Jazz Jackrabbit 2 Online

I love single player levels! However, this pack is a bit… surprising. Levels use original tilesets but the way you used them and the gameplay itself are pretty original and sometimes confusing. Woven chains in the castle, enemies and pickups falling from the tubes in tubelectric, moving gargoyles in bonus-medivo, freezing pickups in hell, areas where you fall down and avoid baddies, tonns of explosives that blow up countless crates with goodies, great number of warps and frog/bird morphers… It’s difficult to describe everything! I’ll try to sum up pros and cons of this pack.

PROS

+ Original gameplay. All the situations I’ve described earlier.
+ Boss levels, bonus levels and music used in bonus levels remind of JJ1.
+ Some bonus levels are really cool!
+ All the bosses included, and it’s unpredictable wich boss you will face it each boss level.
+ Appropriate special effects like smoke above the fire at the bottom of hell, where you fight Utherus.

CONS

- The main problem deals with language and unrecognized symbols. All the hints are in Portuguese, I don’t think there are much people who know this language.The biggest irritation is the symbol “§” in the name of each level- my computer simply changes it to one symbol if it is in a name of a file, or to some another symbol if in the name of next level in JCS. Thus the game crushes every time I finish a level. There are many files to rename :(((
I’m sure I’m not the only who faced this problem.
-Levels aren’t very tidy, lots of bad tiles. Eyecandy suffers a lot.
-Some bonus levels are big and challenging, but some can be finished in a minute.
-Probably too much of useless goodies, I mainly mean gems and sometimes fastfeet. Bonus levels provide you with them, but they don’t give you anything except extra points.
-JCS flaws, for example “12§ Lost level” causes amnesia error, “12§ Devil Devan” doesn’t have any music.

CONCLUSION

The idea was amazing and original but realisation isn’t so good. However, the fact that you’ve made all these levels when you were a kid deserves respect.

First of all this level doesn’t use Angel Script but you indicated it as TSF+. It’s a bit confusing. Additionally the game crushes each time you finish the level, as you forgot to enter the name of a next level or ending.

Layout 2/10
The level is small and simple, not challenging at all… You could place some boss here at least! The level’s properties are 300*64 but only a small part of this area is used, the greater part of a level is a pit you can easily fall in. Ugly square pieces of wall are hanged in the air instead of platforms. The enemies have random positions, the bats levitate in the air… The hard difficulty adds some bats to the level, wich is pretty useless.

Eyecandy 2/10
Have you ever played jigsaw puzzles in your childhood? The tiles are some kind of that, you should put them in a certain order to make a good-looking picture. The absence of this order ruins this level’s eyecandy. Houses are deprived of their frontal walls and look like huge flat cardboards… There is something looking like a colomn at the 1st layer-although this tileset has a normal colomn, you had built it with some random tiles! No background at all… I understand that Haunted tileset doesn’t have any proper background except for the sky, but even the sky isn’t used in this level.

Music 1/10
You’ve uploaded an original music file, but the JCS uses some “Halloween.mp3” so the game can’t load the music to this level.

Total rating: (2+2+1)/3=1.7

I don’t think it’s a good idea to upload levels to the site before you learn how to make them.
Probably you should open some original levels with JCS and analyse their structure, layers, events, music, properties, ect…

A solid and enjoyable level. While the layer 4 EC is rather minimalistic, it does the job and overall the level feels very professional. The BG sun combined with the heat effect looks amazing however. Works well in duels, as was intended, but the level is also large enough to work in small AYCR and TB games of up to 8 players.

The advantage of this conversion is that you’ve added some new tiles here : raindrops, waterfalls, lake and hills… With this tileset I’m not getting stuck into the spikes.That’s OK.
As for the palettes- now there are less colors. The grownd is just gray, without any colored spots. It’s a bit dull, this way you’ve reduced the diversity of the palette…

First of all why didn’t you change the names of the levels? It’s not very convinient to replace the original ones with these levels to play them.
The levels aren’t worth plaing at all- I can’t even see the certain path at the vasp majority of them. Some of them have problems with lighting.
There are also some survivals like Kill enemy or boss. First one has a terrible layout and respawns tons of enemies which is pretty pointless. The music isn’t associated with the tileset. The same goes for the boss fights where you have to face a group of bosses. It’s not challenging at all due to the fact that it’s enough to kill a single boss to exit the level.
The only thing I liked in this pack was the remake of an unfinished original Psych level known as “Far Out”. It can be easily recognized though you renamed it to “Funky Grooveathon” which is the name of the 2nd Psych level. You’ve extended it and placed the Bubba boss here. It could be a decent level if there weren’t places you can’t get through… I counted at least 3 of them. The drums (or whatever they are) in the narrow tunnels are an impassable barrier due to their awful mask.

Medivo looks ominous in these colors! The palette is really nice.

I see there are some problems with flags and blocks- like if you’ve pasted them from another file and they were spoilted as the picture exceeded the limit of 256 colors. This effect could be easily avoided if changing directly the table of colors.

There are some white pixels above the big white square in the left side of the set, they spoil the view of moving ledge constantly appearing each time it’s moving back.

As Cooba has already noticed the mask is original so there are tons of places to get stuck in the level. For example you can easily avoid Bolly’s rockets in the lower rigth part of the arena due to the clumsy mask.

There aren’t any new tiles as well…

I put 7 because I like this recolor and the Medivo tileset itself.

A marvellous mixture of Castle, Medivo, Haunted, Hell, Beach… Well, not sure if I didn’t forget anything!
The mask is fixed so spin roads work. Being inspired by this I used the similar concept in my single player pack.
The music is awesome!
Probably the 7th and 8th layers should be a little brighter.
This conversion is my favorite one, It is really worth to be downloaded!

You make me laugh. It’s a recolor of an original tileset, so there is no need in uploading any .j2l files- we can download your .j2t and apply them for existing original levels! But you’ve uploaded the level 3 times with different tilesets. I won’t deprive any points for that, but it’s funny :)
The main problem of these recolors is the change of the objects’ colors. Rabbit, enemies and pickups look awful! You could avoid it by not changing the first 96 colors (which are responsible for objects) of the palette. It’s very conveniently to edit the table of colors in Photoshop for example.
Another problem is the usage of the same colors in the single palette. The level looks monochromatic this way.
And finally, you used the original mask while you could fix it, for example, make the spin-roads (or wtf they are) work as they are intended to.

I also like making recolors and I can say for sure that Inferno is one of the most complicated tilesets for recoloring. It’s difficult to imagine it green or red… It would look weird and unrealistic.
This version of Inferno is far inferior to original ones- the ice world and the desert. It’s something average and it definetely doesn’t look good. Firstly, the sky, grownd, trees and the whole level are colored very similar and merge each other. Maybe you should make the sky red or orange. The black snow looks like falling ashes- it could be a good desition if somewhere here was a volcanic activity, but it doesn’t seem so :)
The original mask wasn’t fixed, so it’s a kinda of a wasted opportunity.

Wow! Seems like yellow is the best color for the castle. However it’s only a single recolor and I would like to see more of them…

This looks gruesomely marvelous, reminds me of a tricked out version of the Blood tileset from the old irc server (still no idea who made that to this day). Can’t wait to play around with the complete version!

Bloody_Body, there will be a complete version of this set. Since this tileset is to much fun! skulg will add some animated tiles and more tiles to work with.

When will this be finished? We don’t know yet. Somewhere in the summer perhaps…

However, where did you get stuck? At the vines? Ill ask skulg to fix the mask and maybe we could reupload it. Ill let you know :)

-ShadowGPW

Edit (Answer to Mystic Legends ):
I’m looking forward the complete version. This demo version is nice!
I got stuck above the tube, the coordinates of that tile are 28*16. It’s a small matter of course, but I’m sure this tileset would be used for some other levels, so it’s better to fix this small problem :)

Original review:
Well, most of the custom tilesets are really ugly and low-qualified but this one is well-drawn and original. Plaing this was like being jailed into the huge brain of some monster! Those gyrus, vessels, eyes, bloody waterfalls and puddles of blood look really brutal!

It’s a pity that you had a limit of 150 tiles, I’m sure you could make lots of useful tiles otherwise. However, seems like those 150 tiles are enough to make a fully functional level: there are tubes, vines and an awesome background modified with Angel Script.

The mask isn’t perfect, though. Sometimes player can get stuck into the wall.

A pretty good level pack with a few really good levels (Colonial Castle Ruin and Delta Halo) and a few good levels with some interesting ideas. For example I like the tileset usage in Far From Reality. Snowy Slim Shore is a pretty good level with some good eye candy. Unknown Ruins has a pretty simple layout that reminds me a bit of my old levels.

DS made a decent map out of this tileset.
The map is easy to learn – like almost every map DS has made – and the eyecandy is also pretty original (But DS has already mentioned that in his discription). A few small flow issues here and there but not that have bothered me a lot.
Download recommendation and a nice ‘int’ for you!
10100111001 FTW!!

Great times, great levels, great people. I remember being so excited to see if my levels made it or not each year.

Deleted my previous review, by god this is one amazing tileset. After 14 years it still upholds everything you love in a pretty tileset. It is actually better then NickStadlers tilesets.

Old ShadowGPW to young ShadowGPW, who cares that you have to use layer 5 to improve eyecandy and gameplay. The tileset is just amazing.

There are some minor bugs and annoyances, but a smart editor can make something beautiful out of it.

In other words, a fantastic tileset. Well done.

Hello memories.

Edit (May 24., 2015): Most of the flaws discussed in my original review included below have been taken care of. Some perhaps extensively – the spike ball challenge room became somewhat trivial, with safe spots, hardly any actual spike balls, and respawning seeker ammo that you can collect for many minutes and use against all enemies from that point on. The boss on the other hand might’ve become overpowered; the second phase of the fight seemed fairly random to me, with my victory depending mostly on the order of moves he decided to use. I also encountered some other minor bugs I didn’t see before but won’t bother to list. Overall, however, the changes are a major improvement, the level has consistently good quality and a variety of gameplay concepts, and it’s now fun to play.

Aforementioned original review (rated 7.5) available below for reference and historical purposes:

Decent, but with tons of flaws.

New weapons are nearly completely useless and, where they could be useful, it turns out the modified fireball can’t shoot upwards and bombs deal only 1 damage point to Bubba enemies, don’t explode on contact, and bug enemies up.
Many of the enemies are mostly really tiring to kill rather than difficult, especially the Bubba ones generally require a hit and run strategy that is very safe but can easily take half a minute to take down a single one of them.
Loads of bugs occur, besides the aforementioned bombs that have really bad effects on Bubba enemies, spike balls go through walls and all over the place, making otherwise easy areas completely random hell, enemies can spawn at the player’s position without any chance for escape, falling onto the floor without having activated a certain platform can get you stuck there, and Spaz can completely skip the most difficult challenge in the level, which then never ends, causing palette issues.
Said most difficult challenge inconsistently keeps progress over separate lives, unless you had finished it already, in case of which when you die it counter-intuitively restarts from the beginning, and is overall unfair, involving not as much skill as shooting while getting hit constantly in hope enough spike balls are destroyed before you run out of blinking time and health. I could believe it involves some skills or strategy but the spike balls can very well spawn directly above you and quickly fall down, or even spawn at your current position. There’s no way to predict that, if you’re unlucky, you’re simply going to die. On the other hand, the challenge room that precedes it is much easier but has issues too – most importantly, after you kill the initial wave, it runs out of enemies and you have to wait for several seconds before anything new appears. Generally exactly on your position, dealing damage even though you were well prepared to fight.
As far as I could tell, the coin warp requires all coins in the level, which is a bad design decision that means everything you collected will be useless if you didn’t find one single secret. The level also contains gems which it gives no special purpose to, so that’s a sort of a wasted opportunity.
Tweedle is perhaps the greatest disappointment. After the life-draining spike ball challenge I was convinced I’d face a hard to defeat final boss, but instead I saw a nerfed version of the first stage of Devan Shell, who later transformed into a complete joke of a boss that can be beaten simply by periodically pressing the down arrow, after getting him onto one of the platforms in the arena. Or well, that was the case before the recent update – after that, his first stage can actually be called significantly more difficult to kill with blaster than Devan is, but you can always just pull out RF missiles and still finish it within a couple of seconds; and the second stage didn’t change much, maybe just that I now have to occasionally press left or right too to aim the buttstomp better. Granted, he would fit in well with the entire rest of easy to kill official JJ2 bosses, but certainly doesn’t fit the spirit of the level, which aims to be more ambitious than the official levels.

As for the upsides, I really like how enemies drop ammo, and not just any, but the kind that’s actually associated with them, even if they drop so little and so rarely that it’s not extremely helpful. The visuals and mechanics of the moving platforms are really nicely done. The variety of enemies is cool, with the new ones offering original mechanics. Secrets are spread around well, generally offering hints and not being too hard to find. The scenery is somewhat bland but acceptable. I suppose with the exception of challenge rooms and the boss it’s fun to play overall.

WOW! This level is enormous! I don’t remember if I had ever seen such a huge level. It reminded me the Hermitage museum of St.Petersburg, where you’ll never explore the entire area whithin a single visit. This goes for this level as well. You have to play again and again to make sure there is no place you still hadn’t been to. There are splitting paths, so you have to choose where to go, there are plenty of secrets! Someone may say that such a gameplay is too boring and repetitive, but as for me that’s a good idea. I also liked the way you used the 5th layer, the use of Tuf Turtles, different starting positions for Jazz and Spaz and cunningly-hidden warps .

However, while proceeding this level, I had chosen to change the music to the original tune of Diamondus and I also changed the tileset to “Diamondus Storm” by Cansin13. This way it looks newer and matches to the falling leaves, to the stormy weather.

Seems, like you’re really advanced level-maker! I really appreciate levels like this one.