Jazz Jackrabbit 2 Online

Not a bad level but could be greatly improved. These tips could aid to increase your rating:
1. Use more background.
2. Do more fun things example: pool and tests. These atract more poeple to your hotel.
3. Make more rooms.
4. Make the football more amusing. Use tnt in the nets, so the turtle shell explodes and restarts again. (be sure the turtle shell regenerates)
5. The rooms could be made more eyecandy by making windows, doors and more appliances.

Don’t worry. You can do a marvellous hotel. ;)

Hmmmmm… Interesting song by Danyjello! Pretty catchy too.

So anyways, the beginning seems to start out with a strange blubbering sounding thingy which I don’t know how to describe… trippy I guess. Then a drumbeat starts pumping out along with a few louder techno bass drums and some beaty hi-hats. I seem to notice ur into alot of percussion:P.

SO anyways, I didn’t quite like the synth bass choice, it sounded quite out of the blue, and a little bit distorted. I did however like the background sounds of the bonus lvl song and the melody. It changed son scale which sounded pleasant to the ears

The song overall was good and a bit catchy, I liked it and I recommend you download it.

I’m not sure why I downloaded this. But I’m reviewing it because it’s just too awe-inspiring to leave unreviewed.

“Menace to Wonders” is a story about Devan trying to take over a galaxy by “charming” the inhabitants. What this means is, if you fight an enemy that isn’t a turtle, it isn’t actually evil, it’s only charmed to be evil. You’re still supposed to kill them, but now you have the optional added bonus of feeling guilty about it. Especially because I think it tells you to cure them at some point. Well, they’re not charmed anymore, right? There are also a few species that resist being charmed into evil, including parrots, sharks, moths, and women.
…yes, women. I’ll get back to that.
The level pack opens with an old cliche which I had totally forgotten about because I thought nobody used it anymore: a nearly-empty Carrotus Day level with a few text signs and an exit. I think it represents the fact that you leave Carrotus to go on these adventures. That doesn’t change the fact that it’s really stupid. If I go out shopping for donuts, I never expect to see a sign right outside my door reading “Story: There is a lack of donuts in your household.” I suppose I should take this on faith as big signs reading “EXIT” are kind of improbable too, but I have a thing against text on sign tiles which would really never actually appear on a sign. So the intro level sucks.
After that, we get into the heart of the pack, these being the Wonders. See, the way the pack works is each main level is a Wonder of the Galaxy, or something like that, each with a different theme – fire, water, heart, space, plutonium, radium, tumbleweed – and at the start of each level, a sign announces the name of the wonder, the creator of the tileset (this is known as breaking the fourth wall), the theme of the wonder, and the inhabitants. For the first level, Vapor Caves of Randomwordgenerator, the inhabitants are Vapor Souls (Pacman Ghosts) and Lava Monsters (Devils). It seems odd that you need to charm devil things with giant green pitchforks and that they’re not evil already, but maybe that’s just racial stereotyping. Onto the Vapor Caves!
…or, let me take that back, onto the Vapor, because while there is steam all over the level, I counted, and there is only one cave. I have no explanation for this. It makes no sense at all. Almost the entire level takes place on small floating platforms against a background of red sky, often jumping from one platform to another over a pit of lava or something. It is about as uncavelike a level design as you can get. Caves would have probably looked better, too, as with so few walls, there is very little eyecandy in this level. Again, it’s mostly just tiny floating platforms, which the tileset (Raging Inferno) is admittedly very good at providing.
Here I will take the time to quote the level description. “there’s no ‘die when you fall’ holes”. This is very true. Instead, there are ‘get hurt over and over until you finally die’ holes. They’re really annoying and tedious, especially the time when Gus places a pit underneath some stomp scenery blocks, so it looks like you’re supposed to go that way, but then you die slowly. Instakill, come back…!
The next wonder is called Fruit Gardens of Vita, and it doesn’t make incredibly good use of the Fruity Landscapes tileset. The thing is, Fruity Landscapes has a very repetitive wall texture. Fruit Gardens of Vita has big walls with no attempt at decoration. There are fortunately some giant fruit, either serving as useless ornamentation on long horizontal stretches of ground (one of the author’s favorite features of level design) or as floating platforms (another), and amazingly sometimes the giant fruit have smaller copies of themselves on top. Giant floating purple grape platforms have grapes on them to eat. It’s kind of cute. It’s kind of predictable. I’ll lean towards cute on this one.
Like Vapor Skyscape, Fruit Gardens of Vita features stomp blocks, platforms, little background or foreground eyecandy, and generally uninspired level design. It does appear to make more attempt to have secrets than its predecessor, though, which is nice. Here I found a blaster powerup which was my constant friend throughout the rest of the pack as I shot enemies who posed me no threat at all due to usually not even having methods of attack. I might as well say now that the enemy placement in this pack isn’t very good. They often kind of feel like afterthoughts added into race levels. Pacman Ghosts, like Sparks, work well for sneaking up behind you, but they are totally useless if placed right in front of your line of fire.
The next level uses Winterland Wonder and is called Winterland of Alimi. It has ice block buildings which are kind of neat, except, you know, Chandie did it better. Oh well. This level is probably better than the last two as it’s actually kind of interesting with variety in scenery and whatnot, has (random) lighting effects, and even features a puzzle. Unfortunately it follows an unfortunate trend, that being having the explanation on a sign after you’ve already encountered the puzzle, so by the time you have an idea what you’re supposed to do the puzzle is ruined and there’s no way to start it over. Still, this level is better than the others.
Why is everything suddenly cooler when placed in a high-tech situation like outer space? Hi-Tech Base of Roibi, using Top Secret ]I[, is so much more interesting than the previous levels that it almost seems like a cool level. Here are all the ideas of the pack. There’s still standard stuff like platforms over deadly pits, and climbing up (or down) staircases while shooting various harmless walking enemies, but there’s also a sucker tube pit, bridges of collapsing scenery (with the letter F on them… huh?), “robot” things that either hurt or help you, secrets, slippery slopes, and a decent
background. If this level were longer and with some better sprite/foreground layer eyecandy, it wouldn’t be too bad.
Waterworld of Tluba is very confusing because the non-turtle enemies are crabs and the inhabitants are supposedly fish. I think that means there used to be fish but Gus forgot to fix the sign. Anyway, it’s a very pretty level, because it uses a very pretty tileset. It could use the tileset a little better, but it’s not bad. The design is also somewhat interesting, with shark rides, grottos, castles, and a puzzle which isn’t actually all that bad except for the fact that all the challenge comes from figuring out what you’re supposed to do without messing it up. Not really all that memorable overall, though.
The(!!!) Natural Park of Simi also uses a nice-looking tileset, Swamps, although I’m somewhat jaded to it due to overuse. The thing is, by this point in the pack the level design seems to have improved enough that instead of being laughably bad they’re just average and not particularly worth writing about. There’s flat stuff, platforms, ramps, and a “puzzle” where you try to figure out which warp to take, which tends to be my least favorite variety of puzzle. It’s a pity, because the next level is Efreet Palace of Alibuda, a truly unusual level which is the real reason I chose to review this, um, non-masterpiece.
Efreet Palace is the level containing the most storylike elements, as the level is largely under the control of a mysterious creature known as an Efreet who also prevents the charming of his pet women.
Pet women.
“Inhabitants; Efreet, Women, Parrots, Lizards.”
They sit around in various places about the level and speak in really bad old english.
One hugs and kisses you very sweetly because Jazz is totally the kind of fellow who says “Of Course!” when someone asks him if he wants a kiss. I know it’s Jazz because the ending level talks about Jazz, Spaz, and Lori. Hmm, actually, I guess it could be Lori getting hugged and kissed by the pet woman.
“Test 2: Temptation. Resist the pet women’s love or else you’ll die.”
PET WOMEN!
…anyway, this is actually a pretty fun level, it has variety in scenery, okay design, some nice ideas (the temptation test involves women who warp you, and they have wind attracting you… pretty cool, really), a storyline… but then I realize that women are one of the planet’s primary species and it all stops making sense again.
So yeah. That’s the pack.
At the end is another signs-on-Carrotus level where you use the Efreet’s three wishes to… no. I won’t tell you. I’ve spoiled too much already. Just play the pack and find out.
…why is Carrotus-with-signs so ugly, anyway? The last few levels actually had background eyecandy!

—-

EYECANDY: It improves through the pack, but it’s never too good… basically standard fare for each tileset with nothing even remotely inventive. No tile bugs that I saw.
LEVEL DESIGN: Often pretty uninspired. There are some good bits with collapsing scenery and other stuff, and the bits with horizontal springs and ramps are amusing, but a lot of the rest feels pretty interchangable and uninteresting. CliffyB designed his levels as interesting bits with space inbetween, but he did it better.
EVENT PLACEMENT: Not too interesting. The enemies often don’t pose much of a threat, or at least they don’t give any sense of danger. Admittedly that caused me to die once or twice because it didn’t occur to me that I ought to be careful, but still. The pacman ghosts in particular could be used a lot better, and not much of the ammo seemed to serve any real purpose. There is a cool thing where there’s a bomb crate at the end of every level, it serves no purpose but it gives the pack a certain feel somehow.
STORY: Better than some. It’s not a bad idea that Devan charms the inhabitants of various planets (wonders) to attack you, rather than just saying that ordinary innocent creatures somehow cause you pain when you walk into them. However, there’s really no way to cure the charmed creatures except killing them. And I have to give points for the Efreet Palace which is pretty cool and could support the pack fairly well.
OVERALL: Basically, I am not very impressed by this pack, but it does have its moments. Way too much of the levels was boring move-forward-and-shoot, though, with no branching paths to speak of and no special rewards. I’ll give a download recommendation, but keep in mind that’s because of the Efreet Palace…

YaY, Lark! And his best JJ remix!

Everything sounds so peacy, so happy, so free… I think I don’t have to mention super sample choice, lark-quality beat with fantastic transitions, cool harmonic background or Lark’s sense for a detail (the bird whistling is FANTASTIC, and the end couldn’t be better). True, Lark didn’t try to make some outstanding original melodies, but for now, it doesn’t mind ;) It could be a bit longer too… ;)

Everytime I listen to this tune, it makes me happy (which is great especially because I am not much in the rock). Again and again. I don’t know how Lark managed to do this, but it works. I can be in any deppression, this makes my smile like Lily Allen’s new hit.

I don’t have much to tell about this jewel, just… Download it. Now!

Darn, GO!

To Spaz18: Try ModPlug Player, it can be downloaded from www.modplug.com, it’s easy to use and it sounds very, very well.

Uhh, there’s a simpler way to do that. Put the music volume to zero, open your favorite music player and put some music playin’. But I guess this is for changing the original music. Which makes it pretty cool. I’d give this a Download recommendation but there’s no review so I won’t.

Odin and Dan posted quite decent reviews themselves, so I’ll just retort to say:

This is awesome.

Rating Menace to Wonders:

To start:
Seven excellent created levels which are considerably long and hard.

Large levels:
This episode contains seven levels which is all long and cumbersome. Gus have made the levels beautiful. The enemies and obstakels are well scattered and the eyecandy is also very good.

No bosses:
A large pity: Gus have placed no end bosses. A pity with a large P, because Gus creates regular his own end bosses and does that very good. For example: download ‘Flashback: Outta dis World’ and ‘The Game Machine’. In the final levels of them Gus has created his own bosses.

Puzzles:
The levels have been strewn with several puzzles and riddles which you must answer to come further in the level or reveal secrets. All puzzles are not just as easy… with some puzzles I was more than one quarter busy!

Conclusion:
In spite of that there are no end bosses this is nevertheless an excellent episode. I look forward to play his next episode, but Gus… could you please put (selfcreated) end bosses in it?

Mark: 8,6
Download recommendation:

[Rating (8.6) clearance. Why were the enemies and obstacles well scattered? Why were the levels beautiful? You still need to specify the upload’s good sides before rating. ~Cooba]

Enemies/Obstacles:
They were good placed, because it were not too much and not too less. The level is on that way hard, but not impossible. I always mean that if I say that the Obstacle Placement is good.

Eyecandy:
It’s beautiful, because there is a nice background, maybe a good foreground and the path is beautiful. I always mean that if I say that the eyecandy is good.

But I never write that in my review, because I think that everyone knows when something is good.

Alright, I haven’t done a lot of reviews lately, but Forest is just begging for one.

Forest is basically the Swiss Army Knife for JJ2. Basically everything that Controller did, Forest does, and a whole lot more. Fixes seeker holes, chat bugs, weapon auto-changing (picking up a new weapon) and the respawn bug. Allows you to spectate, auto-cycle levels (switches levels until you get to one you want), remote character change (including bird and frog), and can even poke the memory! This tool replaces about 5 different programs, does it quickly and cleanly, and brings in the equivilant of 5 new programs.

However, there are some things that Forest doesn’t do. I have so far seen no ability to bleach names (e.g. Project Gamma), although you could do that manually, but it’d be a major pain. The morph bird and morph frog addresses are switched, according to tests (although that could be my fault), and “Call Plugin” seems to have no function (as of now, perhaps it’s meant for third-party add-ons?).

Nonetheless, Forest is a wonderfully done tool, and while it may not have everything you need (no chatlog, nor server protection), no server should be without it. 9.2 and a HIGHLY RECOMMENDED download recommendation from me.

Eh,my new controller program.That lets you make what you want to.Perfect.I recommend you to download.Thnx jam.Good job.
Fake rehost doesnt work but nvm.

Short review.

This is awesome. We needed this all-in one program looong time. Seekerhole, chatbug and warp target fix, entire Project Controller, Respawn, Instagib with tons, really TONS of new stuff, such as trigger controlling, quick spectate, fake minimize, fake server stop, changing all players to jazz/spaz, making all blink / never blink, or million of others. And in addition, it’s expandable by special libraries. All in easy-to-use interface with okay structure. And, what is the best, IT ALL WORKS!!!

Main minuses of the program are making jj2 crash when there isn’t exactly well written parameter and stability (hopefully it’s not because of my computer :OOO).

Great program, probably the best ever made. Get rid of that parameter bug and you have 10. Great work, jam. i hope to see you as programmer of… jj3! :DDD

Dude, THIS IS COOL!!!!!
LOTS OF OPTIONS!!!!!
now, u can morph ALL players on the server into Spaz!!!!
SO COOL!!!!!!
As a matter of fact… this is even better than controller…
but i found 2 bugs…
1.When ur the server, if u morph into a bird then back into jazz, (Or spaz), u’ll get hellicopter ears.
2.When u press “Full server-client synchronise”, The Program Crashes.
EDIT: Yes Danyjel, the program can crash JJ2 when you enter too long of a name.

I wonder which functions are server-only and which ones also affect clients in the server. Then I’ll edit this and make a huge review :)

How about including a readme explaining the myriad of buttons with cryptic labels?

Great stuff, lots of possibilities, probably the best JJ2 program yet.

[Rating (10) clearance. Why is the stuff great? What are the possibilites? ~Cooba]

This upload gets the honour of being the first one where I’ll be using my enhanced review system. It should provide longer reviews, yet save me a lot of work. A paradox, but it should work fairly well. Anyhow, here goes:

Visual Appeal – 2 out of 5

Uh well yeah. Take no offense on this, but I didn’t like the eyecandy at all. Firstly, it makes little to no sense that the background would be so terribly open while the level is supposed to be an underground depository? Also, a lot of the level was barren. Most of the walls seemed to be the same 2×2 block pasted over and over, which looked very dull and uninteresting. The layer 4 background weren’t all that good looking either, and most of the time the mournful background was gloriously exposed. Blargh. There was also some sparse layer 3 eyecandy, but most of the time it was either buggy: or it blocked 80% of my vision, causing me to bump into enemies. Overall, the level doesn’t have the scary atmosphere it was intended to have, and the lightning doesn’t help it, either.

Playability – 2 out of 5

This field was also below average. Most of the level involved searching for leaky radioactive barrels and blocking off access to them. Most of the barrels were placed on the main path of the level (why would a depository be so linear?), and thus it wasn’t as fun as it might have been. Also, the whole thing became boring after a while. Not sure why, but it might be a fault of the linearity. This level also was lacking in terms of hardness, it was mainly easy in most places. In some areas, however, there were vines placed just above the radioactive radius of the barrels, and I couldn’t avoid getting hurt there. There were some carrots on the way, so it wasn’t much of a problem in the long run, but still seemed unfair for me. And for a closing note, I wasn’t really happy with how there were little to no puzzles in the whole level.

• The general idea was decent.

• The execution was lacking, honestly.

Overall
This level was pretty average. The story and the idea were good though, and they made me raise an eyebrow, as well as the overall rating. However, the level itself was quite a letdown… work on your levels a little more.

I didn’t like this level very much. It is not a test. The background could have been changed to a much brighter one so it would be more eyecandy. Yet still i can’t still understand what is the objective of this level. On my opinion I can’t give you more than 4

i didnt like much this level
(Unsupported rating (4) removal. ~Violet)

!!!!
This is like, 10 times better than ChatLogJJ2 or whatever it was called. And that didn’t even work on my computer. This has WORKING chat saving with a timestamp option. Logs roasts, captures, joining and leaving… Has a text box to send chat to jj2. Can generate stats for level and individual players, minimize to system tray… Let’s break each thing down here.

:: Basic Form and User Interface is simple and Friendly. -> 1.0

:: Saving and Loading Options with Timestamp. -> 1.5

:: Minimize to system tray and run in the background. -> 1.0

:: Optional and Automatic “Auto-Ignore”, “Filter Word Array” and the option to choose what to log (Roasts, CTF Points, Joining and Leaving, etc) -> 3.0

:: Option to Generate Statistics for a current log or a saved one, and view the stats of each individual player since SalLog was run. -> 3.2

Total Rating: 9.7
Recommendation: HIGHLY YES
Final Comments: SalLog is THE essential server/client side logging program for Jazz Jackrabbit 2. Period.

—Red

Not a bad level. I liked the concept. The only real problem was the length of the level.

Eyecandy 4/5: The regular background could have been better (plain white gets boring). Everything else was great.

Gameplay 4/5: Good. Some of the paths were difficult to find, but it was a nicely done level. I think it would be helpful if you used pulze lights to indicate areas with radiation, however. That would make the level a little less frustrating.

Enemies 4/5: Nothing super. It kept me entertained, so you must have placed them well.

Item placement 2/5: There wasn’t much to speak of. I think the ammo at the beginning was about it :/

Bonus: I liked the concept. Keep making levels like this, and make them longer.

You want more reviews? Well here’s another.

This level is perhaps one of the BEST EVER I have played on JJ2.

EYECANDY: WOW! The eyecandy is MAGNIFICENT! I love the way the Story is presented in the intro. Very cool. LOTS of the tiles are used. No repetitive backgrounds or foregrounds. The Spaceship levels make it look as if you are really in Space. 10/10

GAMEPLAY: LOTS to do. The levels are VERY LONG AND HUGE. There are 15 levels in total in this pack (2 save points, 1 intro). There are TWO endings to get in the pack, a superb idea. The password system in one of the levels is a fantastic idea. 10/10

DIFFICULTY: This pack is hard, even on easy. On Hard, the puzzles are made much harder. 10/10

MUSIC: I really love the music used in this pack. All the music goes well with every level. 10/10

ENEMIES: Not too many or too less. Enemies are not found in annoying places like on the end of platforms. They are very well placed. The way the Bilsy bosses are used is SUPER. 10/10

OBSTACLES: There are LOTS of obstacles on each level. Hidden Destruct Scenery, secret passages, lots of Trigger Crates and lots of Trigger Zones to find. 10/10

EVENTS: The eventing used in this pack is REMARKABLE! I love the way the Escape Pod moves with Jazz in it. The way the TNT events are used in the Spaceship are also fantastic. 10/10

TOTAL: 70/70 (10.0)

BONUSSES:
This pack is compatible with 1.23, so you don’t need TSF to play this. +0.5
The whole pack is only just under 200KB. It’s amazing that you can fit that many levels in just that size. +0.5
TOTAL BONUS = +1.0

FINAL MARK = 11/10
But it will have to be 10 since scores like that are impossible. I would have done 11 if it was possible.

DOWNLOAD RECOMMENDATION?

Darn right, I reccomend this! So, what are you waiting for? Download this NOW!

GRADE: S (Better than A!)

BTW, this is my second 10 rating now!

@Donda97 & Lori98: READ the level description. There’s a link you can click on to download the music and tilesets. Otherwise if EvilMike did include the tilesets and music, the level pack would be OVER 5MB and the limit on J2O is 2MB.