Jazz Jackrabbit Advance Single Pak Battle Pack

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Reviews and comments

    cooba 12 Aug 2024, 21:28 (edited 12 Aug 24, 21:30)

    An admirable amount of effort – sadly it probably took tenfold more time to convert these to JJ2 than it took Game Titan to make these levels in the first place. They aren't really suitable for JJ2's fast multiplayer gameplay on account of being very small and barely having any pickups – perhaps with some extensive mutator work this could be interesting.

    As mentioned in the description, the tilesets are not reusable because of JJA's tile size. Whatever artwork Game Titan had not stolen from JJ2 is also pretty poor.

    It's nice to have this available as an interesting curiosity – very similar to the 3DBattle levels ( https://www.jazz2online.com/downloads/175/3d-battle-pack/ ) in fact – but a curiosity at most.

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    kn0b010ck5m0th 13 Aug 2024, 18:19

    A quick "compare and contrast" about port levelpacks is that for example, at first glance: the MS-DOS Commander Keen games` levels seem to port more playably to Jazz Jackrabbit 2 than the Nintendo handheld Jazz Jackrabbit Advance game levels.
    Although this level pack isn`t a 1:1 port, the ammo is not exactly the same either, which drastically alters the direction of the level layout design.
    Haven`t really playtested the original Jazz Jackrabbit Advance battle levels on Nintendo or anything, so I don`t know how close to a 1:1 port is this levelpack, in terms of layout / graphic attributes.
    Also the levels are designed for a much different Jazz character in terms of abilities, jumping and running; that means the balance between characters has a broader scope of bias — it`s practically like the layout is designed for the frog character instead of the jackrabbit characters.
    The platforms are disproportionately close together and require short hops without any special moves to traverse across.
    There aren`t any spring events in this whole levelpack.
    Also, graphically the eyecandy kind of takes an abstract approach to visual clarity — the one-way tiles are masked in such a way that the indication of a one-way tile is not reflected by its masking properties; and also: sometimes the shading colouration of the tiles are meant to indicate whether or not it`s a masked tile.
    Generally… the level in this pack that doesn`t have any carrots might work for a battle mode instagib duel… the levels with 1-2 small carrots could work for a 2-4 players battle mode game.
    Personally, I won`t directly compare this levelpack to the original Jazz Jackrabbit Advance, in terms of it being a port — the battle mode in the original Jazz Jackrabbit Advance game is like, practially unrealistically unplayable given current technology — comparing a Windows game to a Nintendo game is conceptually enough to speak for itself.
    The battle mode there was originally designed for the totally different control scheme of a handheld and/or console instead of a keyboard with/without a mouse compared to this levelpack port.

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