Jazz Jackrabbit 2 Online

The last time I reviewed, the Germans were in the process of capturing Berlin (a long time ago, okay?). So, my comrades, it’s time to review.

Good tilesets deserve long reviews, I always say. I was originally planning for this to be long, but I’m going to cut it short, and turn it into a medium review.

Colors – Very good
A nice, colorful tileset. I see red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, pink, black, grey, sea green, turquoise, tan, white, maroon… you get the idea. Very colorful.

Graphics – Good
There are a lot of colors, yes, but the graphics aren’t very detailed. They still look nice, though. Simple graphics can look better than extremely detailed graphics sometimes. There’s tons of stuff in this tileset, ranging from fancy orange and red carpet (I think) blocks to colorful and blocky, blinking conrete (I think) blocks. The carpet blocks have 45 degree slopes, 60 degree slopes, and 30 degree slopes, while the concrete blocks only have 45 degree slopes. Most level makers will probably use both varieties a lot. There’s a dartboard, balloons, destruct blocks, hooks… but, what’s this? Moving hooks! The hooks are placed on balloons, and thus you can make them hover up and down a bit. There are pillars, fireworks for the background, a large variety of coins, some mix and match signs (for example, you can write “WE ALL LOVE DEVAN and WE ALL LOVE DEVAN, and so on. Lots of fun there. There are palm trees (that blink, yay!), some clear brick-like tiles (unmasked). There’s a castle with mountains for the background, and a nice blue textured background. We’ve got spikes, flowers, neon signs with Jazz, Spaz, and Lori’s mugs on them, giant cards, giant dice. Oh, yes, and there’s water for the background in addition to the castle and mountains. There are giant pool balls, neon blinking arrows, and… I’m really wasting my time. Why don’t you just download the tileset and find out for yourself?

Animations – Very good
I like the animations here a lot. There are tons and tons of them. Probably the most I’ve ever seen. Neonius, this tileset, and Reactor Core have probably the most animations in any tilesets. They all look great, excluding maybe the coins. The coins could use more frames in them. It looks like they spin around a bit too fast, especially when they are approaching and leaving the state where they look like this… | … you can only see the sides of them. At that state, you can chose to have the backside of the coin look differnet. In other words, you could have a coin with Spaz on heads, and Lori on tails, Jazz on heads, nothing on tails, etc. Very customizable. There are loads of other animations, too, but I’m too lazy to write more about them.

Masking – Very good
Masking is great, very smooth. My only complaint is that you didn’t include any balloons that you could stand on top of. That’s probably the only thing that bothered me at all in the mask. Other than that, it’s awesome.

Palette events – Good
Jungle poles work and psych poles work. The other poles do not work. The snow is blue, and looks good. I’m not sure if the snow being blue was accidental or not, but it matches the background. All the pinball events look great. Good job there.

Oh, and the tileset has plenty of eyecandy tiles. I’d like to point out to everyone that the reason that this is TSF is because of a combination of large size and a surplus of animations. If this were 1.23, you wouldn’t be able to fit in very many animations. I’m not even sure if you could fit this into 1.23, anyway. I would use this if it was 1.23 and 1.23 had room for more animations, but I’m afraid this is TSF, and I don’t want to make levels for TSF. Most of my major beta testers only have 1.23, anyway (Blacky and FS, for example).

Anyway… .Download or not? I guess so :-)