Jazz Jackrabbit 2 Online

One of the most normal of Lark's 2024 levels, without any strange weapon replacements. The pink sands look delicious, or rather lovely, and the background effects set up a nice little underground cave. You'd think pink on red might be hard to distinguish, but the brighter walls and darker skies contrast each other nicely. It's only a shame that the stalagmites rising out of the water don't have reflections of their own, you'd have to use vertically flipped tiles and some non-opaque sprite mode for that. Do the fuel tanks make sense thematically? I don't know, I haven't played Doom 1. But they work for platforming and maybe that's the important thing. Important items (two powerups, two carrots) are distributed at reasonable distances from each other, and there's no superfluous ammo types, though there's maybe room in the level for a few more pickups. I worry, though, that the level is a bit large and doesn't fully know what to do with its space, though the bottom right area with the big fuel tanks is a nice contrast to the rest. Otherwise the layout feels too generic. I like the bottom carrot, though, where you have to jump over the spring a little in order to grab it.

Without having played World of Warcraft, I have no idea how similar this level is to any canonical Raz'goth.

It must be said that the background looks fantastic. The yellow/pink from The Crackdown return, yet perhaps even more extreme. I think you could lean into the curve of the sky a bit by having the trees go higher up at the sides of the background, and lower down in the center, but that's hard to achieve with Diamondus. Layer 4 mostly works with the background colors, including the altered sprite palette—though the carrots are rather hard to see, despite the lighting—but I do dislike the background foliage in layer 5. There's too much contrast in every tile with the constant interplays of black leaves and bright yellow/pink background. The walls are decent but a little too close to the same single wall tile filled in everywhere.

I'm not quite sure what I make of the tar pits. They're fine, they don't get in the way, they just don't feel useful either. There's nowhere you have to use the tar pits to get to, you could always go by land if you wanted. There are no obvious goodies lurking down there. Further inspection reveals there's a coin warp, but it's invisible, and the carrot it takes you to is also invisible, so there's no way for players to know what they're getting. Isla de Meurta is a better example of how to use water like this, I think.

Above the tar pits, there's not much to say about the layout… it's big platforms that don't really suggest to me that much thought was put into them, similar to Lemondrop Labyrinth. There could be more ammo pickups in general. The replaced blaster animation is cool, the bouncer animation makes less sense.

Apart from the black leaves, this level looks great and is fun to vibe in, especially with the wacky music. But it doesn't have the gameplay to back it up. I would hang out here but I would not fight here. I'd be interested to see someone else take a crack at the tar pit idea, though…

I would love to love this—it's so cute and colorful! it's so earnest in its ideas!—but I also get caught up in how it plays and how it looks, and it needs some more time in the, uh… what is candy made in?

It must be said, the textured background looks fantastic, managing to look different at the top, middle, and bottom of the screen. Trying to place the candy cane posts in front of it makes some sense as an alternative to mountain layers, to show off more of the textured background, but they're just too high contrast. They clash with the sky and they clash with layer 4. The translucent autoscroll elements are fine though, silly but fine. Maybe as a middle ground, some cave-like background elements could be put here with colors similar to the sky, with layer speeds somewhere around 0.8/0.8? The actual caves are a bit too bright and repetitive, and most importantly, the walls are full of the classic Carrotus Tile Bugs. Yes, it takes more time to make a Carrotus wall that tiles properly, but it really looks ugly if you don't, especially when the brightness contrast is high like it is here. I'd take a look at other video games with candy themed levels and see how they construct their color palettes… short of like, Math Rescue, I suspect there's more leaning on softer colors in general. All the incidental Candion things on the grass and ceilings, the candy bars and lollipops and such, look fine though, it's hard to go wrong with a good little eyecandy thing standing around. It would be nice to have some of the lollipops be offset by 16 pixels vertically, though, for smoother slopes.

The weapons are not going to win many friends. The blaster is replacing with stationary exploding candy, which, well, I have a few questions:

- why does the candy explode?
- how is this supposed to hurt other players?
- why do you get bumped slightly to the right even when you fire the candy without moving sideways, preventing you from using it for TNT-climbing purposes?

I don't hugely mind the sprite replacements for seekers, there's a long history of pointless Commander Keen references. The increased RF speed throws people off a lot, it messes up all the RF tricks people are used to. But oddly it's the bouncers that offend me: you can't have a bunch of lemon pickups that are food, and then also use the same sprite for a weapon, and not have the pickups increase your ammo for that weapon. Either lemon use is fine, but not both.

The layout mostly feels random, like a slightly thicker South African Style battle with all its wide platforms, open spaces, and flat walls on either side of the map. The bottom is the most interesting part with its caves and its food supplies.

Thematically I like what this is doing, I do! It just needs to make some more compromises to be a playable multiplayer level at the same time.

This one doesn't do much for me. The design's not bad, but the visuals cast too broad a net.

The central oval of the layout, combined with the additional little loop in the top right corner, is pretty interesting. The little roller cutout near the bottom left may be too generous though, especially since it targets one of the only sources of seeker ammo, which is what you'd want to attack someone in that alcove. A third seeker area, maybe near the top somewhere, could help a bit, and would also make the seeker powerup a more desirable prize. 20 coins is a decent target number, though the coin script is a little off, using the candy sprite in some contexts and the coin animation in others. I want to like the awkward purple spring in the bottom right but it's a little too awkward even for me, too hard to predict/control whether you'll go through the one way events or not. Other parts of the layout are fine—good use of varying platform thicknesses, good powerup areas—I'm just not wild about some of the most vital places. Oh, and it's hard to make Boomerang work as a non-infinite weapon, and I don't think Pumpkin Park pulls it off.

The visuals are where things fall apart—they're close to good, but don't quite get there. cooba calls them "scattershot" and I think I like that. There are simply too many different tilesets being thrown together here, and because we can recognize the sources, the level doesn't feel like it has a proper identity. Especially bad are the upscaled graphics (rocks, pumpkins, trees) with no effort made to smooth their big pixels, and the wild Carrotus trees right next to the carefully maintained Townhouse trees. None of the weird random rock graphics overlaid onto the Holidaius texture look like they really fit in, the tree branch platforms in the bottom left are too muted to see, and the random Carrotus/Diam/Psych foliage thrown all over the place is too generic, yet inconsistent, for me to care about. The colors are all a little too muted and the background of Diamondus trees in front of Townhouse buildings is a little too familiar. The Omen Woods caves do look great, though.

A really lovely take on a more eveningy Lapper Festive, though obviously I come in with a lot of positive bias for the tileset. The background does not work at any window height other than 600, but otherwise everything looks great here. The alternate-color ornaments work well, not too garish, and everything else tiles properly. The use of tinting to mark non-solid giftboxes and other elements is good here. This isn't the most detailed account of the visuals but just, um, it all works)? Everything in the tileset is put to its proper use and flows together nicely without ever becoming distracting.

I will jump right in and say that I'm not thrilled with the nail gun usage here. The gold standard for nail gun is still Illumination, with the different pickups and stuff you can access with them, and Jolly Battle isn't that. There is one specific area you get to using the nail gun, thoughtfully marked off with additional nail gun pickups, but the reward is… a nail gun powerup. This just raises the question. Also you can shoot the nail gun powerup with electro blaster instead. (This must be intentional, it's the only obvious place to use electro blaster in the whole map.) But the level also has an RF powerup, and most of the level is crowded enough with curved platforms that your nails are never going to go all that far.

There's also a toaster powerup which feels like it has a lot of support: fastfire scattered around the level, a few big springs, and of course thematic resonance. It's a bit blatant, using both Duo Bouncers and Spike Bomb right after they were both MLLE-ified in the same level, but I suppose there are reasonable places to use them both, spikes on the right side and bouncers in all the gentle curves that weave through the top/ left half. Firework doesn't work everywhere but it, too, has its good spots. Other the nail gun and the electro blaster, I think weapons are well chosen here.

The layout in general is a good mixture of close spaces, thin platforms, and open spaces, which keeps players entertained and also helps you keep track of where you are. A few minor visual landmarks are also included. The biggest point of interest is the full energy carrot, especially in a level with three other carrots, but I think it does work. Multiple weapons can be used to shoot it down (but not the nail gun!) and it takes long enough that you put yourself in a lot of danger, which is what you want to avoid if you have, say, 1 health and desperately need a full energy carrot. It's a good trap.

I would not have guessed this is a Dragusela level. Honestly I would not have guessed this is a 2024 level! It's so… indoors! It's almost a single tileset despite using four separate .j2t files, but it's all visually coherent. (The giant porthole is a bad resizing job though.) It's got really solid, intricate use of layer 4 and doesn't just lean on the background layers to sell itself. Battleship is not a tileset that I find easy to make look this good, so, kudos. I can see the Maelstrom comparison but it also reminds me of Dethroned, interestingly enough…

My biggest issue is the level is just a bit bigger than it needs to be. I think you could cut out about a fifth of its width, some of the area between the seeker and toaster powerups, and be fine. The far right area with the wide springs is also quite expansive but like, it's showing off, it's cute, it's fine. Check out all these springs! The sucker tubes into the top powerups are super campy but, well, I guess you know exactly what you're letting yourself in for, right?

This is a level I respect a lot but have never quite fallen in love with. It's not quite got a central concept that I can gel with, although it does do interesting things with vertical space. But it has lots of great bits scattered around, and again, the detail work in the walls is a treat.

Zeno is probably the 2024 level I can most easily imagine myself making, if one day I decided to get really into springs. It's a very vertical map, to be sure, and this relies on springs to get you around, and those springs tend to be perfectly positioned, taking you to just the right heights and with just the right amount of horizontal displacement. It's deeply satisfying, the moreso because the layout is still interesting and varied, you're not just taking springs from one long smooth platform to another like a 2002 CTF. Over and over exploring this level, you expect something to go badly (perhaps a fall to your death?), only for the level to save you by being designed just that carefully.

Besides the springs, there's also a smattering of energy blast. I'm less sold on that… I can't object to the powerup area after making Scorpio Key (and there's plenty of electro blaster, including very close by), but there's not much energy blast ammo in the rest of the level and it's just not going to last you long enough to do anything cool. The area above the powerup, with the firework ammo, is likewise a bit awkward despite some revisions… the firework ammo itself seems very appropriate though. Other powerups besides the energy blast powerup are pretty much just sitting around in the open, which feels nice, you get to keep getting stronger as you move around without having to think about it too much.

Visually, Zeno stuns in its layer 4, the bright Labrat colors standing out really well against the black, and the tunnel starfield amazing in how well it works for how simple it is. minmay may be right about the intervening layer, though… the not-quite-1/1 speeds work well enough for the pipes, but the rectangles are always a little weird how they don't quite serve as backgrounds to whatever layer 4 area they're associated with. And yes, sometimes you lose track of where you are in the big emptiness. Layer 4 looks so good though, obscure graphics source and all; the stop signs are as cheesy as ever but they sure do their job.

Zeno is deeply cool and has a very clever level description. Maybe some more firework pickups though?

Starling is fun stuff, a bold revitalization of the ancient art of combining JJ1 sets to form new things, but a JJ2 set for a change… the exact reverse of the IC JJ1 episode. And what do you know, it looks great. The deliberately non-fading background is a particularly cute touch, but the layer 4 stuff is still a great mixture of clearly Colon-inspired while not trying to faithfully recreate every single Colon detail. The crates feel appropriate despite not having a clear analog, and the pillars are fine too. I wouldn't have thought of any of this but it's all nifty and clever.

The biggest risk Starling takes is the sewer/coin area, but I don't think I'm thrilled with how it ended up. It just doesn't seem worth it from a gameplay perspective, despite how interesting it is. If you want to go to the roof, you can use the lamposts, even if they are very narrow. If you want the powerup you can shoot it through the wall. The sewer takes a while and feels like a trap to get camped on. It's very interesting but I wouldn't want to go there, although JJ2 players are like ants and I'm sure some people will pass through it anyway.

Outside the sewer, well, I like cramped spaces in Battle levels, with weapons that can reach around corners a bit, and Starling delivers, but with nice smooth walls instead of the uneven alcoves of cramped levels of yore. It's not a silky smooth gameplay experience by any means, but it's consistently interesting, and because part of the problem with the sewer is that it's so skippable, well, you can simply skip it!

True confession: I do not know what produces the lightning strike, here or in Thunder Cliffs. I'm sure I could read the script but I just don't have the pattern recognition skills to figure it out from gameplay.

The original version of Windstorm Fortress is a deep cut, and pairing it with Iron Crown makes a lot of sense. It must have felt satisfying to create all those cloud layers without resorting to animated tiles tricks. The background is still slightly too minimal for my tastes though… I know this is a hugely gameplay-focused level, and the background is as unobtrusive as possible, letting the player easily distinguish between black and gray, but I would like slightly more obtrusion I guess. Visually I'm pretty satisfied with layer 4 and company, though, they're clean and minimally interesting, not trying to do too much and distract anyone. Some of the sloped corners are kind of ugly with the striped blocks, but I guess that's the tileset.

As for gameplay and stuff, this generally delivers on what I want out of battle levels: a bunch of little spots where you can do different things, that play in different ways. Using custom weapons makes this even more possible, and the elektrek shield powerup feels great (though a bit neutered from earlier versions). The fusion cannon feels fairly thematic, I dunno if the layout is especially built toward it but I guess you can point it in some direction and hope you get lucky ten seconds later? The toaster and gun 8 don't feel too necessary but there are lots of springs for the toaster.

The left side of the level seems like a good place for helicopter ears, between the wide open spaces and the bouncer powerup. The right side of the level is very Spaz-centric, with jumps that are a little too high for Jazz or Lori to reach. I guess maybe that balances out?

Other than the elektrek shield, this level doesn't take any big risks, but it feels good to play and it's easy to navigate and it's easy to read. I'm also a sucker for levels inspired by other levels and stuff.

I've played worse.

Please review before downloading.
And happy birthday Koen.
Doe de groetjes thuis.

Cool stuff, short and sweet, felt like 2004 again. I used a few cheats though.

Gefeliciteerd Koen

I think about this tileset too much to continue not reviewing it.

For so many years, a JJ2 level used one tileset and that was it. Making a bespoke version of a tileset for your level wasn't unheard of, but it wasn't the norm. If a tileset didn't have everything you needed to make a level – all the foreground and background and platforms and so on – it didn't get used.

If used in this way, as the example level dutifully does, Cybercity has serious weaknesses. Its loud decorations and quiet walls make it hard to parse, it boasts one of the ugliest textured backgrounds I've ever seen, and it lacks game design tools like obvious one-way platforms.

But that's not how levels are made anymore. JJ2+ and MLLE make it trivial to paste different tilesets together, change palettes, and edit the tileset images themselves. And in that world, Cybercity shines. It offers fun, original, well-designed animated decorations that'd work great in any city setting with a matching art style, or in one of those levels where you're in cyberspace (we're overdue for another one of those!).

The artistic vision here is just too cool to ignore, I don't even care whether it's referencing Deltarune or not.

There's a lot to like here. A strong theme with bold color choices, animations to keep things feeling alive, and all the functionality's there, with a clean layout and mask and every obligatory event tile. Creative reuse of episode posters, too.

Where it falters is in the tiles themselves – much of the artwork is just too primitive to appeal to me. The foreground and background walls are bog-standard blocks with no identity. There are some windows and such to break them up, but it's just not enough for my eyes.

That said, the background skyline is awesome. The shading on those buildings is perfect for the theme.

An outstanding tileset overhaul with two excellent Single Player levels that use it. You can tell that an insane amount of work (and love!) was put into making these. If JJ2 had a "definitive edition", this is what I imagine it would look like. It's a must-play!

A music upload in IT format? I'm practically required to review that!

I haven't seen the level(s) Jungle Fevah v3.0 was made for, but I have no doubt it'll fit perfectly. Not super transformative, just an "upgrade" of the song, but a nicely done one where I liked every addition and change – always excited to see a tiny bridge. I'm most impressed by the new original vocal and guitar solo samples, that's some high effort right there.
It's also cute how it takes even more samples from Necros's "Ascent of the Cloud Eagle".

Jungle Fevah (Hip Mix), while it sometimes feels less polished (I really do not like the sound of the panflute portamento in rows 49-51 in patterns 23 and 24), is more interesting. It's still very intent on reminding you that it's Jungle, with a lot of melodies from the original showing up unaltered aside from the shuffle rhythm, but takes a lot more risk with going to new places, most visibly with the Plaedo section! It's a genuinely creative interpretation of Jungle Fevah that I'm delighted to see.

Here's hoping these don't lose their luster by getting used in 100 levels like Diamdust.j2b did :p

The tileset "Hotel Mix.j2t" is missing from the upload.

Quite like the gameplay. I'm still oddly fond of layouts with lots of vertical movement, and it's super easy to learn.
Visually, I love all the kooky gadgets in the walls, the Labrat-esque palette, the upside-down powerup, and the stop signs. However, I think the background's too austere – there's a cute textured background and a cute parallax layer matching the layout of the foreground, but that isn't quite enough for me to absorb an atmosphere from, and I'm left reading the level as mostly-disconnected floating platforms.
This minimal background decoration also results in a lack of visual cues for your position after jumping left off the top carrot platform, but I guess there's always the F9 display for that.

Tök jó mapek :)