Jazz Jackrabbit 2 Online

@Cooba: Haha, J2VF was a level group me and NOKA started late in 2003, but it didn’t last very long. You and DS used to be in as well, so I hope remembering it doesn’t hurt too much. :P

I silently revived it last year since I began some new attempts at JCS, as I thought it’d be fun to release my levels under that old tag. For now it’s just a one-man group though. xD

@ThunderWalker: Thanks again for reporting that bug. That and other masking errors should be fixed now.

@Treya: Wow, that’s lots of cons VS pros.. Anyway, the vault reward was designed with ‘mechanic knowledge’ in mind, and I’m fully aware that it was a risky choice to surround the entire level around it. For weapons, well, in my playtests (with 4 to 6 players) the bouncers and hidden seekers did the job quite well, while ice was pretty much ignored. However, I fully agree that the final level size far exceeds the intended ‘duel-style treasure level’ I was going for. At least some people liked playing it, and in the future it could be a great addition to event playlists instead. Thanks for the 7 though, it’s a fair and good score (compared to the overrating-nature that haunts J2O lately)!

Now that’s not a tag I expected to see ever again.

I included the music file just in case someone deletes it, so that he will have it. :)

Slaz: Yeah. I kinda rushed the level for the contest, and you know... rushing isn't good. I will update the level in the future. Slaz: Ok gonna fix that soon! #2
Slaz: Updated! #3 Stijn: Well… As I said I rushed the level, though I am working on a better TH level. I have some battle levels that I didn’t show, I even have some Domination levels, and for the big part, some Singleplayer Episodes that will take a while to make, they have some cool AS codes in them (Hunger, Stamina, Wall-Climbing, Armor, Potion Effects, Fall Damage, Drop Ammo on Death…) Stamina and Wall-Climbing was not made by me, just found it on the snippets page, hunger is some sort of copy from stamina just that it does a bit of something else. Armor, Potion Effects, Fall Damage, Drop Ammo on Death ———- I made them. Those will be cool singleplayer episodes, there will be like 3, because in each episode you’ll have to play with a certain character. (Jazz, Spaz, Lori).

By the way, you don’t need to include default music files, as everyone has them.

I will review this once the deadline is over.

EDIT: Chances are, if someone loses the default music files, they either didn’t want them or tried to get rid of JJ2 (the completely wrong way, as you’re supposed to use the uninstaller). You can’t really delete an individual music file “by accident” considering it appears in the recycle bin and it’s not worth the effort deleting them.

Mainly it’s a great game, however the war game doesn’t really match JJ franchise. Jazz it’s a cool hero, not a serious one. The idea of making a new JJ game is great.

10/10 because you’re trying to revive Jazz Jackrabbit :3

This conversion set is far inferior to IC-IF Medivo, which adds more useful tiles and rearranges them for much easier use. The original Medivo tileset layout is awful and keeping it is redundant thanks to J2T Rearranger. The altered palettes vary in quality but the vast majority are way too bright or colorful to look pleasant.

Very short and bland. The level contains 4 pickups, neither of which have generators. It’s possible to get permanently stuck at the float-up section. Eyecandy lacks contrast and it’s easy to become confused. Not really creative. Presumably fairly average for its time though.

Some positive features and a nice variety of challenges, but not much thought went into level design, often relying on fairly random block placement. Some areas cause bugs and others can be beaten in unintended ways. Overall pretty average for a test.

Time for a more to-the-point review system.

Description:

Dodge and don’t shoot the spike bolls, and don’t get hit too much by the enemies (you can shoot those, however). Moving right automatically at a fixed speed, you can’t slow down or speed up, only jump. Your health slowly regenerates when you aren’t getting hit. The level is pretty easy once you know where everything is. Relatively short.

The good:

Experimenting with a different way to play JJ2, looks decent. Music fits.

The bad:

This level suffers from a lot of unintuitive design issues such as:

Getting rid of the hurt sound and replacing it with the burn sound. Replacing the sound with something that is asscociated with killing an enemy is misleading. With the new health system, it can be easy to overlook if you have F9 on a lot out of habit (it overlaps, which could be remedied by moving the health where it usually is).

The trial and error nature of this level; This comes down to many things; failing to mention shooting/going into spike bolls kills you until you fail, the forced tiny resolution, making copter ears useless (everytime I used them I died into a spike boll because I couldn’t see what’s ahead) and shooting then suddenly discovering there’s a spike boll off-screen. Being mindful of shooting isn’t a bad thing, it’s that I can’t always prepare for it until I know what’s ahead.

The cutscene that barely suggests it’s one, because it looks no different from than what you are playing. Perhaps some black bar surrounding the bottom, with the character saying not to shoot the spike boll/s in some way? Maybe there could be some explosion sounds going on at the start and end.

Why am I walking away from an explosion? It looks odd, as wouldn’t you be running away from it? Plus it suggests that you can go faster, but apparently this level does not.

The annoying bug: Backspace doesn’t work. So you have to keep reopening the level everytime you fail. This is exactly what makes me discourage from recommending others to download it.

Could improve on

The level is rather short. It lasts 30 seconds. Though it appears to be intended, so I don’t imagine that changing.

Being able to control your horizontal speed would be more suspenseful and challenging. It would make the lab explosion itself a threat (like if you fell far too behind, you’d die).

Difficulty settings could affect the level.

The script writing. Too bad I’m a script noob, though I can say, there appears to be a lot of uneeded hardcoding, which results in a wall of text.

Once these issues get fixed (especially the backspace one), I’ll rate it higher. EDIT: Forgot to mention something else.

Wait no reviews for this? Even if the level itself is a complete gimmick, it has such creative coding, and all appears to work fine. Eyecandy is nothing special but more than sufficient, and pickup placement is alright too. Layout works well with the script – but is also very dependant on it.
Still a 9/10, purely for the creativity of the script. Download recommended!

Edit: Can’t post it as a quick review for some reason despite it originally having less than 350 characters. Raise that limit for fairies’ sake.

[]

Oh, wow! A recolor! You just gave my life a meaning!

Please, stop teasing me, admins! Just because Beelzebub persuaded you to believe I’m a pedophile, which I’M NOT, doesn’t mean whatever I say is wrong!

And this is DEFINITELY a waste of hard-disk that can be avoided by using AngelScript!

But since you admins feel gay love towards BloodyBody, I’m forced to give this recolor a 10 and a download recommendation.

I hope BloodyBody reciprocates your gay love, you intolerant communists!

[Nonsensical rating (10.0) removed. Also, what? ~Stijn]

greak, COOL

Nice to see another new level maker starting out. Hopefully you too will make new levels in the future and if you do so, here is some advice that you might find usefull:

First of all, this level seems very small since you can move around very quickly which makes it more suitable for duels.

One thing I kinda dislike is that the bases are right across each other which allows you to cap and recap too quickly. Ofcourse it can be a good thing since you have to think about where to kill your opponent and it will give very fast paced games but it’s perhaphs frustrating if they are this close.

Now something I both like and dislike: the c area. You can enter it from below with an rf climb and you are able to shoot it down which gives you more control over the level. However the placement is less good, right between the bases makes it extremely campy. Still, if the level was bigger it would be less campy so I think you are on a good track here.

As for the flow, there are a few minor issues: the springs at the bottom are annoying to use and the wind below the base is unnecessairy. Besides that it feels fine.

The ammo placement is nice, though maybe there is a bit too much at one spot. Three pu’s at the bottom is probably a bit too much (I have to admit, I made the same mistake once).

The eyecandy is nice and simple, thus good for a ctf level. Perhaphs you could vary it a bit more in the walls by changing some tiles to different wall tiles. One thing I’m not fond of is that you copied one half of the level and pasted it to the other half. This makes it less original, even if you make a symmetric level I usually like it if gameplay and eyecandy vary on each half like JE or FF.

One last thing: try to make your next levels more interesting by adding more diagonal passages, at the moment is a bit too straight. Hopefully you will keep on making levels and ofcourse have fun doing it :)

Well first of all it’s good to see you started levelmaking, there has been a really lack of them especially in ctf/battle. I will just give some basic advice of what I think that could help you and some thoughts:

First of all, the level felt good to play in. It might not be of mappool quality but for a first level I think it’s original and fun to play.

As you said, the level is campy. However this might not always be bad and I think it’s not disastrous here. You can throw bouncers in the seeker box and rf the blue base a bit. Still, putting seekers at the carrot area/red base/blue base and limiting the acces to the rf pu might make those areas too campy. Usually to avoid this you can make an area more open or accessible.

The ammo placed at the diagonal ceiling makes it annoying to get, the other ammo/pu placement is fine.

As for the overal level layout, vertical levels are usually very biased and therefore more difficult to make. It’s nice that your level isn’t symmetric but perhaphs try making a more horizontal level since those are more suited to the JJ2 gameplay (which is running like you are being chased by a zombie chicken).

Even though many of the areas are very small the flow is still decent. Still, you should try to avoid 1 tile passages and also too many 2 tile passages. Keep in mind that you want to create both safe areas and dangerous areas which contain pu’s. It’s usually a matter of balancing open and more closed area. And also it is important that the player can move smoothly between them without too much annoyance.

Three carrots is fine, but one carrot or two makes the game usually more exciting since you allow the teams to get control in the level by controlling the big carrot and make it more risky to get it.

As for the eyecandy, it’s nice and calm which is perfect for a good ctf level since you want to focus more on gameplay than singleplayer. However for next levels it could be nice to add some eyecandy to specific areas to distuingish them from other areas. This makes the level more appealing and unique.

This is most of what I can say to you at the moment. Hopefully you’ll continue making levels and if so, have fun! x)

EDIT 30th April 2020 – I decided to come back to this after I realized that my rating was a bit too high. Also because I feel like now I have better knowledge of what a good tileset conversion actually needs. This is not a bad edit, and while it is certainly better than the original Medivo tileset, it does not bring anything that useful or new compared to objectively better and more well known conversions such as IC-IF Medivo. The different palettes do look cool though, so good job for that.

I give it a 5. Not bad but could’ve been better.

Well, This looks really good for a first map :D

Cool.

Well..

block the Cllif is good idea for protect the player from the hell-(and..real hell was opened)-.

but I’d like to suggest some of these problems

1.Tilebugs : I’m kinda wondering that it was updated. it seems still broken and background pattern is.. not so fine. maybe it should be textured background or updated to another pattern I think.

2.‘Only one’ respawn area : Some battle maps only have one respawn area. but commonly, battle mode need various respawn area ‘a lot’.(for prevent the rude play)

3.BGM : this map uses official JJ2 music source. that is not problem but.. it doesn’t unmatched.. BGM City1g is pretty good music itself, but it’s not a good choice for this map. because main subject of this map is ‘Summer Beach’, not City. So probably, it should to replaced to another proper musics.

4.Water : There is no water level event on this map. I was imagine the swiming pool or beach as it titled, but my imagine was blown up :P

After that, it can be rated much higher than about 6 or more I guess.
I love your passion!

I played a few games here, so I should have a strong-hold on the gameplay.

Starting with EC:

It’s fairly logical for the stronghold theme, but there are some illogical things: The brown pillars near the bottom sides lack shadows when they support stone ceilings that project away from the pillars. Some bg stone tiles are in front of some brown pillars, but most of the brown pillars are in front of the bg stone tiles. Loose sand doesn’t erode easily in waterfalls here, but is that even sand? – Also, the tileset doesn’t have “mud” tiles anyway. The bg clouds are zipping at a very high speed, indicating a very fierce wind, but the surrounding scenery is calm. The stronghold lives up to its name for being able to withstand such wind-speeds. I realize those issues are minor, and they can probably be explained easily, but they are noticeable enough to consider. Anyway, this is just a 2d cartoon rabbit game, so whatever.

I like the bg hills, because they are well executed with plenty of levels of elevation.

Overall, I’d say the ec was executed well, but some minor things are questionable.

Gameplay:

Well, it wouldn’t be much of a stronghold if it wasn’t secure (balanced) and “fool proof”, and this level mostly functions like a stronghold gameplay wise, with fairly balanced teams and item placement. There’re some “secure” control points like the top middle. The escape routes, despite their name, are death traps if your enemy decides to camp their exits, so that’s “secure” too. Contrary to what PurpleJazz stated, I don’t think this level is unsuitable for duels because of the easily controllable top middle, I think it’s preferable for team games because of that. I noticed some places are relatively hard to rf climb up to, but could be easier to reach with wall-jump: Getting up to 92,41 and its opposite side are examples.

That’s all I have to say. A very solid, enjoyable level probably best suited for team games of 3vs3-6vs6.

Ehhhh…

The download file doesn’t work. You should re-upload this.

Please don’t add full stop characters to zip filenames. J2O can’t handle such things properly.

Whenever I try to open the file is get something like “the compressed folder is invalid”.

Luckily I found the new version of the level in my cache, but that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be fixed.