According to Wikipedia, today is the 18th anniversary of the first Jazz Jackrabbit™ game being released! To mark the occasion, I've released a new version.

Development has been slow recently, but since the last news update the following features have been added:

• Slow motion.
• The option to change the difficulty setting mid-game.

This is the first post in almost a year! Apart from Newspaz getting the first boss to work, most updates in that time have been bug fixes. Today's, however, introduces a few new tricks:

• Mouse-controlled menus.
• You can choose (in the setup menu) to be followed around by as many birds as you free. This makes the secret bird level... different.
• You can choose (again, in the setup menu) not to pick up carrots unless you need them. This can help prevent you running out of health, but you won't get the points.

Thursday's release was on Canada Day, so appropriately enough today's is on U.S. Independence Day.

This version makes several improvements to JJ2 levels. I forgot to mention that none of the JJ2 support would have been possible without Neobeo's documentation of the JJ2 file formats (available here). So, big thanks there!

Other improvements include Newspaz's fixes to enemies' shooting.

I'm pleased to announce that I've just added support for Jazz Jackrabbit 2™ level files. Select "specific level" from the episode list, and you can now type in the name of any level you want. Support is very limited at the moment, but there's more to come.

As you make your way from the launch of the program to the end of a level, you'll notice a bunch of other new features:

• The first change you'll see is Jazz blinking during the introductory cutscene, thanks to AnotherGuest. Other cutscenes have also improved.
• Next, you'll see that the main menu now has a plasma-y background effect, thanks to Alireza Nejati.
• When you load up a level, you'll be greeted by a planetary approach sequence.
• In-game, you'll find that animations are now positioned more accurately. Bad guys now explode properly, too. Thanks to Newspaz for both of these.