Jazz Jackrabbit 2 Online

Full review time!

What this is
This is basically a conversion of the pallet Candion. For the most part, the conversion is complete with little problems, but there are somethings to talk about.

Tiles
For the most part, everything is here. The basic candy is here. Caves, gingerbread man, lolly, jazz 1 style signs, different types on candy, candy polls, tubes and jazz 1 style background. The mountains are here as well. I’m not a huge fan of the destruct blocks. We got arrows, textured background, hooks and vines as well. As far as I can see, mostly everything is here. Good job!
8/10
Animations
The weird flashing poles are here. So are the arrows. However, the lollipop had an animation to it and it isn’t present. Good job, but you missing one.
8/10
color
For the most part color is good. the color’s look kinda deducted from the some of the tiles but it’s not your fault. I’m giving a 10 because the color blending isn’t your fault. (Dang pallets)
10/10
Masking
Masking is near perfect. Straight lines for the most part and everything is masked properly. Good job there!
10/10
Pallet Events
Well lets see. Water, textured background work perfectly. the jungle poll is usable as well. That’s about it.
5/10
Reusabilty
Not bad. Even though it is only a conversion, you can still quite a bit with this tileset. From caves, to a candy garden, to outdoors or a mixture of everything. Good job!
8/10

Final Score:47/60
Score: 8.7
Rank: A
DR? Yes. this is great tileset from Violet. I look forward to more of his work.

Ok first thing how can it be yours when…

1: The colors look correct?
2: There are jazz 1 end signs?
3: There’s non of the green tiles?

I didn’t steal yours the top section is what’s included in jazz 1 and I added onto that. Also you never reply to my emails so I gave up and did my own. I didn’t steal anything from you so thank you and good bye.

Edit: I did respond to your letters and I did compile the tileset and I had the same problem. I’ll bet you anything this problem happened because the mask had no pallet loaded into it. (Since I used remap pallet) I was only making suggestions so please drop this! I’m trying to get my name out and become a respected level maker and tileset maker. I didn’t steal anything from you and I didn’t know how to fix the problem so I gave you subjections on how to improve the tileset as the one you made looked like crap. Once we fixed up the tileset then I was going to help you with the problem. I was only trying to get you a higher rating. So you see you have nothing against me and I didn’t do anything to you. I did what you told me, I had the same problems and I tried to help you improve it. If you didn’t want my help in that area all you needed to do was tell me that you didn’t want my help. So if this continues on and on for some reason I’ll get an admin on this and see what he thinks.

PS: And again I DIDN“T steal anything from you tileset! This tileset is 100% my work.

Edit2: Response to PT: Everything’s been settled. I made the tileset and RedJazz agrees. Ok? I’m the author.

NOOOOO!
How could you?! How?! Oh how?!

For those who don’t know, SonicNathan and I had a deal where I would send him my already 1.5 year old Deckstar conversion. But this never happened. :(

Anyway, it’s a good conversion. But it looks like it’s based on mine since the first 12 rows are identical.
But I’m STILL the owner of the first one!

Response to SonicNathan: From what I have in my “electronic mailbox”, you did never actually compile the tileset but instead only sent thousands of emails with suggestions on how to do it better. Thanks, but I never asked fot those. I only wanted you to compile my tileset. With that I could have finally done something good for the JJ2 community, which I never did with my level crapware.

asxcasx

He probably means medium, I wouldn’t mind it if I was you. Now lets review.

Gameplay

I think I played in your old version of this level before. It was bald with a huge gap in the middle. You did a great job rebuilding it. This level is flowing as most levels are supposed to: simple, with some little obstacles. There is only one thing I’m not statisfied with. You put all warps in the bottom of the level, which makes the bottom far more actractive with a lot of weapons in reach , which is attacking power, also with a lot of warps and tubes which gives a lot of evasion and defensive power.

Eyecandy

You also did this job well. I couldn’t find any title bugs and you used a lot of background titles, which gave the level a nice spfere. I would have liked some more foreground titles, which could’ve made your level look even more proffesional. For your first real level posted here, the eyecandy is really sufficient though. I would like to see, if you have the power to improve and learn from what you did.

Originality

Especially for a first level, this level is quite original. You’re really showing where the power ups are, but if you haven’t been downstairs, you don’t know how to get them. What I’ve allready mensioned is that your warps were all down in your level. You could have spread them more to create a better flow.

Gameplay: 7,3
Eyecandy: 7,2
Originality: 7,1

Final Grade: 7,2

Edit
You changed your level. Good job, you did everything I asked for. You added some foreground, which is really hard to add. Also you improved some parts and made a warp upstars too.
These are you new grades:

Gameplay: 8,5
Eyecandy: 8,1
Originality: 7,4

Final Grade: 8

This works great, but not flawlessly. The error message for ‘Error reading file’ is missing, which can cause the the program to crash/display incorrect error messages.

Oh, you’re also a game maker user?
Nice to hear that, I’m also quite pro (even as I say myself) with game maker.

level is tedium

Here we go:
This is the sequel to Invasion of Deserto, another very good pack.

Gameplay:
Very good use of baddies, triggers, and bonuses. The levels are long, yet fun. (My personal favourite is hopping from spaceship to spaceship. That was fun.) The major problem is difficulty. At some parts, surviving is harder than the puzzles!
9/10

Eyecandy:
Well done! No problems that I could see, and good use/choice of tilesets! There was some very good use of lighting and bosses, and awesome effects made using layers.
10/10

Placement:
The baddies are sometimes hard to deal with, and sometimes too close. Another problem is sometimes proximity of dangers, with no pause in-between. Nothing seriously wrong.
8.5/10

Originality:
Pretty average, yet the choice of endings is new to me. Also, the pack uses events in ways I haven’t seen.
Very good!
8/10

Overall:
DEFINITE download recommendation. As the description says, download the previous episode first. Yet if you need a challenge, download this pack!
9.5/10

And now the review:
Gameplay: 4/10
-It’s CTF, just to let anybody know.
-Lots of jumping required. Slows down process of getting around.
-A bit confusing as to where you are. Too much like a labrynth.This makes it hard to remember how to get to your base.
-Bases too close together. A standard game (10 captures) would finish in a couple of minutes.

Eyecandy: 7/10
-Neat tileset chosen.
-The contrast actually works very well. Easy to see difference between background and forground.
-Little forground.

Music: 10/10
-Very good tempo
-Synthesizer in there? Fits the tileset and level.

Placement: 4/10
-Why were there warps in some places? Why did you end up at a computer? This made things VERY confusing.
-Too many seekers. They require little skill to kill with, and are one of the most powerful weopens in the game.

Size: After running around a bit, it looks suitable for about 5-6 players. Not necessarily good for a CTF level.

Bonuses:
-Tileset is a crossbreed between Tubelectric and… something grey.
-Makes me feel claustrophobic.

Overall: 7/10
A good level for a LAN party, but not online play for a big server in my opinion. It has ok eyecandy and good music, but the gameplay is confusing and makes things a bit too complicated.

Download Reccomendation: Yes, but only if you intend to play with less than 7 people, because the level is a bit small and the bases are close together, making it easy to finish the level in a couple of minutes..

Okay, well.. I saw the rating of this level (7,8) and decided to review this myself. It’s a battle1-remake with the Swamps-tileset made by SPAZ18.

Okay, well, let’s start with the eyecandy. When I open this in JCS, the first thing I see is the bug at [4,124], which isn’t a great start of this review.. Another annoying thing is the repetitive eyecandy: a few steps to the right and you will see three times the same jaguar appearing. Well, I’ve used this tileset myself. You can create great eyecandy combining the different leafs in this tileset. You didn’t use the combo’s, which is really pity. The walls at the destruct-blocks are also bugged.

So basically, you didn’t use this tileset like you could’ve done, most eyecandy seems rather random and repetitive.

Now about the gameplay and placement. Well, there are 3 carrots now, which is okay for a level of this size. The only problem is the left one is a Full NRG, which isn’t a good thing at all in a battle-level. You’ve added a lot of extra PU’s, most of them are at weird positions and not really needed. The flow is, just as in the original battle1, quite well. There are two coinwarps, a nice idea, a lot of silver coins, and some hidden golden coins. Another nice idea is the blocks you have to shoot to appear at the bouncy PU. The timeglasses at the RF-PU are nice, but the vines in the center area are bugged.

The size is just okay. It’s big enough for a battle level, there is enough ammo and there are enough passages. Well, there are some nice ideas and you tried to improve the level at certain points, still, most things aren’t sufficient at all and I can’t give a download recommendation for it.

This is just another Battle1 remake using a Mario tileset. Not much has changed, except for an additional box of ammo in the Seeker PU area.
The background in Layer 8 is very boring. All I can see is black. There are some Mario sprites in layer 5 but that doesn’t really improve anything.
Also, the eyecandy in Layer 4 is very repetitive.
The green pole by the Warp to the Seeker PU is masked meaning the player cannot walk through it.
Overall, this not a very good level.

INCLUDE TILESET

INCLUDE TILESET

Panic!!!

Flow and stuff
The level flows nicely – without making it ridiculously easy to move around. There are most often several ways to take, which I see as important in a battle level. I also find the level to be of a rather nice size.

Ammunition and powerups
In the top left corner, you can find a seeker-powerup. Looks like a fun campspot to me, and for that reason, it’s nice to be able to get 50 seekers by kicking it. We all know how addicting camping a seeker powerup can be <3.. atleast this one isn’t by a warp target.

In the bottom left corner, there’s an RF powerup, which you have to stomp, and while trying to get a hold of this weapon, you’re an easy target for any attack. Good, interesting area.

In the top right corner, there’s a toaster powerup, which you, too, can kick. It’s in a rather spacious area where I can imagine myself and my opponent hunting eachother around. Good job.

It’s obvious that DarkSonic placed his powerups with thought, intending to make sure the whole level comes to use in the games played in it.

Regarding the amount of pickups; there’s a nice amount of them. Enough not to render you compeltely helpless when you don’t have any powerup, for example after dying – but not so much that you don’t feel a need to get powerups in order to stand a chance.

Carrots
This level has one carrot, unless I missed some :o And it only gives one heart. This isn’t necessarily bad, and it certainly doesn’t make for any unfairness… It’s just that this means that this level maybe isn’t the best level to duel someone if you want to try to get a perfect score. If you go to the carrot while being hunted, you will die, unless you play with a version of carrotade which makes you invincible for a while after taking it. Caution, thus!!!

Rating
Never rated a battle level before… I’ll think about it.

Exciting scenery

lol why does the grass kill me hehe :P :P

(No, really, I can’t be bothered to review two battle levels… but it’s definitely worth playing, if you’re into battle. Both his levels are definitely good Battle server material, or bash material.)

Innovation

Flow
Blablabla, the level flows nicely etc etc. This is a DarkSonic level, the flow is good by default. Some areas are spacious, others are not – more about that later. There are warps that take you from bottom to top, of those can be made good use when fleeing, unless you get a warpkill. :* In all, I like the level in this aspect. Learning to find my way around in the level wasn’t hard. That’s a good thing^^

Ammunition and powerups
There is one powerup placed close to the start positions and base of each team. By the blue one, there is a bouncer power up, and by the red a toaster. I’ll come back to those under Base areas.

The third and last powerup is one of seekers. It’s located in the center of the level, and you can only reach it with the copter ears, that you take low below, under the carrot. Taking the seek powerup is complicated by springs. I know from playing this level that hitting people that are trying to take it is evil fun. Needing to take a risk to get hold of such a good weapon is a nice element in a level, in my opinion. It also takes a fair amount of time to do it, which adds even more action to a CTF game, for example when you urgently need to get ready.

There is a nice amount of pickups. The level is designed so that all ammo kinds can come into use. In the more “closed” areas, you can make good use of seekers and bouncer, while the RFs (and to some degree bouncers) become effective when you are hunting in the more open areas. And Grytolle saw that this was good.

Carrots
There are three carrots. Two one heart carrots (to the sides), and one full energy (central placement).

The one heart carrots are place in two one-helluva-tubes (which made me laugh so hard the first time I saw it). As fun of a gimmick this is, this means that people that follow you to the tube start can turn around, run to the end of it and start camping for a fun kill :-D Nice-nice.

The fullNRG can be reached either by RFclimbing (which seems plainly stupid considering the spawntime of the copterears) or by copterears. Taking the carrot takes concentration, which is fun. Yet another risk you need to take. And while you’re at it, someone might follow you and spam you with seekers, or you get shot through the walls by electroblasters. And if that wasn’t enough of a risk, someone might be camping above it. There is a carrot close to it, however – but there’s no guarantee that nobody won’t kill you trying to take that! Yes, I like this area a lot.

Base areas
The bases are located in the bottom corners, and as the level is symmetrical I can save time by mostly discussing just one of them o/.

It’s not easy, but not impossible to stay RTS or R at them – there’s no “safe spots”, atleast not really close to them. As long as you have seekers, you’re relatively safe to attacks… but there is a (hopefully intended) lack of seekers around the bases, which unables you to do this forever. Escaping upwards with bouncers works though, which there is ammo for in the actual base area. There are one powerup close to each base. They don’t pose an unfairness, being different, but they do force you to adjust the way you play. The bases are designed so that both of them can be useful when holding a defensive position of any kind. The areas are rather spacious, which is good for the sake of dodging, but there’s also a tighter passage towards the center of the level, which is nice if you have ammo better suited for that. It doesn’t take long to get to the carrots, but long enough to make you miss scoring chances. This, too is good \o/

Rating
I really have problems rating individual levels today, but let me say like this: I like it, and it seems to really be worth playing.

Panic!!!
This level owns. It owns so much that I attempted to make a “tactical map” or something over it. White arrows are warps. Circles and squares are spawn positions and bases.

Eyecandy
This headline is online here because I really like the eyecandy/tileset!

Flow
lol mby ill fix this when i’m home from belgium

Ammunition and powerups
lol mby ill fix this when i’m home from belgium

Carrots
lol mby ill fix this when i’m home from belgium

Base areas
lol mby ill fix this when i’m home from belgium

Rating
:-D

Rooms!

This level fails. The colors hurt my eyes, the bases are frustrating. It simply doesn’t live up to your standards DS :( It’s nice of course, but not worth playing. Maybe if the bases were less “wtf” and a better tileset was used. It does feature nice elements though, like the camping friendly seeker area. The general flow is very nice too. The problem is that base areas really matter in CTF. Better luck next time :-)

n

[Review changed to quick review. For more information, see \Review Rules\. – Cooba]

These levels aren’t as conventional as they might appear due to borrowed concepts from other levels, which can fool you into thinking there are no original ideas. If you look closely, you can see that these levels shine in lots of aspects visually.

Demon Rampart:

Demon Rampart may remind you of “The Temple of Suffering”, but upon closer inspection you notice that every area was added to complement the look of another; if you were to move specific eyecandy elements to other locations, they would look drastically different. Demonic structures are in the level, and they don’t look cartoony due to the surprising amount of detail added to them, in my opinion. I disliked certain ‘patterns’, but that probably can’t be helped with jj2’s limitations, and they sort of add more personality to the level.

As for the gameplay, the level is a completely different story. It’s like a paradox, because the essential items like carrots and bases are so close to each other with a relatively large amount of playing area all around (the top area is almost useless, but with exceptions like having the “higher ground”). In duels, I imagine the level probably favors RFs and Bouncers over Seekers (which is kind of a good thing). The top area is not safe, because there’s 4 ways to get up there, so players that use it will likely be blasted with RFs, and that takes away the use of it being a good spot to lure people there. Players might feel that they should stick to the middle area due to the concentration of carrots, thus making the entire gameplay hanging around there, and they will only go to the bottom left and right sides occasionally for powerups. The top area could be useful for luring people away from the middle area, or to grab a +1 (the area is big enough to allow this), and possibly come back for another to get full, but it’s risky. If you’re playing someone smart/skilled, he/she will wait for you to get impatient and own your (butt) once you get down from the top area (hopping down to the full nrg is likely to be suicide). Players will probably prefer to play a fast paced match by using the middle area a lot (which is roughly 30% of the level), and they will probably avoid getting stuck at the top with an uncertain outcome. If there were no arrows to help guide a person to where the flag carrier is, then I think this concept could work out nicely without such a large risk. Also, the middle area is tedious to defend: it simply wouldn’t be fun to move back and fourth with your opponent, and wait for him/her to make a mistake; I’d rather play DW, because I won’t have to put as much effort to move. If anything, it may encourage the defender to waste seekers, and decrease the risk. All in all, the top area just makes the level tedious to play in, but the level would probably function chaotically without it (or when players decide to just play 30% of the level). In team matches, I don’t see any reason for the flag carrier to move around much, and the top and bottom areas can’t be exploited to a great effect.

Now onto Distorted Research Site:

The thing that struck me the most about this level is the tileset. To accentuate the theme, P4ul used the metal/pipe tiles quite a lot, and although it may look easy, it’s actually a challenge to work with them effectively, so he resorted to using a lot of patterns. Some of the patterns around the right side are a bit clever, in my opinion. P4ul went crazy at the bottom area, and you can tell that he did just randomly place tiles, and hope for the best.

The gameplay… Ok, first of all the layout consists of many relatively small platforms, so… I normally despise layouts of this variety, but the lack of a seeker powerup may save this level from being chaos. You can get a shield for 25 coins, and that’s alright, but considering the layout, I think players will be too focused on offense than defense to even care. There are pits at the bottom, and you have to open them by using tnt on a crate. You could restart the level if some idiot decided to open them (assuming you don’t want them) during a private match, but in public servers, there’s just no say in the matter. The level will probably be hell in jdc events. So yeah…not much to say about the level here.

Death Facility III (i thought there were only two versions of this; where have I been?) is a large improvement over the previous version I played in every aspect:

The last one has some neat eyecandy imo, but this one has eyecandy in epic proportions, and even in the little ways things were done to enhance the level’s appearance (although in my opinion Demon Rampart seemed to have far more mastery).

The level is, in my opinion, more playable than the last version, but it still lacks the aspect of ‘using’ the layout against the opponent. It’s probably boring for duels. In team matches, I hate the base placement for the fact they are easier to defend than even sbv2 bases (that should tell you something).

Overall these levels have neat, brilliant eyecandy (alone almost earned 8.6), but they fall far short of masterpieces due to the fact the layouts have bland, tedious or simply uninteresting gameplay. I guess you could argue that more stimulating gameplay would sacrifice the way these levels look, and is a fault of 2d level design or jj2’s gameplay style in general.

Agony is a must to download. It shows the epitome of what can be made with these sets. The levels should also be fun to play in public servers and possibly events.

MULCH, as strange as the level name is, is a really fun level to play with a few players or with a lot if you want to see some crazy action. The random weapon concept makes it fun, but it can also get frustrating if you get the wrong weapon all the time.

Sometimes you don’t get a PU, that probably happens when people are getting killed over and over. If I’d were to rate this as a serious level I’d give it much lower, but just because the fun you can have in it(I played it till 100 a few times and played it very often in my own server) I’ve also experienced that the server usually wins with even teams.

Of course it’s all about the weapon you get, because Pepper is not useful in the level. If one has Pepper and the other has Seeker you can guess who wins. But that’s just the level.. not much to do about it. With Carrotade on you can’t recapture fast but if you don’t have it on you can recapture faster. That’s why you should play with Carrotade on. This gives people the time to score more, otherwise you would have gotten even crazier games with people killing each other without scoring a lot.

You can sometimes score 2 points if you kill someone because of Carrotade. With 1 player against more it’s unfair, but this doesn’t mean you can’t score points.

This level is not a candidate for the next JJ2WC or some JDC event, but it’s still a very fun level. Like I said, if I wanted to rate the level as a normal CTF level(that means looking at the eye candy and the placement, although there are no carrots and there is also no ammo) I would rate it much lower.

Download recommendation? Well, this didn’t get downloaded a lot yet so I have to say yes.. but only if you want to have fun and you can take some stress.

Host: Well, in my server this is the standard opening level so you can have some fun before you’re going to play other levels. But if people don’t want to host or play this I really understand that because this is a controversial level. I’ll give this level an 8.2 for now.

Too bad your hotel is in Polish, otherwise I could have understand some more of it.

Eyecandy

Your eyecandy is quite sufficient, you did make some mistakes. There were several wrong red blocks in walls of rooms, you could look at your level before you’re posting it and look for them. You can notice them by the dark lines with which they are separated from the other blocks.

Gameplay

When I played this level, and looked arround, I got bored pretty soon. There are some things to do, like tests and wallclimbing, but it is too easy. If this hotel is hosted, the clients joining it, might get bored after several minutes and leave.

Originalty

You tried to be original. You partly succeeded with nice music and some kind of blue snow. Most other things you tried weren’t succesfull. Putting 2 half door’s on a vertical entrance of a room just doesn’t look that nice. You also made a chimney, but forgot to use all of the titles made for the pipes you made the chimney with.

Eyecandy: 6
Gameplay: 4
Originality: 5

Final Grade: 5

No download recommendation: Everyone should just host his own hotel, not other’s.

Very useful program which works flawlessly.