Jazz Jackrabbit 2 Online

What. The. Hell.

Whatever you may think, Battlea is NOT a secret level. Moreso, Battle4 is a level which came with v1.00g. However, the edit itself is awful enough to blissfully ignore that Battle4 has been done. Hurt events. Lighting Shield. Ultimate Weapon of Doom accessible via a coin warp. Invincibility carrot kept. And many more poorly overlooked flaws.

Far Out has been edited so badly that I just can’t explain how badly is that done. Zapper apparently has no clue how to make foreground layers move, so he puts there various loads of junk hoping that someone (maybe Jarno?) could find it nice. The way to access the level itself is also bad. Crash a crate and get a secret!!1

Anyway, as Zapper has informed me, I shouldnt rate it because it’s not a level pack, but a patch (tisk tisk). gg.

The way to access Far Out is a neat idea… if you find a secret earlier in the level, you get an alternate ending at the end of the level. It’s an understandable way to attempt to get the mid-level secret level experience while not knowing how to fix vanilla JJ2’s treatment of secret level area (it’s possible but takes some setup). The implementation has issues, though: the tiling at the end is pretty dubious, and more importantly, nobody’s going to find the trigger crate without knowing to look for it. If you find an area totally covered in layer 3 with no goodies in it, you’re not going to think “oh, I should stomp everywhere in case there’s a trigger crate.” And even if you do stomp it, there are no nearby effects, so there’s no way for the player to know what happened or why the secret level entrance is/isn’t open. Finally, this is a level with a bouncer powerup, and it’s trivial to shoot those bouncers through the trigger scenery events and hit the secret level signpost that way.

I couldn’t actually figure out how to get to the Tubelectric and Labrat secret levels in these edited versions. :?

Anyway, the main attractions here are the secret levels themselves, and they’re not great. “Shocking Experience” is just an extra (non-thematic) boss fight—is that really a good reward for finding a secret? And while this version of Far Out makes a good decision by using a unique palette, like Return of Birdland does, there’s not much to recommend it past that. It’s ‘finished’ to a pretty minimum extent, with strings of pickups and no other edits, and the foreground layers are a mess that you can barely see through.

The basic idea here is good, but I don’t actually want to play these secret levels, so I don’t want to apply the patch to my official labrat2 and tube1.

Yo Zapper for Battle4 please update the tileset of it please thnx