Jazz Jackrabbit 2 Online

Full review, after playing it.

Music:
Well, that was allright. Fits the level
10/10

Eyecandy: Well done, but a few bugs in the background… It is very monotonous but that’s a tileset issue probably so no rate-down… it isn’t really PurpleJazz’ fault considering he tried to use every eyecandy piece as orginal as he could.
9,5/10
———
Gameplay:
Flow: Ah, by FAR not the best I’ve seen this year. Many levels surpassed this one. I got stuck into one-ways, bumped into walls, needed to make weird running jumps because Lori can’t double-jump etc. Jazz could uppercut but that takes more time like Lori’s running jumps (so Jazz should have to do those jumps too). Also, some places are very hard to reach with Jazz/Lori, which makes this level noob-proof (noobs use Spaz less often in comparison, while being unable to negate Spaz advantages with tricky jumping due to relatively low skills).

Only Spaz can double jump; Jazz can’t either. So only Spaz can play here properly. Lori’s weird jumps are faster than Jazz uppercut, while they lack the predictable course (possibility to turn away and slam bouncy in you face!). It isn’t about Lori’s disadvantage – it is about the Spaz advantage over both Jazz and Lori. It is true a noob who at least knows how to uppercut, will do better with Jazz than with Lori here.

Edit: With noob-proof I also say that are less competent players in general have there issues, and not only the walk-and-shoot TheServer/ZA noobs.

Edit2: I could no longer get stuck into one-ways.

5,5 -> 6,5/10.

Pickup placement
Everything was allright… the Seek PU has, despite the freakin’ warp is removed, still its issues. You can shoot it with unpowered bouncy, but it takes a very precise hit – which takes also a lot of time if you don’t have experience or when you can’t aim too good. If this map is intended for a lot of players, more fastfires would be nice as well…

EDIT: Warp to Seek PU removed. Still, Seek PU is hard to reach for those who don’t have a VERY good aim. In SP it is possible if you don’t have a good aim, but try hitting it with less than five bouncy spent, in three seconds.

7,5/10 -> 8,5/10

Replay value:
Zero. I’ve played it… and well… I really don’t want to play it again. Getting stuck feels really, really frustrating… considering I did it twice in only half a minute… well. Goddamnit.
The grim atmosphere, while looking allright, doesn’t really help either. It is all grey and dusty which is something I don’t really like to see too often in a server…

Edit: OK, the worst things are removed so this level are removed. But in fact, this is my personal like/dislike box; would I like to replay this?
3,5/10 -> 4,5/10

36/50 -> 39/50

Penalties:
None

7.2/10 -> 7.8/10

DR: This level isn’t made for noobs. So if you consider yourself a noob, don’t download this.

Edits: Main issues were fixed, so the rating is now upped quite a bit. Bumping into walls is still an annoyance though.

The boss is meant to have an unfair advantage, and the minions are planned to die quick, so that they don’t need ammo.

Sorry for being late, but I was in a hurry for this, so you don’t get the full review.

I will say the eyecandy is great, but i get confused as to what the ground is.

The layout is great, small, but kinda hard to learn.

The boss has an unfair advantage with quick respawning ammo (like 2s or something) and the grunts never get access to +3 ammo. That’s not quite nice.

I don’t know much about good levels, but this isn’t one of them.

7/10

Neutral DL recommendation

Ok, let’s see…
FLAME FLAME FLAME FLAME FLAME
The level seems to be well made, with effort put into it. There are though some things that I will complain about… For example, the background is completely basic usage of Windstorm Fortress. Maybe consider adding something to layers 6-7? Perhaps a translucent black tile and some additional buildings? Yes, I know you have lightning there :P
Then, there are places where I can complain about moving too slow, and that would be deadly on this level, atleast the places with pepper spray, in the upper part of a chunk. Consider one-ways?
Second-last thing: -64 is too fast at sucker tubes. It already starts to skip events. This happened to me, and I didn’t get the set light event when coming out of a carrot box.
And the last thing, I had to check the location of the blue springs on top of a chunk. They are too well hidden… A pulse light? :D

Ah, that’s the negative part gone. The level has a nice theme, a dark test lab (?). The music fits well, and the eyecandy looks great. On my brief look, I couldn’t find any tilebugs. The system seems to work, though I didn’t place a stress test on it.

Now, lose to me in the competition, please :(

It is possible to get the Seeker PU with a cleverly placed shot with non powered up Bouncers. The warp is just a “bonus” way of getting there – you can get there either if you are good with RFs or by getting shot up by another player.

EDIT @ TW: When are you getting stuck exactly? This level has been tested throughly, and I haven’t noticed anywhere players could potentially get stuck. Seeing as I made this level in 1.23, isn’t the argument that this level isn’t Lori friendly technically invalid? You claim you keep hitting walls – you will if you don’t actually control yourself instead of mindlessly running forward. Why do I need to make this level “noob friendly”? I’m pretty sure they’re all happily playing Battle 1 No Fire Hotels and generic top3 tests. I can appriciate why you may not enjoy the atmosphere. The downbeat, monochrome, dreary theme was completely intentional, creating a more morbid arena with a grittier feel than the usual colourful levels found in JJ2. I don’t have a problem with you disliking this level, but I really think you should at least consider justifying your arguments a bit better.

Inferno is not necessarily the first tileset I think of when I imagine a golden opportunity to make brilliant levels. Despite the fact that it was my second favorite planet in Jazz 2 (TSF’s Turtleville is still the best), let’s face it: The tileset is buggy, the eyecandy is just plain hard to use, and the tileset is incredibly monotonous.

Allow me to put your mind at ease when I say that while it may be a hair on the monotonous side, Purple Jazz’s Pit of Necrosis is certainly none of those other things.

For one thing, the level looks just plain awesome. PJ took a tileset that was originally supposed to be a frozen wasteland and turned it into a lonely, windy boneyard completely appropriate for a battle level. No piece of eyecandy is used the same way twice, as he made good use of the various images of skeletons and bones and musty old skulls in several different layers, putting one in the foreground here, while placing it in the background there. There were even a few random bones lying on the ground, which I thought was a cute (depending on how you look at it) little touch. I especially liked the “bone pile” in the lower left corner of the map, built up to look like a bunch of giant animals just fell on top of each other and died.

But he didn’t stop there, utilizing a trick that I myself am a big fan of (if it’s used right), which is creating side paths as eyecandy in the level. In random areas of Necrosis, PJ put a few little alternate roads under certain areas and behind certain walls, preventing you from accessing them, but ever increasing the visual size of the level.

Necrosis was a nice and wide open level, but not in the sense that it was empty and boring. Oh, no no no. There were a number of paths stuck on top of paths on top of paths, leaving a truckload of escape routes by which to avoid your attackers, which means it’s easy to get lost here. And in my book, if a level can do that successfully, it’s a good thing.

I wasn’t too crazy about some of the little scattered text strings PJ used, but let’s not drag personal views into a perfectly good review.

There was also very fine bug management control, and for a tileset like this, that’s terrific.

Remember all the anvil-shaped platforms? Well, Purple Jazz found a unique (although not original) way to deal with it, making the very edges one-way. In fact, I had a hard time finding anything wrong buggage-wise here.

Layer 8 and the surrounding background layers were a bit bland, in my opinion, but not intolerably so. I didn’t mind too much after a while.

I didn’t download the music track for this level (since the last time I tried something like that, I got a vicious spyware virus that knocked out my internet for nine months), but if PJ took as much care with that as with this level, I’m sure it works just fine.

I was disappointed, though, that some of the platforms were just out of the reach of normal jumping (and no springs were around), which meant that you either had to get a running start (if you even had enough room to do that), or else just uppercut/double jump, which can cost precious time in a battle.

In addition, I tried and I tried, but I could just not get into the Seeker warp at the top of the level. Unless there’s some newfangled gameplay trick out there that I don’t know about (And that’s entirely possible), it’s not accessible at all, except by using singleplayer cheats.

My biggest major problem with this level is, as I originally pointed out, it IS a bit on the monotonous side. I mean, you can only go so far with a black+gray+white color scheme (There was a little orange in the background, however). I would’ve maybe put a light dusting of dark red into the level (or the set, if you modified it yourself), and that would’ve made it so much better. But this is a small nuance, and it doesn’t irk me as badly as others might have.

In short, I think that Pit of Necrosis is a pretty darn good level, if I do say so myself. Perfect for a brawl between a large number of players, or a really long two-player contest. Download today, compliments of the reviewer.

If you have TSF, then YOU MUST download this.
Why? It eliminates Amnesia Errors, so you can save in giant levels and use giant music files. How does it do that? It will allocate the maximum amount of RAM for JJ2 possible.
To patch your TSF, just put this in your JJ2 directory, fire it up and click patch. After less than a second amnesia errors are now history.
But just to be sure, I recommend you to make a backup copy of Jazz2.exe, so if anything goes wrong then you can fix it easily.
Overall, it’s a MUST for anyone using TSF, get it or Amnesia Error. Finally one can save in QoB, just as the author intended. DR? Heck yes!

It’s Medivo. That’s about it. Glad someone made a better conversion than CelL’s old one, though.

@Loon are you silly? It is conversion from NES… you are saying that NES graphics sucks? They are from 80’s

This is 100% conversion so i don’t see reason why not give 10. It is really wonderful! Keep converting ^^
EDIT: After deeper playing i noticed some less important bugs (…fire doesnt hurt / jazz is floating few pixels on grass…)
EDIT2: If levels doesn’t load in jj2 or tileset doesn’t load in JCS, rename “AdventureIsland.j2t” to “Adventure Island.j2t”

10 for the same reason most people give it too: the author and his place in the community. Yay for the bias!

Kidding,the tileset is awesome,but the story is true

Well, MedvioD. I’m assuming that this is the next in a series of conversions like CrysilisV and RaneforusV, and it’s quite reasonable, too. However, it isn’t quite as good as the aforementioned conversions, mostly because of some clashing art.

For the most part, it’s quite a useful Medivo conversion, with plenty of eyecandy, and loads of possibilities, as shown in the main example level. However, several of the tiles stand out, such as the larger bricks, which seem badly blurred. Also, I can’t seem to figure out exactly why there’s a warping spaz animation in the set. There isn’t much destruct scenery, either, and it’s quite low-quality compared to the rest of the set, sadly. Perhaps the set could have been expanded to include more destruct scnery, or useful tiles like H and V-poles. Some of the tiles in the background need to be flipped, which I dislike somewhat, especially if there’s space for pre-flipped variants. There are 870 tiles in the set, so there would have been room.

Apart from these flaws, however, it is still quite a good set. It has a nice variety of tiles, plenty of animations, and is a good choice for a castle-themed level. An 8.5 and a download reccomendation.

Well done. nice look, nice idea.
Probably the the layout is a bit boring, because of the repeating rooms.

Weaker in comparison to Violet’s other JJ1 conversions due to lacking the “wow factor” provided with CrysilisV and RaneforusV, but still a top class conversion. I especially liked the inclusion of Holidaius ground, as having a second solid type expands on the possibilities of a tileset; in this case allowing to make more organic looking levels.

you can view the new concepts if you run these without running them from JCS and actually make some of them if you use reworder. :D

@ThunderWalker: Could you be more specific? It seemed to work just fine on my computer.

Aww heck, I’ll just upload it again.

Well, this level is really easy because of the fact that it’s nearly completely flat. It’s extremely linear and you can complete this level by just running and jumping.
Also there’s some really painful and obvious bad tile placements. Like the dark background under the floor that is suddenly cut off. Very ugly.
Eye candy? Surprisingly, it contains a healthy amount of it. The parallax background is good and the windy leaves in the foreground are great too. But in the sprite layer there’s not much of it, sadly.
There’s a lot of enemies but they don’t pose a real threat because you can just jump over them with no problem. Also, the bees at the beginning were going crazy and kept jumping back and forth for some reason. Also, these enemies are randomly chosen. Most of them don’t fit to the tileset used. What is a cat and the caterpillar doing in here?
Also there’s not much powerups. One blaster powerup and a few carrots, sometimes even a gem.

Overall, it’s a beginner’s level that looks like someone just read a tutorial. Boring and easy, but manageable.

“There’s also special effect used in one level so why can’t you give him 10??”

Because this is a tileset upload, not a level?

TomoAlien: This is a conversion of a Jazz Jackrabbit 1 tileset.

Really GOOD tileset and levels!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I think Treylina wrote enough, i can only add that it is very fresh and cold weather.

Why the hell do you rate so bad?
This is the most perfect medivo remake i’ve ever seen… There’s also special effect used in one level so why can’t you give him 10??

@Narcist: You seem to be a permanently happy and satisfied person, why didn’t you give him 10?