Jazz Jackrabbit 2 Online

A first remark: please do not put files in subfolders.

This tileset (which, as the title suggests, partly consists of tiles taken from Super Mario Bros.), is a classical “megatileset”, with several types of tiles which not necessarily fit with eachother. The tileset has some original, seemingly hand-drawn tiles, but also contains for example Jazz/Spaz/Lori animations, a textured background taken from Blade’s tilesets (which sadly does not work, even in 16-bit), and a lot of tiles ripped from the original tileset and other sources I cannot identify. And, of course, it contains tiles with all sorts of characters to make text signs with.

As can be expected the quality of those tiles varies, but is generally acceptable. Most Mario tiles are quite nice, I especially liked the question mark-block animation, though the combination of NES Mario and SNES Mario tiles doesn’t work too well due to the difference in palette and resolution.

A lot of tiles would be useful if only they were finished. For example, there’s a nice platform (taken from Mario) which is completely useless because there are no tiles for the bottom of the platform or to make corners. There are ripped tiles from the official tilesets, which suffer from the same problem. If you really have to rip tiles from other sets instead of drawing your own, do it in such a way that they do not limit your creativity by not allowing you to build platforms with more complex shapes than a rectangle.

Additionally the palette is quite bad, as the Textured Background does not work, and water looks horrid even in 16-bit. You might want to ask someone about this or read up at JCSref (http://www.jazz2online.com/jcsref/) or Disguise’s Tileset Resource (http://www.jazz2online.com/tilesets/) about this, Typhoon Bunny. The masking is severely flawed too: the ripped Carrotus vine, for example, seems auto-masked, so it doesn’t work as a vine. Vines should be masked with 1-pixel, 2-pixel max thick lines instead.

The author asks me to rate the example level too, but as this was uploaded as a tileset I’ll stick to rating the tileset only. The example level is quite nice, though, and even while it does have some flaws it shows some nice ideas and is a very good example of how to use the tileset. Even though the tileset is pretty bad I’d still recommend downloading this just to play the (single-player) level. I do not understand why there are 3 seperate music files in the zip file, though, as there is only one level. Jazz2Online is not a music repository, and you should only include music if it is not included with the original game and used by a level.

All in all this is a pretty bad tileset with a nice example level. So even though I’m giving this a 4.0, I still recommend downloading it just for the level.