Jazz Jackrabbit 2 Online

It’s hard to know what to say about this… on the one hand, it does a good job of what it tries to do, if not a perfect one, but on the other hand, is what it tries to do a good thing?

I compared the levels in the pack, in addition to their JJ1 LEVELX.00X originals, to jj1Diamondus1.j2l, a total conversion of Diamondus 1 I found in my JJ2 folder, of unknown origin, and jjtube1.j2l, the total conversion of Tubelectric 1 that came with Newspaz’s Tubelectric conversion. In terms of tile-to-tile accuracy alone, PT32 does a better job, no doubt aided tremendously by the existence of the level viewer JCS94, which was not available when the other two levels were made. jjtube1.j2l has two tubes slightly longer than they are supposed to be, but PT32 gets both of them right. jj1Diamondus1 has a few missing tiles at the end, perhaps because they were not present in the tileset it used, but PT32 includes them. The only places I noticed where PT32 diverts radically from the actual JJ1 tiles are those which are never seen on screen, and that’s fine. Obviously a massive amount of time was put into the accuracy and it turned out well, with only occasional, minor hiccups (a layer 3 problem in Diamondus, a few background tiles overgeneralized in Medivo). In nearly all the spots where Jazz could get stuck in JJ2 from diagonally masked tiles coming together, PT32 carefully inserts invisible solid tiles to keep you safe: good job there. Even the enemies that appear only on hard difficulty are present and appropriately parametered.

Of course, JJ1 and JJ2 are different games and use different engines, and there are a few things that do not translate exactly, and thus necessarily a few decisions that must be made. I can’t however say that I agree with all that many of PT32’s. The enemy replacements are all straightforward — replacing JJ1 bees with JJ2 bees is never as accurate as we might want it to be, but I’m not sure there’s any better alternative, and rapiers are a decent swap — and I can’t say I have a better, easily implemented suggestion for shields than coins, but problems subsist. The tiny turtles are gone without a trace, although I’d have been tempted to use moths. The secret level, as PT32 admits, is barely playable, and it would have worked out much better with an airboard than an actual bird morph. This is what JelZe did for his own conversion of Turtle Terror, and it was much more functional, even if the bird morph is a better match VISUALLY. I’m not sure how I feel about using Bubba for the turtle boss.

Only occasionally does PT32 have to change the level design outright. There’s a secret in a Medivo level with four +15 Toaster boxes, which in JJ1 you reach from above and then exit through the floor. PT32 notices this doesn’t work in JJ2, because two of the boxes would fall through the floor, and replaces the exit route with one way tiles. This is decent, if confusing, but +15 boxes are not affected by gravity when you move them with belts, as JCSref mentions, and I think that would have done a much better job. Conversely, there’s another spot at the top right of Diamondus 1 where some tiles are supposed to be one way but aren’t because they’re not masked in JJ2 and I guess PT32 didn’t test it enough. The various tube secrets are all done pretty well, but the secret-to-the-left-of-the-spring in Diamondus 2 is inaccessible because PT32, unlike JelZe, was unwilling to compromise and add one more unmasked tile above the spring for Jazz to fit through. The destructable blocks in the Guardian arena are understandably replaced with destruct scenery, although I don’t understand why their debris tile is lava. On the bright side, invisible springs are handled consistently well.

Tubelectric is the biggest offender. To be sure, it’s for good reason — there simply aren’t obvious counterparts to the turrets or barriers. Newspaz leaves the barriers as unmasked eyecandy (after all, his only goal was to show off the tileset as visually complete — which it wasn’t — not to push the limits of the JJ2 engine), and puts Hurt events on the turrets. JelZe leaves the turrets out entirely and replaces the barriers with four-hit destruct blocks. PT32, though, employs the worst of both worlds and masks neither of them, leaving Tubelectric neutered. However, unlike Newspaz or JelZe, PT32 was actually working with a tileset that had masked animations for the turret fire, and apparently just chose not to use them. Bizarre. The barriers are a harder case, but I’m pretty sure a solution could have been found with Reworder. It wouldn’t have been perfect, but it would have been better than not trying.

So, PT32 does a nearly perfect job of 1:1 conversion accuracy, though the creativity comes up a bit short. What’s it worth? This episode is the natural counterpoint to JelZe’s, which itself was fairly controversial — I don’t even agree with the rating I myself gave to it back then. JelZe did better in making a JJ2 pack — his Fast Feet section and secret level are irrefutably better than PT32’s, for instance — but necessarily sacrificed a bit of accuracy, both from graphics (waterfalls, glowing blue circuits, lava, foreground bars, and so on) and from gameplay. PT32 does better in bringing over the exact contents, almost mechanically, with few problems other than those of the JJ2 engine and the conversions used, but loses the feeling of newness, creativity, and mystery.

The real problem, in short, is that PT32 should not have made this, not in 2010. I’m not saying that if no one had totally converted Turtle Terror in twelve years, then there was a good reason for it — though I’m not arguing against that, either — I’m just saying that, given our understanding of both the JJ1 and JJ2 file formats, this should never have been done by hand over a period of apparently 80 hours. A program could have done automatically just about everything PT32 does here manually, with human labor necessary only for a bit of cleanup and feature adding at the end. And that’s the tragedy of the work: all the lost time and talent toward only a questionable end.