Jazz Jackrabbit 2 Online

It might be good levelpack but graphics just ruined a lot of things. It should be rather called MEH (My Eyes Hurt) Levelpack and my eyes did hurt after playing level with fog, underwater level and dark castle level. This graphic was so annoying that I used jjnext few times. Since leveldesign is well but eyecandy is horrible it makes the whole thing pretty average – so 5.5 is my final rating.

Just a little comment on Violet’s description.

“Two other levels, battle4 and race4, are only available in .lev form, which is very different form of encryption and much harder to convert, if not impossible.”

It must be possible. I don’t think that Cliffy would have time and will to 99% accurately remake all the levels in JCS.

[2011 EDIT: LOL I AM DUMB]

OK, here’s my few words about this package, since Agama is real guru in making tilesets and I hope that users high ratings are big encouragement for Agama to create more masterpieces. Of course it gets 10 and recomandation and now some words about this tileset. It was made on a base of original beach tileset – good to know, because I see no similarities (maybe a bit in a colour palette) this rather looks like made from scratch because every element, every tile is changed. Imagine a scenery for JJ2 on which you see a swamp with tall trees with rather dark brown and green colors and beautiful background. Now open your eyes and look at sample level of swamp tileset… and teach your imagination to create such amazing images.
P.S. still few Agama’s tileset’s to see, I’m sure I won’t be dissapointed.

Yes, it’s Agama’s tileset and yes, it is great. Although I don’t quite like some elements like black holes among bricks, and the river in the background is takin’ player attention (at least my attention) but it’s still a masterpiece. Look at those pictures on the walls, one word – genius. Hard to compare it to other Agama’s works, it’s quite similar in style, just different scenery. One thing is certain these tilesets are real jewels in j2o downloads and it would be a crime if I’d rate it lower than 10.
P.S. Filesize is quite big, but trust me – it’s worth waiting!

I really like these tiles… they’re neat and preserve the cartoonish style of whole game. Now, that work deserve really high rating beacuse this stuff fits well to original tilesets. Level designers: use Heaven and your levels will just look great. That’s how good tileset should look like, so… maximum rating and recomended for download :)

Quite playable and enjoyable levelpack… some ideas originally implemented other not, eyecandy below average – it’s not just because of poor quality tilesets, even on levels with better tiles there are too small repetitive patterns and lack of details. There are even more cons – like too narrow passages making levels buggy. But the most important bug is that some files are probably missing making the game to quit with fatal error… and there’s no readme file. I can’t give more than 6.5

I can’t believe this levelpack is so underrated it is MUCH MUCH better than many high rated so called episodes. It totally beats original XMas Chronicles it is about as long as Secret Files, but although there’s only one tileset these levels aren’t monotonous <- this has such serious impact on playability.
Wille you know what tiles are for and you know where to place enemies. I like the way you use levelspace, steges were almost like mazes but ones that you won’t get stuck for long. The game just flawed sucking the player for a looong time. I agree with the rest of reviewers this pack is SUPERB, but I’m surprised with all those rather low ratings.
Eyecandy – marvelous
Leveldesign – perfect and I found no bugs
Playability at the top
You get 10 and you really deserve it, two thumbs up and … I WANT MORE LEVELS made by you. :)

Great episode, good leveldesign, even with the “bug” in ending the eyecandy is fine. I like the idea of using darker tileset instead of darkening the whole castle. I really hope this is not your “last word” ;)

It is my first download here and first review. I’ve read previous posts started this “episode” and now I’m surprised by what I’ve seen. Do you guys review the same levelpack that is available in downloads above? :O Not that it’s so bad it’s rather horrible and should’ve never seen the light of day :P
First of all – what are all those cinematics for? They aren’t played under JJ2 and the so-called intro should be in readme.txt since its only a single sentence or so… why? Because the whole download is too huge for some players – w/o those worthless cinematics it would only be 3+ MB big :P
OK, let’s get to the rest – LEVELS :(
Tileset is … UGLY – bitmaps taken from some site dithered down (I think) to 8-bit palette doesn’t make tileset yet you know … Jazz and other sprites DOESN’T FIT in amatuer, crappy graphics like this. Leveldesign – I was hoping that it’s gonna improve from level to level but it was rather Mario-like-go-right stuff with some exceptions, and look at the background – repetitive chaotic patterns of this “tileset” remind some 8-bit retro game rather than JJ2 game with ultracool graphics. Look at the grond/dirt in original tilesets – it’s not a black hole like here, right? Overall design was rather boring and I haven’t played through all levels – I couldn’t stand it long. Once again look at the original levels – do you see how the whole levelspace is used? Do you see placement of baddies and how they act? Do you see graphics?????
The only good point of this “episode” are the ambient sounds – but they’re used instead of original music which is crime – it additionally makes the whole stuff less dynamic. Just one point up for that and one another for the idea but none for leveldesign and graphics.
I hope that next time you’ll use some of standard tileset and practice more with leveldesign – release more single levels before you make a whole episode and please DO NOT KILL JAZZ JACKRABBIT anymore.

I pretty much agree with Haze. I just want to make some suggestions.

This song has some potential, but I can tell it’s mostly a copy and paste job from the original songs, which is okay, as long as you change around the way the notes are used to fit the instrument. I see countless places where a tone portamento or offset should be used, but is absent. You should also make sure to change around the key of the samples. Two different samples could have different initial keys when first loaded, so you’ll have to test them out by ear and then manually adjust. Most of what I hear in this song sounds really offkey.

… ouch. It’s horribly out of tune. No, really. A novel idea, I’ll give you that. But it sounds like absolute hogwash like this.
I for one know you can do a lot better than this. And maybe an orchestral arrangement is just not the thing for you. If you do however want to pursue something in the direction of another orchestral arrangement, try looking up some more information. Especially when doing something like this it’s handy to know where each instrument is positioned in an orchestra and what it can and cannot do. (think of real instruments and how they are played)

The level is as confusing as Windows 95 at its worst. Add some random crashes, and it will resemble W95 exactly. :D

JJ1 RULES!!!

Diamond Forest Sector 1
This level is converted well, but there’s one thing I dont like about this level: In JJ1 it was possible to jump on the top of a tree. There are enough invisible mask in the Diamondus tileset, so why didn’t you use them to mask te treetop? Because the treetops aren’t masked, it’s not possible for Jazz to find the Birdie. I didn’t find any mistake in this level, except for the missing spring, making you unable to get a toaster box.

Diamond Forest Sector 2
This level is also nice, but there’s no reason to use bee-generators. You also could reduce the amount of bees because JJ2 bees have a longer range and are much harder to avoid then JJ1 bees. The fast feet part is very original and I like the last cave before the exit. But why did you use the Diamondus Night tileset?

Diamond Forest Secret
I’ve got not much to say about this level. Please change the airboard into a bird morph, and I’ll be happy.

Tubelectric Tower Sector 1
This level is really good. This one is done really well and it gives me the good old Tubelectric feeling. The tube-corner-parts are used as the huge flashing blocks which looks really cool. There are a few eyecandy mistakes and you could have used something better then the countdown blocks (used instead of the barriers), like the electric pillars in the tileset, but this level is really fun. There’s one thing I really have to mention: the turrets have been removed, and the dark area (which isn’t really dark) is really boring without them. You could add some sparks or use something inside the tileset as turrets, and turn the light to something between 0-50% to make the dark part dark again.

Tubelectric Tower Sector 2
This level was my favourite of JJ1 Episode 1. It uses the Night tileset again, but this isn’t that worse as in Diamondus. Maybe you could reduce the number of sparks (same reason as the bees in Diamondus2) and delete the extra part behind the exit.

Medivo Fortress Sector 1
This level is done very well. The Eyecandy is very good, but it is a lot easier to play then Tubelectric and Diamondus. This time you could increase the number of helmut’s and rapiers a bit (yes I’m terrible) to make it harder. There’s one bad thing in this level: there are hardly any obstacles in the airboard part. I know there are no wall- and ceiling spikes in this tileset, but you could also use moving (or not moving) spike bolls. Except for the airboard part this level is really good.

Medivo Fortress Sector 2
This level is also really good. I’ve got not much to say about it. By the way: There are two ways to get the bird in this level.

Medivo Fortress Gaurdian
This level is a bit small. The boss appears to early and the hidden 1up has been removed. Not much to say about this level.

Conclusion
This level pack is nothing special, but it is one of the rare packs that amused me. You could improve the enemy placement and things like the turrets and airboard part. It’s more important to make a fun pack, then to make a perfect clone of JJ1.

Fun: 5/6
Eyecandy: 5/6
Gameplay: 4/6
Event Placement: 4/6

Rating: 8.0
Download recommendation

Good Job!!

This screenshot speaks for itself.

Welcome, one and all, to the race of… uh… 1998, I guess. Gameplay consists of you as Spaz (if you join as Jazz, tough luck) warping into a series of small rooms, and attempting to get stuck in the tile directly above the warp target before you are hit by the ceiling spring in the tile directly below the warp target. You do this four times, then you are taken to a big room where you enter a randomly placed warp, which takes you back to the beginning of the level. There’s not even “Setlap”.
Eyecandy too is abysmal. No tiles really connect together at all, and the only two layers used are 4 and 8. 8 only has tiles in its bottommost row, not the rest, so everything tends to leave trails. One can only wonder why the author bothered to use Townsville ][ Night, if “use” is the operative word.
There’s really no reason to download this. It has no interesting ideas. It’s full of broken stuff and places to fall out of the level. And, believe it not, that screenshot I posted was all of layer 4.

[Adjusted to use 1 as rating. Original rating 0.8. ~Cooba]

to be called cocky enogh the race of the future

Ah, but Race4… Race4 was pretty fun, just needed a few bugs worked out so Spaz wouldn’t have such a major advantage.

n00b: Interesting. And it really wouldn’t be “converted to a Jazz playable format”, as Battery Check and BETA 2 use the same format, right?

Cooba: …yes, it’s possible, but only if you understand the file formats for both .lev and .j2l, okay?

Battle 4 is perhaps the worst battle level ever made, anyway.

I like it, it’s pretty good. Don’t feel like writing an entire review though.

Well, i’m changing my review because of the change of the section!

As a tileset, this pack has great things to do. Lots of animations and fun also.

One thing is: too much red! but doesn’t really matter. Also there are some tiles look like MS Painty!

Except these, many good levels can be built with the tileset. So, here’s a 8.5

This actually sounds good to me, with the good samples, but the notation implementation is something I will pick on.

Pros
The arrangement of the song is excellent! It’s very catchy, and something I’d listen to while fragging the (beep) out of my opponents.

Cons
Might need some working on one or two of the samples. The cymbal crashes are kind of hit ‘too often’ which kind of adds a bit of repetitiveness.
There’s some notations there unnecessarily transposed around near the end of the song, and throughout. (The new-age-like samples)
If you could fix the transposition problems, I promise to change the rating! :)