Treasure hunt, by 
The first thing I noticed while downloading was that this file was embedded within the ZIP in /WINDOWS/DESKTOP. Please make it the root of the folder, since this caused it to unzip to C:\Games\Jazz2\Windows\Desktop, which is strange to say the least.
Now on to the level: Simply put, this is the best Treasure Hunt level to come around in a long, long time. Then again, that is saying very, very, very little since, after all, this is probably the only Treasure Hunt level that has came along in a long time. However, this is certainally a fantastic level. It reminds me greatly of “Sandstrand O’Hazes” in the eyecandy used. That is not a bad thing at all, but there are other similiarities. Dig:
- The passages are fairly narrow and cramped. This is not a terrible thing and probably is pretty good for a water level.
- A diverse selection of ammo is used.
- It is set underwater (well, of course!)
- The pretty bubbler event is used well in both levels, and quite a lot. There is no steam coming up from it, and it is only decoration, but it sure looks purdy.
- The eyecandy is somewhat close. You will know what I mean after playing both of these levels a few times.
It is nice to see people still making Treasure Hunt levels. I have not seen one in eons, especially not a creative and well-done one like this. A quick query to Telnet (telnet:jazz.logicware.com:10055) on the ever-useful port 10055 of the server lists reveals that only 24,903 of the 301,080 servers (as of last update, which was a while ago) were Treasure Hunt servers, or eight percent. Taking in account that many of these servers are probably Survivor or hotel levels, treasure hunt seems to be the least liked of all the gametypes. But this level is one reason to start liking treasure more.
PICKUPS AND STUFF
GEMS: Gem placement, probably the biggest indicator of quality of a level, was quite spifftacular. Gems were placed well, and while there were not too many, it was still not that hard to get to the maximum. The level recommends only 2-10 players (I think) which is a good estimation, though it may be a bit high. Once you get past seven or eight active players, a bit of a gem drain will occur. Nevertheless, the gem placement is good enough to facilitate enough players for the game to be fun. There is a eensy bit of crowding, but that should not be a big problem.
WEAPON: Weapon placement is not very important in treasure. The only thing I really looked for was to make sure that there were absolutely no ice events. Why? Because there were gem rings in this level. A little-known but highly dangerous bug occurs when ice meets gem rings. Since there is no frozen gem ring animation, Jazz will simply konk out and crash. Everyone in the server will also crash with an access violation. Fortunately, the author had the foresight not to place any ice in this level. Good job. You have saved some level hosters trouble.
FOOD: Food also is not important in a treasure level. In this case, it is simply used as decoration. Sugar rushes are more or less useless and near impossible to attain. Go for the gems instead.
LEVEL LOOKS
EYECANDY: This level contains plenty of eyecandy to keep even the most obsessive of observers happy. As with most levels using default tilesets, it does not go hyperoverboard with “gee-whiz” effects such as Elevator backgrounds or ultra-neat warp backgrounds. Still, for your basic beach level, this has good eyecandy and it definitely shows that plenty of effort was put into the creation and tweaking of this level.
TILE BUGS: Beach is not an easy tileset to master but Electric pretty much has the entire thing down. There are no tile errors that I could see, which is not surprising after seeing Sandstrand O’Hazes. This is the easiest sort of eyecandy to really mess up, but this looks great. Exceptional job.
LEVEL MECHANICS
LAYOUT: Since there are not a huge amount of Treasure Hunt levels out there, it is hard to compare the size of this level. It is more or less a medium size level tilting very slightly towards small. As with many other Beach levels that are underwater, the layout mostly consists of a lot of small passages with no center of the level to speak of. There are some areas that are more wide open to help the layout, but not much more than that. It is difficult to rate the layout of this kind of level, but by the standards of an underwater level, it is quite good.
FLOW: Flow is not as important in Treasure Hunt as it is in either Battle or Capture the Flag. Again, the underwater aspect of the level completely distorts how the level functions. There is no concrete way to measure flow quality in water levels since it is so different than flow quality of ground-based levels. While the passages in this level are small, that does not present a huge problem. After all, it is in the water. Since this is underwater and a Treasure Hunt level, this aspect means almost nothing.
MISC.
EXIT PLACEMENT: The exit is placed towards the right of the level, near the bottom. You will need to first stomp a crate to access it. This can be done any time during the game. Yay for trigger crates!
SECRETS: This level is literally packed with secrets, most of them containing gems but nothing ultra-huge. It comes with an image documenting where the hidden areas are, and I will not spoil them for you. I just hope you find them yourself instead of looking in the picture. If you don’t, may a giant sea monkey eat you. Or something.
TEXT SIGNS: This is the sort of level that makes me write an infinite amount of “Misc.” values that have no point. This level contains some text signs which feature either copyrights or funny quotes like Moonblaze’s “You are a stupid person who is stupid.” There are not too many of them, but they are fun to read. The others are not exactly funny quotes, but are still humerous.
EFFORT: This level definitely had a good deal of effort put into it. If you believe the text sign, the level was apparently made from 2001 to 2003. I doubt that Electric slaved away on it during this entire time, but that still is a significant amount of effort put in. I like to see people put effort into their creations.
HOSTING: No maintence is really required. I hope that people will occasionally host this. Unfortunately, there still are a lot of people who absolutely can not stand playing Treasure Hunt. Some have never played a real Treasure Hunt game.
COMPATABILITY: No crashes or anything. The only thing I would like to see changed is that there is a lot of useless tiles horizontally. While the level is physically only about 100 tiles, there is about 126 tiles worth of solid wall and copyright sign. Even if the copyright sign was kept, removing the excess tiles would be nice, so that it would keep file size down (if by a very miniscule amount) for downloaders.
CONCLUSION
This is a very spiffy Treasure Hunt level. The gametype really does need more levels. Maybe if there were more works such as this, it would be hosted often. This is a quality level that shows effort and knowledge of JCS. There is not much more to say that I have not said above. It truly is a shame that Treasure Hunt is not hosted often. If there were idle dedicated Treasure Hunt servers, I am sure that this level would be hosted by all of them. This simply is the best Treasure Hunt level that I have seen in ages, if not ever. Worth a download for anyone, even if you dislike Treasure Hunt. Maybe this will change your mind. My score is 8.2 and a download recommendation. Very nice job, Electric. Truly a Treasure Hunt classic if there ever was one.
