cooba
5 Nov 2006, 14:55 (edited 7 Nov 06, 14:53 by Cooba)
Featured
7
Alright, I have had it damnit. This is overrated to the point where the author himself asked me to review this fairly. Which means, these ratings make my blood boil.
Visual Appeal – 3 out of 5
The main change here is the color, obviously. However, while I could live with the original Castle tilesets being based upon very few colors, I will not stand this conversion being just monochrome. Everything now has a cyan tint, which not only doesn’t go together with the castle tileset, but is very boring on the eyes. The background tiles now use a strong shade of blue, which does not fit to them, either, and makes the background look dull.
As for the additions, there’s the beach seaweed (which has ugly pixels around it and isn’t even fully ripped), the water block stolen from Persian Paradise, and a textured background. Unfortunately, the background doesn’t work well in 8bit mode, and thus neither does the JJ2 water.
Usability – 3 out of 5
The layout is the same as in the original Castle levels, which means that it’s rather unorganised, chaotic and hard to manage. Anyway, this doesn’t fix the bugs which the original Castle had, and doesn’t take advantage of the unusable tiles (the slide) to make them usable in one way or another. To put it shortly, this field hasn’t changed at all.
Summary
- The colors don’t look awkward at least :|
- The theme was a nice part
- Kind of miscolored
- Nothing really changed on the technical side
- The additions are average, and the seaweed is kind of ugly.
Overall
While you are improving, PJ7, this conversion is still not much above average. Try harder next time, and don’t rush things, and you’ll make great conversions.
3
At a brief glance, I can say there wasn’t a whole lot of work put into this. It may have a cool theme, but it could have been better.
Layout 1/3: Same as the original castle except for the added, ripped tiles.
Usefulness 1/3: as stated above, nothing was changed about the original tiles or their masks (aside from color).
The Conversion 0/3: In all honesty, I think all you did was change the Hue of the whole tileset using Photoshop. This would have been reasonably okay, but you added barely anything to CONTRAST the blue — therefore, it is drab and plain. I think the yellow suits of armor are the only contrasting colors. Having a differently-colored textured background would have helped greatly.
Originality 1/1: The one thing I can’t deny you.
I think you should consider making an original tileset for a change. You keep zipping out these tileset combo/conversions that have rather limited use.
SPAZ18
5 Nov 2006, 14:20 (edited 6 Nov 06, 17:33)
7
OK, here’s a fresh one. I did rate that one a bit wrong. So, I’ll try again.
The colour of the castle has been changed to light blue but it does get boring after a while. I don’t really like the green on some of the tiles, it’s too bright. There are some other tiles ripped from other sets by the looks of it, these are the seaweed and the background for layer 8. The ripped tiles do look a bit grainy. It’s an OK set but it’s not the best. It looks OK underwater but I don’t think this set would be used that much. I’m gonna give this a 6.5 because it’s not terrible but it can be improved.
Originally, this was a 9.2, but I rated the wrong things.
[Unsupported rating (9.2) clearance. This review doesn\‘t give the valid reasons for rating a tileset conversion. Please rate tilesets and conversions differently. – Cooba]
RATING: 6.5
GRADE: D = OK
DOWNLOAD RECOMMENDATION?
Maybe.
I left the edit from Cooba in the review to show that I did it wrong previously.
6
Aquatic Castle, as you can probably tell from the included screenshot, is Castle gone Turquoise. Most everything in the tileset is somewhere along the range of blue to green, with a few exceptions like the very bright purple veils. It’s fairly hit and miss. Some things look too bright, for example, while the background turned out great in its blueness and is a joy to watch as it floats by. The sprite colors are also changed, and I guess I can live with that, although the apples seem to suffer a bit, which is ironic because they’re all over the example level.
The real test of the color scheme, though, is the walls, which make up the vast majority of the tileset’s content, and sadly I cannot quite find myself approving of them. They look okay at first, but gradually their just-off-whiteness begins to feel somewhat sickening. This could perhaps be saved by some variety, like maybe dark brown, but the tileset does not offer such safety.
So much for the color scheme… it’s rather pretty as far as it goes, but it gets old, and parts of it are too bright. That leaves the other modifications. Castle edits aren’t too common, and honestly, nearly every castle edit I’ve ever seen involves painting the whole tileset one color, but that doesn’t mean it’s not editable. Indeed, it has a few flaws, particularly in the realm of masking. Aquatic Castle fixes none of that. It does add a textured background, which I like very much, an animation from Beach with anti-aliasing difficulties and a different perspective from the rest of the tileset, and some tiles ripped from Disguise. It’s an effort, but while one’s taking the time to edit a tileset, one could at least fix its bugs…
Thanks for your critisism, Cooba.
Jazz-Les
5 Nov 2006, 14:06 (edited 3 Dec 06, 18:18)
Purplejazz7 made this conversion specially for me!!!
Isnt he nice!!!
——————————————————————
I gave a responce of the review by: Janus aka Jahari.
U said: I think you should consider making an original tileset for a change. You keep zipping out these tileset combo/conversions that have rather limited use.
eeehhhm Janus: Purplejazz7 made this tileset conversion cause it was a request of me, i wanted him to make a castle tileset that looked like underwater castle, and i wanted him to let it look the same as the original castle tileset, only then other colours and extra eyecandy stuff for underwater, so its not his idea to be exact, so if you want to complain, complain than to me, not to purplejazz7, cuz he only MADE my idea to a REAL tileset. Why he did that is for the fact that i cant or nearly cant make a tileset or conversion, sooooo….
Tileset conversion, by 
