Jazz Jackrabbit 2 Online

First of all: I can’t seem to host at the moment, so I was not able to play these online. As such, I am not giving a rating, as I cannot say much about the balance. However, I can still evaluate some things.

Big Apple Beatdown is great. Nothing particularly novel, but very well done – flow is nice and intuitive, the level is good-looking, and so on. The only thing I really dislike about this level is that there are too many powerups and they’re too easy to obtain; you can expect to see powered-up seekers and bouncers flying everywhere.

I am not so fond of Escape from Precint 83. The concept of having all the players permanently flying is a good enough one, but I feel it could have been implemented much better. It’s really easy to get caught on the edges of the many, many ceilings, and the “pits” at the bottom just seem to get in the way. The level also strikes me as looking downright ugly, though I think that’s more the fault of the tileset (someone make a good Technoir conversion already! And then give it a palette swap so it isn’t so hideously pink!). Also, it completely breaks in 8-bit color for some reason; the background turns completely black and my FPS goes from 100 to 30.

Anyway, this “pack” didn’t blow me away, but it’s certainly worth a look.

It’s Medivo. That’s about it. Glad someone made a better conversion than CelL’s old one, though.

Simple and inoffensive, but quite well done nonetheless. There are some interesting visual experiments, most notably the pond, although in some places they come off as messy. Layout and general gameplay is very good, no complaints there.

What part of this upload are people supposed to rate? The tilesets, the levels, or both?

If you react to all JJ2 tests with disdain, you obviously weren’t around in the EvilMike days. The biggest problem with this upload is that it took about five years to appear.

Very ugly and inconsistent in style, but quite functional. The various stolen tiles were completely unnecessary, though (you didn’t even give credit – for the record, those gems are from Bookworm Adventures).

You have a good grasp of tileset layout and what tiles are needed – a shame this isn’t backed up by competent artwork.

Next time, please do not upload tilesets that are not used in your level.

Competently made. The biggest flaws I can see are the ammo placement (too much and uneven), invisible walls (they’re useless and a bit confusing), and tilebugs.

“Crappy” referred to the contest, not the levels made for the contest.

Pretty much what you expect from Mike – original and interesting ideas that are well-implemented. Not really exceptional, however.

Lava Fortress is certainly a very good tileset. It is well-drawn and easy to use. However, like anything, it does have certain flaws. This review will try to explore the tileset in more detail than 350 characters and “hope someone uses this” can allow.

How does it look?
The tileset consists of two different themes: a barren, rocky and irreconcilably brown landscape of dust, and a generic factory setting with pipes and conveyor belts.
And lava. Lots of lava.
Both settings are nicely drawn. I think I prefer the look of the factory setting, however, simply because it is much more varied; there are very few eyecandy tiles available for the outdoors — just some wooden poles, bridges, and a dead tree.
And, um, lava.

I must, however, make one exception. The volcanoes in the background look like crap. In fact, they look sort of like actual crap. I admit that volcanoes erupting with actual crap would appeal a lot to my juvenile sense of humor, but it doesn’t excuse bad artwork.

What about usability and flexibility?
It’s certainly easy to use, I’ll give it that. Tile layout is sensible; there are a few tiles placed in rather odd places, but they’re still easy to find.
Flexibility is when the tileset begins to lose some serious points. It’s called “Lava Fortress,” but /you can hardly do anything with the lava/. It is extremely restrictive; lava can only be in one-tile-high pools on a single flat surface. There are tiles for lava pouring into the pools, but no tiles for lava pouring out of them, which means there are no true lavafalls (they’re like waterfalls, BUT WITH LAVA).

And then there’s layer 5. The tileset is impossible to use effectively without layer 5; there are no tiles containing both solid ground and background, requiring you to split them up between layers. I completely understand the tile limit, but come on, I had to give up a layer so that you could draw some fricking crap volcanoes?

Also, the large pipes lack corner tiles, which is rather disappointing (even the example level finds this a problem).

Anything else?
The mask, palette, and event tiles are fine. You can shut up now, Boldface Text.

This is a good example of a tileset that has no place being converted for JJ2. There’s no way getting around the fact that Bubble Bobble, great game as it is, is rather ugly, and it only looks uglier when you put it next to JJ2 sprites. And as the example level shows, you can’t make up for that with clever usage.

Well-drawn and fairly flexible, but in no way is this tileset exceptional; the most appealing part to me was the background.
Edit replacing review, for Dodges: The structure of the ground is similar to that of Traditional Japan. It is made of many small rocks in a “cartoonish” style with heavily defined outlines.

This is an example of a great concept with poor implementation. Level design is bland and repetitive, and there’s not a whole lot of skill or tactics involved in the gameplay.

Excellent in both design and execution, held back only by a few flaws that could’ve been corrected with a little more time and testing (tree masks are easy to get stuck in, a few resprites/recolors look slightly off).
And you did avoid doing the reflective goop, you sneaky little git.
Edit: Night is crazy awesome, have another .3 points.

This level implies an author who has had experience with level design, but not experience with Jazz Jackrabbit 2. Eyecandy in layer 4 is actually quite good, though it could be a bit more interesting; it’s a shame the other layers were ignored.
Event placement, while aesthetically nice and balanced, does nothing for gameplay. It feels like an attempt to emulate the default levels; for most games this is good, but since the standard levels for JJ2 are crap, it falls short completely.
Basically, forget everything you learned from the standard levels, and re-learn it from some popular, current user levels. I recommend EvilMike’s enormous single player campaign.

jalo0: Lark already did a competent Stonar conversion.

This is an interesting concept (albeit NOT A NEW ONE!), but the levels and ruleset are so severely, blatantly, and hilariously biased towards the seeking team that they could never be used for anything other than a few minutes of non-competitive fun, similar to what you get with the cheat codes.

It irks me that people are giving out high ratings just because it’s a new gamemode*, even when there was obviously hardly any effort at all put into level design, balancing, coming up with coherent rules, or even a decent trigger system.

*Perhaps the worst part, it isn’t! This particular gamemode seems to get reinvented all the time, always with very minor variations from the original Tag-style conception – the levels are long lost, but you can guess what it was like

Ktos: I can only find one on J2O, which Gus made. I remember playing quite a number of them, but unfortunately I seem to have lost most or all of the level files (Captain Cook searches were unproductive). The ones I remember are pretty old, so they would be hard to track down. I guess I don’t really have any “proof.”

Written before version 2.0:

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This program has been over-rated, plain and simple. This does tend to happen a lot with JJ2 utilities, since the majority of the community ranks “programming” one notch above “skydiving with an anvil instead of a parachute and your hands tied behind your back.” I consider PlusLLEdit to be the most egregious example of this so far.

I will admit, it does exactly what it claims to do. The problem is, it doesn’t claim to do much – makes a ten-second job a five-second one – and it doesn’t do anything on top of what it claims.

The sad thing is that the addition of just a few more features would have made this program actually useful. Being able to select groups of levels would be great; I could put all 30 Survivor levels in my Treasure list with much less effort than would be needed otherwise. But I can’t.
If I could sort levels by level name instead of filename, perhaps even search for terms within the names, it’d make sifting through them a lot easier in some cases. But I can’t.
Even just being able to add levels with a keypress instead of dragging and dropping would have made things much better.

It doesn’t help that Plus itself already has most of this program’s functionality. You can drag-and-drop J2L files on Plus.exe, and BAM, they end up in the level list. This is actually superior to PlusLLEdit in a few ways; most notably, I can add the aforementioned 30 Survivor levels all at once.

The 10 ratings are just ridiculous. Is this Captain Cook, which massively improved the barely-functional Home Cooked Levels? No. Is this TilesetPal, which made one of the most painful aspects of tilset making easy? No. Is this Carrotade? Okay, that one is kind of an unfair example.

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The new features definitely improve it. I still doubt I’ll actually use the program, it’s usually just as easy to edit the level list directly, but I can see how people would want it.

I remember playing this level, or perhaps one extremely similar.

That was at least seven years ago.