Jazz Jackrabbit 2 Online

Is this a vanilla, traditional level? Well, sort of, yes. Enemies are the most basic available—thematically, if not mechanically—it’s an official tileset with the standard music, there’s nothing wild about the background use. Slaz even sacrifices an entire background layer just to controlling the speeds of the textured background, rather than let a single line of scripting take care of it. There’s not a lot to describe on these fronts because yes, this is in fact how Carrotus (or Easter) tiles go together—though, to be clear, a very strong example of the form.

But sort of, at the same time, no, tradition is being bucked here. There’s a question that lived me with the whole time I went through the level: what are all these coins for? I got to the end of the level, beat the perfunctory boss battle, and still didn’t know. I had to go in a second time to discover that there was a coin warp I simply missed the first time. Even if you do better than me and manage to notice the warp right away, I think you’re still unlikely to have enough coins the first time you encounter it. Especially because you can’t really know in advance what the target number is.

So you go back and play the level again, this time maybe somehow doing enough exploring to collect all the coins. But why? What’s the reward? Nothing too much. The reward does speed things up a bit, but if you’re replaying the level, you’ve probably already beaten it. You don’t actually need the reward to beat it. You could make a completionist argument, sure, but is it possible—and bear me with me here—the goal of playing the video game is simply to have fun?

Because this makes a lot of things about the layout make sense. This level trusts completely that you want to collect goodies and find secrets. Sometimes you even have to find secrets to progress, unless there’s yet another alternate route that I missed that would work as an alternative. But also there are large areas that aren’t necessary at all. Sometimes because they’re alternate routes to the next stage in the journey, but sometimes large areas that don’t go anywhere, that just loop in on themselves and contain goodies and secrets and things. The goal of playing these sections is playing these sections.

And collecting coins in them, I guess.

Anyway, those were the thoughts going through my head, deprived of sleep as it is this weekend. I can’t promise they have anything to do with Slaz’s actual intent with this level, which has a lot to recommend it even if you don’t stop and get confused about the meaning of coins or whatever. Slaz’s levels tend to have lots of little microsecrets and these are in full force here: some are little holes in walls, some are in the floor, some are more complicated. But they tend to be signaled. There tends to be some visual sign "secret here! try to find it!" on the wall. It’s something I associate with Slaz a lot and it works well here.

In general, this level is filled with moment-to-moment stuff. You enter a new room and suddenly you could climb those eggs, you could go up that slope, you could stomp that block. At least one of those options will probably help you progress. There’s a whole lot of use of vertical space, including clever uses of springs, and even some swinging platforms that it’s actually worth paying attention to. There’s very little flat ground, there are not dull rooms where you walk to the right while shooting lizards, there are not moments where you purely turn your brain off because it takes no work to decide what to do next.

And in that regard, this is not a usual traditional level.

slimy land was always one of my favorites

Absolutely amazing.

Level design as place, rather than as gameplay encouragement. You can battle here, if you want, and JJ2’s gameplay will shine through despite the level not doing a whole lot to encourage it. But mostly this lets you hang out, in a fantasy of being inside leafy mountains. The kind of thing that usually isn’t uploaded and so risks getting lost.

Umpisuoli ratkeaa, level is tedium!

woha
amazing!! thanks so much for uploading it!! :D

of course i got a fan of the first Rainbow runner set!
thats why i was interested of the other pieces
im so much thankfull that you uploaded it for me =)

//good things:
this tileset have a lot of interesting things!!

i like the rainbow with the sparkels very much!!
and the whale, your work is so amazing!!!!!
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and.. the sky castle
=
i love it!
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there is a lots of interesting stuff inside!! ;D

A great twist to normal CTF gameplay. Flag scores happen a lot more often, the rules are simple enough to explain to people, and it’s always entertaining when one base has both flags and everyone in both teams ends up fighting there.
This was really fun in JDC events and I think it will be really fun for 3vs3 and larger games in general, too!

Fantastic looking tileset, it fits the JJ2 aesthetic almost perfectly.

There are some particular ideas that work here, like the super long hurt areas to encourage copter-earing, or the tiny blocks in front of enemies so the player slows down. The use of springs is good. But mostly this level just feels a little too empty to me, graphically and functionally. The gems just off the main path are a good start, but there need to be more pickups in general, especially ammo (e.g. bouncers and ice for the Bilsy fight), and some more variety in wall size, and a lot more visual detail.

There’s a definite logic here, an internal vocabulary, even if it’s not the one we’re used to seeing in JJ2 levels. The massive supply of RFs at the start sets us up to run through the level at high speeds, blasting missiles in front of us to take out the unknown enemies waiting ahead. It’s not a challenge, but it is fun, and I think that’s worth celebrating. It does mean that the morph monitors get destroyed by accident, unfortunately. The two platforming segments and the dungeon also show good instincts to change up the gameplay at intervals, especially as two of them are preceded by steep drops which serve as good signals that the player is entering a new area. Graphics are largely rudimentary, despite the clever use of the foreground to cover gem rings, but get their job done. The level is over very quickly but I can see this kind of design philosophy being put to good use.

It’s always interesting to see the occasional level with a fundamentally different idea of what level design should look like. Some of that seems to be produced by a lack of technical knowledge—layer 8 and the coin warp stand out—but the long open passages also make possible a sense of uninterrupted speed that can go missing in JJ2 SP sometimes. This is not to say that every choice here contributes to that feeling—in particular, the float enemies take too many hits to dispatch quickly, and it would be nice to find some way to make the ammo alcove areas somehow flow back into the main level so the player doesn’t have to completely reverse direction—but it still does feel like something that could be worth pursuing, especially with an easy to use tileset like Diamondus that doesn’t make it hard to have super big levels. This is very fast (and drastically overestimates the difficulty of the tuf boss) but everything certainly works in it and it’s nice enough to spend a minute or two in. All the trees are a good touch.

In a community that sometimes seems to strive to produce the most beautiful landscapes and luxurious buildings, it takes some courage or at least ingenuity to aim for something bleak, desolate, and screwed. This is a mixture of War Torn (by theme and perspective), Casualty Mines (by palette and, in some places, shading), and just a little bit of Baltyville Sewers. The aliens from Future that have spent the last however many years hoping to go mainstream make another appearance here as well.

Standout artwork here includes the tentacles, the ruined walls that curve away from the camera, the cozy lumpy background cave, the intricately pixeled background hills/buildings, the bones, and the barbed wire. The green slime is colored and outlined well but is a bit off if you look at it too closely. Giant Dreempipes-style tubes are always cool and these are great examples of the form, with lots of cracks and bones and things to keep them from being nothing more than gradients.

Weaker elements include the pillowy garbage bin, the depthless floor texture, and honestly the palette, which is mostly a little too obvious and a little too discrete. The ruined buildings suffer the most here, looking for all the world like they use the sprite palette like in Shrunken Jazz. A soft tint to the tileset could help, to make the disparate elements blend together more, as could gradients that start and end in slightly different hues, so the player’s screen is a little less obviously a blotch of this color on top of a blotch of that color.

Right now, despite how comparatively unique they are, the ruined houses are letting the rest of the set down a bit—I also wonder if taking a trick from Haunted House would help, allowing some foreground walls for layer 3?—but this is a moody, elaborate, and downright innovative set with lots and lots of different options to try out, both the main elements (walls, caves, tubes, houses, slime, aliens) but also the sheer wealth of incidental drawings (tires, furniture, electrical poles, barbed wire…) to keep a level feeling fresh and interesting and not-machine-generated.

"mini" tileset is probably the right term, not so much for the number of tiles but for their content. Looking at the titular grass shows the issue: it’s much closer in size to JJ1 Jungrock than JJ2 Carrotus, and JJ1 is displayed at a much lower resolution than JJ2 is usually played at. Jazz and other sprites look overly large against it, and the wall texture is sufficiently noticeable that it’s hard not to make the screen look repetitive—which, again, wouldn’t be an issue at a lower resolution. This would be a great tileset for a different game, because despite their size, the images really do look very nice. The treetops are my favorite things here, both the bushy-yet-plausibly-flat ones and the gnarly spiky foreground ones, though again the trunks are too small for this game. The background hill palette could use some more thought, it blends in too much with the foreground.

"Gorgeous" is a great word from minmay for this, but the other word I’m leaning toward is "natural." It’s easy for CTF levels in particular to feel very deliberately crafted, to maintain balanced gameplay—which is not itself a bad thing, as the crafting can produce very elegant results—and this is not that. Nor is this the opposite extreme where a level is completely devoted to being a picture with zero concern for playability. Instead Timberland somehow achieves the impossible of an asymmetrical, playable, utterly natural level to which nothing can be added and from which nothing can be taken away. Alcoves and slopes abound throughout the map. Powerups and ammo are sufficiently out in the open to seem as if they grew there naturally. The tileset—the truly incredible conversion work, blending Diamondus and Inferno to an impossible degree, with a perfect palette—is so organic that it is often difficult to believe the level is composed of tiles at all. The grid is invisible, the walls full of what looks like they must be nonce or bespoke connections. An absolute delight to play, an honor to experience.

There are a handful of things that don’t wow me in this set. The silver pots are the big offenders with their surface area to color depth ratio. The giant moth or butterfly with its incongruously black outlines. The destruct blocks that are too colorful to make out their specific markings. And…….. that’s it, honestly.

Again and again while scrolling or playing through Rainbow Runner, the impression I get is "these tiles could be a tileset all on their own." You could totally have a Waz-style set with the hamster tubes, or the "blueground" of course, or the clouds and rainbows. But instead they’re here all together in a giant kaleidoscope of everything that could possibly be related to the concept of rainbows. You can be most of the way through the level or set and suddenly there’s an entirely new set of tiles you’ve never seen or dreamt of before. It goes on and on, new trick after trick, cute animal after cute animal, and yet never sacrifices quality for so much quantity.

It’s hard to know what to write for this review that isn’t just listing things in the tileset and saying how cool they are, so maybe I’ll do that. It’s a damn shame that six months later nobody else has bothered to write a review for this, so I’ll have to. Let’s talk about the clouds. They’re based on the same flat color design that bothers me in other tilesets, but here they work beautifully. They’re soft and bubbly. The option of unmasked rows of clouds against the flat background keeps things fresh and interesting, and so do the curvy and bubbly edges at every possible angle. The masked cloud rows look especially delicious when set against the unmasked ones, but even without them they’re still great, reminders of how many tilesets we’ve seen that failed to have clouds of any quality at all. And there are giant clouds too for hanging around in the foreground.

The blueground is lovely in a Skulg sort of way, and works well with the floating background trees, but what really makes it stand out is the giant staircases which I’ve never seen in any other set. Castlevania’s tiny background stairs can sit right back down, these are the real deal and they work perfectly and look phenomenal. Besides that, all the tiny little roots coming out of the bottoms of the ground reinforce the idea that these are floating platforms ripped up into the air—as they should be, up in the clouds—not just regular earth that happens to be cut off at the bottom because video games are weird. Coming up with the exact three colors of grass to look great together must have taken some time but it paid off, even though one’s green it’s not a default grass green by any means, it’s something much more interesting and fantastic.

The animals! I’m sure many of them are space fillers, like the flowerpots and other such tiny little objects taking up a tile or two in a larger section, but they’re emblematic of what may honestly be this tileset’s most distinctive feature: there are so many individual drawings. It would be impossible to catalogue them all were it not for the fact that Blade actually drew them all. It’s the exact opposite of a Raging Inferno with its single trident to distract from the tileset’s two or three textures. It’s luxury, vast, unending. The theme is rainbows and yet there is more of everything than in any dedicated tileset. And then somehow on top of all these other tiles there are animations too, scores and scores of them, territory basically untouched save for RainV and that was probably originally drawn by professionals. Not only does everything look incredible, but there are so many things that nobody else would ever even have thought to draw and include.

Over the years many fun and memorable levels have been made from limited tilesets, using flipped tiles and transparency and other funny tricks to make much out of little. Rainbow Runner presents the opposite challenge, providing so much bounty that we must learn to reduce, to find ways not to use every single element on screen—or even, perhaps, in the same level—at the same time, lest the player be utterly overwhelmed. I hope it is a challenge that somebody shall soon take up.

The background layers of Aztec 2 have taken on a life of their own since the tileset’s release, to the point that going into this review, I was crafting a narrative in my head about how they completely outweighed the rest of the tileset and people mostly struggled with how to use its vast variety of themes. But that was wrong! There are at least half a dozen levels that use Aztec 2 as a tileset primarily or exclusively. I just forgot about them somehow.

Maybe it’s just me that finds it overwhelming. Sure, there are a few sections that don’t need to be there because they hail from a time when layer 5 couldn’t be trusted as a reliable source of 1/1 layer speeds, but even putting them aside, there’s still a whole lot of stuff in here. But it’s not confusing, hard-to-use stuff by any means. It’s not all blocky (except the first section), but it’s all close enough to blocky that it’s easy to tell what goes with what. Tile order is pretty easy to follow, I can’t spot more than a handful of tiles that had to be shuffled into the next section to make the grid work. And besides being easy to use, the different tileset components (blocks, pillars, branches, foliage, etc.) all have lots of options for tiling in elaborate ways. There are a dozen or so different treetops. Rocks have short and long slopes at every angle. Tree branches can be diagonal. Water offers more options than any other tileset ever.

So why am I still kind of lukewarm about Aztec 2? Ultimately I think it’s the flat colors. They work fine for the water, which needs to be no more than a tint so it doesn’t obscure the actual gameplay behind it. Fine for the background mountains, which similarly shouldn’t be too distracting. The foreground foliage I can live with because you can have a lot of borders to break up the flat insides. Nothing is as flat as in Islands. But it’s the main blocks and the cave sections that don’t appeal to me, and they do happen to be the main building blocks of the whole tileset. They don’t look very solid and they don’t look very interesting. You have to put in a lot of time to make shapes that aren’t just rectangles, to keep things attractive, and granted you should be doing that all the time anyway, but it’s also easy to think that structures made of lots of stone blocks should be rectangular. It’s easy to get sucked into making sections of Aztec 2 levels that are nothing more than seas of undifferentiated brown.

Is it fair to criticize Aztec 2 for making it possible for level designers to not put in enough work? I’m not sure. If you stick to the more decorative stuff, the trees and the water and the gems and things, I’m happy. But it’s hard to make that carry an entire level. So do you combine with something else, and in so doing, sort of perpetuate the Aztec 2 Background Mountains issue? I dunno.

Aztec 2 is very cool. It can do a lot of things very well. It’s absolutely packed with cool little features and single-tile drawings, the antithesis of a tileset that’s nothing but textures stretched across shapes. It would be great to love it. But the flat browns are a turnoff for me personally.

This leans heavily on some elements that generally turn me off—trigger crates with unclear targets, dark lighting, general difficulty discerning where to go next—but by wrapping everything in a haunted house it ends up working really well! It’s haunted like disconcerting haunted, like you never know quite what’s going to happen next. Floors collapse under you, crates fall from above, doors open mysteriously. It’s really good use of atmosphere (in 1999!) and near-flawless use of a fairly complicated tileset. And the moment-to-moment gameplay is good too, with cool uses of gems and enemies that pose a good challenge (even if the darkness helps them a lot). Not the longest level in the world, but one with a lot of craft to it. A disconcerting pleasure to play at 1 AM.

oh, the end of the level seems to be messed up though, there are activate boss events but no boss, weird.

A very interesting palette choice for the given tileset. It looks very retro and cool, well done! The layout is decent and plays well. However, I don’t like that there’s only one entrace for each base. This makes it easily for the opponent to defend where you might as well die before you can take the flag with you.

Probably Dragusela's best level yet. I love the atmosphere created with the combined tilesets, especially the fountain in the middle is cleverly made. The layout is very open so there aren't many places to hide. I'm looking forward to see more levels like this in the near future. Keep up the good work!

Gorgeous visuals, plays very well, it even has a command to stop the color changing for those who might find it too distracting.
Amazing stuff.