Haze's Hideout - Jazz Jackrabbit information more daily than the Daily Carrot

It was a long time coming but finally it has happened: Unreal Tournament 3 is available from your local game-retailer. That is if you're living in the United States. European gamers will have to wait a few more days, until the 22nd, before they can get their hands on a shiny copy of the game.

Both a regular- and special edition are once again available for those who like to choose between plain vanilla and custard with chocolate pieces in it. Linux and Mac OS X versions are expected in the near future with a Sony PLAYSTATION 3 version following somewhere later this year. A Microsoft Xbox 360 version is planned in the long run.

So which brave soul will step out, buy the game and then thoroughly sift through it to see if there are any hidden references to green lagomorphs?

One of the things we have missed in our unforeseen hiatus was EvilMike launching a new Jazz Jackrabbit 2 blog. In it he reviews new and classic levels, trying to highlight some of the best (and worst) out there. If you're not reading it yet go over there now and start. Perhaps this snippet from a review of Queen of Board will convince you to do so:

Today there are far better examples of the kind of gameplay and level design that Queen of Board helped pioneer; ones that won't leave you smashing your keyboard on the floor in frustration. The fact that this episode managed to break new ground is enough to save it from a score of 1.0, but not enough to make it worth playing for more than the curiosity of it being the first to do something.

Now we haven't seen any new reviews for a little while but with such quality and controversial statements it's hard not to look forward to new ones hopefully coming soon.

Recently veteran Jazz Jackrabbit-composer Alexander Brandon released a new album titled "Era's End", with an accompanying website located at Alexanderbrandon.net of all places. Described by gaming website GameSetWatch as "non-soundtrack catchy synth" and as "really awesome" by commenters on his own site Alex himself puts it this way:

Parts of the music were written in a tracker, of all things. Parts were written in Nuendo, the high end of PC based studio digital audio workstations. It uses ancient 90s samples and more modern Waldorf and Absynth. It is a conglomeration of the old and the new, but the whole thing says "I defy standard albums because I have many different song styles". I truly hope you enjoy it.

You can listen to and buy music from the album over at Alexander Brandon's website.

As some may have noticed the comments have been disabled for a while now here at the Hideout. This had to do with some insane amount of spamming, which was cluttering the posts with links to... questionable content. In the process of updating the website and the software package which is powering it the decision was taken to temporarily turn off the comments system. Little did we know that updating would take so long. Daily life and most importantly my day job have been taking up most of my time. And with the rest of the team solely responsible for the technical side of things the Hideout got put very low on the priority list.

But now we're back, thanks to everyone's pestering (and support)! Sure the place is still a mess but we'll reorganize things pretty soon. And it's about time we started making good on all those promises we've made in the past. (Organized download section, anyone?)

So, what have we missed?

While our ever-vigilant Mark Rein is heavily promoting Unreal Tournament 3 on the Sony PLAYSTATION 3 (and boy, is it looking sweet) CliffyB it taking a look at the competition. Or rather: old brethren.

Ben Kuchera of Ars Technica caught up with CliffyB at E3 '07. And after a bit of banter about Gears of War coming to the PC Guerrilla Games' Killzone 2 is brought up. Fishing for some trash-talk about their supposed rivalry everyone is instead treated to some fond reminiscence by CliffyB:

Ben: One last question and then I’ll let you go. What did you think of the Killzone 2 footage shown?

Cliffy-B: I thought it looked hot!

Ben: Did you?

Cliffy-B: Yeah, the funny thing about that game is that the lead programmer (Arjan Brussee, from Guerilla Games) and I, actually, that was the programmer I did Jazz JackRabbit with back in the day.

Ben: Really?

Cliffy-B: Yeah, and that’s always like, you know at E3 a couple years ago that was being compared to Gears and everything, so everything is kind of full circle. It’s like, I’m fucking Professor X, and he’s Magneto.

Of course we all know that Professor X and Magneto have teamed up frequently over time. And I'm sure none of us would complain if Arjan Brussee and CliffyB would follow that example.