A rating of 8.3 looks promising, but after downloading the tileset myself I honestly don’t understand why this gets such high ratings. Sure, it’s huge, but sheer vastness isn’t enough for such a rating in my book.
And it’s a pity, but the tileset has little more to offer than sheer vastness. A lot of space is taken by animations of Black Ninja’s JJ2 character doing various things, and other JJ2 characters standing around doing nothing. Those animations are only really useful when making story-driven SP levels, and because the player names are part of the tiles a story-driven level using these animations is confined to using Black Ninja, Spotty, Violet, KJAZZ, Trafton or Hugela as characters. No offence to those mentioned, but I would rather have the possibility of making my own choice on who to include in my story.
The tileset of course does offer more than just these animations, such as platform tiles. Black Ninja’s Castle is drawn using semi-isometric perspective, which works well. However, and this is my main problem with this tileset, it just doesn’t look good. Colour reduction didn’t work that well and everything is dithered and looks grainy. The stone blocks are just grey tiles with a border, without any texture to speak of. The doors look like they had the wrong palette applied to them, the light beams look like a 10 second job with Paint’s spray paint tool.
There may have been some nice ideas and concepts behind this set, but it’s executed very poorly. The text suffers a lot from lack of anti-aliasing and horrible colour scheme, eyecandy tiles such as the “Ninja Cola” are grainy, destruct blocks and arrows are just normal block with ugly text on them, etcetera, etcetera.
All in all this is a very mediocre set that is not really worth downloading or using, except if for some reason you have a brilliant story for a level involving Black Ninja and Pals. 5.5 might be a little harsh, and 6.0 was my original rating, but to balance out the ridiculous ratings others have given it’s a 5.5 after all.
I like the tile set!
so I give a 9
_
Taz
Posted more than 20 years ago
8
@Snowball: Okay now.
The review of it:
I think this is a pretty kewl tileset. You MUST use it once in your whole life i think.
There are everywhere lol Black Ninjas that are running, dying, flying, standing, shooting, or scribbling.
Not much to say, the eyecandy is oki-doki. Overall a pretty nice tileset and you must really use, download, this :)[This review has been edited by Taz]
The tileset is very good indeed, i like the animations even though they get confusing. Well, the basic tiles are there and a lot of blackninja tiles there too. It has weird tiles like popcans and vine doors which actually make it more unique and creative. This is a fun tileset to use, and i will surely use it for an insect breeding chamber ;P
Well what else, nice backround, im not sure, it looks very close to diamondus backround and im unsure if it was ripped or not, ill take a closer look later. The jail idea was funny, and fooruman is still there so i will make a foo race our of this >:D (or spotty will…………or bn……hmmm so its a race they want >:D)
Just download this for the fun of it :)
WOOT MY 200th review used on a tileset like this, oh joy…..=P[This review has been edited by Blackraptor]
KJAZZ
Posted more than 20 years ago
8
Excellent Tileset, great idea too, lol, and the fact I’m in it gives it an extra 0.2 points! w00t for you! I like the set a lot too…hmmm next Moo race might use this..:D
DoubleGJ
Posted more than 20 years ago
9
Lots of animations, good background, some funny jokes… (vide Ninja Cola) A C00L tileset. Gotta have it.
Snowball
Posted more than 20 years ago
8
Sorry all, I’ll go review the Tileset instead:
very cool Tileset, I dont see any missing tiles.
Overall an 8
and sorry again for the other review, can you forgive me?[This review has been edited by snowball]
n0
Posted more than 20 years ago
Rate the tileset, not the level.
There was a review here, but it was deleted since mike isn’t up to date with the current j2o policies, and did not merely edit it. He won’t do that again. Please do not sue. It was somewhere in the 8.2ish range, and said something like “nice tileset, I like it” or “his tileset is neat i like it” or “nice shoes” or somesuch. Anyway, if the original authour would like to repost it with more detail, please do so.
Tileset, by 
