Jazz Jackrabbit 2 Online

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.