to the highest possible resolution — the very one the community praises so much — and brought the sound back, but left the picture small, ringed with black on a modern monitor, almost hard to make out. Running in a window helped, except you had to resize it again with every stage that loaded.

The two-player mode on the same screen, decisive for anyone who wants to play as a pair on the same couch, also failed in this review: the race mode froze after the first lap, and co-op worked only halfway — no extra lives, no chance to continue, leaving the partner to finish the stage alone, squeezed into whatever slice of screen was left. The very patch the veterans cheer for unlocking the resolution is, here, the way into the problem: without it, not even the sound works; with it, the game's picture no longer fits on the player's screen.

For those hunting the secret code — and for those who just wanted to open the game with someone beside them

Anyone who already carries a memory of the original game, wants to hunt for the secret code that leads to Valhalla or build their own stages in the editor, finds solid ground here: an old game, but a whole one, with a community still writing code for it. Playing solo, or trading the keyboard with a sibling as in the warmest reviews, is where the collection delivers what it promises.

If you want to sit down with your partner or your kids for a session of split-screen play, you run into the account documented here: a race that freezes on the first lap, a co-op mode that works halfway, a small picture ringed with black that clears up only by wrestling with the window by hand. For that reader, the collection still charges a technical toll that nostalgia alone doesn't cover.