Jazz Jackrabbit 2 Online

Foreseeable Future is the first “modern” JJ1 release. Everything before this has been more or less bound within the steep limitations of JCS94 — DD was able to create a palette edit of Diamondus, and we’ve many of us edited a few events within the confines of the sprites that come with the levels we’re editing — but Newspaz has custom tilesets, custom attacks, custom sprites (mostly swapped from original JJ1 planets, but also some smaller spritifying work, like the flames in Castle and Desolatus), and even custom movement. There could be more — the flowers in Carrotus are conspicuously unanimated, and you should be able to shoot the knights’ helmets, like in Bloxonius — but overall Newspaz is pioneering and demonstrating JJ1’s true range of customization possibilities. Cooba and I are of course working on our own projects, as are perhaps others who haven’t shown any screenshots yet, but Newspaz got his out the door first.

All that, though, has nothing to do with the more important question of how good the episode actually is. Fortunately, in addition to doing stuff first, Newspaz is pretty good at it as well. He creates three distinct atmospheres that are copies neither of their JJ2 counterparts (though Desolatus, his version of BlurredD’s tileset “Desolation,” doesn’t have an exact single player counterpart anyway) nor of any particular JJ1 planet. Carrotus definitely has familiar elements from the original Carrotus levels, but it’s still distinctly Newspaz’s own, and I suspect I even noticed a piece or two inspired more by Easter. The enemies are turtles and bees, more or less straight from Diamondus, although the movement of the bees is sometimes a bit wonky, and nothing of the planet poses too much of a threat, unless you fall into the thorns a lot. Every once in a while the level feels a bit open, but for the most part NS recognizes that JJ1 necessitates eyecandy being crammed into small spaces, due to its small screen size, and his tileset conversion is flush with foliage. The turtle looks a bit weird, since its shell is the color of the Carrotus radish, but that’s not too big of a deal.

Castle is assuredly the main event. It’s the hardest and the prettiest of the three, the subdued tile colors mixing beautifully with the near-garish sprite colors. Enemies are Armor-Doofi from Stonar, recolored Red Bats from Turtemple, and the cannon tiles, which cannot be destroyed but will still fire cannonballs at you. The bats come out of nowhere, the cannons fire a lot, and there are a lot of spikes, all of which adds up to a difficult experience, with only one checkpoint per level. The level design is in no way an emulation of JJ2’s castle — it feels a lot more solid, for one — but it’s still very consistent, and does the best job of any of the three of feeling like it has a coherent, planned layout, more than a lot of areas one after another.

Desolatus is the most out there and plays around the most with JJ1, featuring moving platforms, spike-like events, weird jumping owls, tubes, bridges, and spring shoes. Its layout might be the closest to Cliffy’s, though I’m not sure… it’s pretty claustrophobic, with a pretty twisted path in each level, and, more than the other two planets, it features a number of clearly divided areas. It’s not as pretty, but that’s arguably not NS’ fault. It’s not nearly as difficult as Castle, though, to the extent that the level order becomes a little confusing, and while NS provides a skeleton plot for the episode, it’s not especially clear why one planet necessarily precedes another, so this could have been switched.

There are some distinctive features to NS’ level design which feel slightly out of place in JJ1 because they show up so rarely in the original levels. Newspaz makes much greater use of vertical space than Cliffy did — Cliffy had occasional floating platforms or floating springs, and Newspaz does use the latter once, but he also has a lot of tubes which you traverse using a single spring, or big pits for falling down, both of which are quite distinctive to him across all three planets. Secrets are usually in the same sort of place, a little off to the side in a place you’re supposed to go up or down, and they’re never hidden by foreground or destructable walls, you just need to walk over to them. Paths break occasionally, and that’s always cool — Carrotus is fairly complicated, and there’s a nice loop area in a Castle level that feels similar to Crysilis. One area near the end of Desolatus has a bunch of floating (tile-based) platforms and feels more like a CTF level than anything else, or perhaps Jill of the Jungle.

The biggest flaw in Foreseeable Future is that the difficulty, while mostly reasonable, is occasionally unfair. A side effect of Newspaz’s fondness of vertical space is that there are a lot of leaps of faith, and there’s no good way to know which ones will have spikes at the bottom and which won’t. One pit in Castle comes to mind especially which it’s really not clear that you have to jump across, and while this is subverted at one point in Desolatus — you fall down and land directly on a moving platform, which NS clearly timed carefully — it seems that working in such a small resolution is difficult, especially if you’re used to JJ2. The bats and cannons in Castle are hard to predict and the latter fire very frequently, making them possible to get by without injury if you memorize where they are in each level, but much harder to appraise at a distance and come up with a strategy for avoiding. You feel much safer there when you’re moving left, because the bats approach you more slowly and the cannons can’t hit you. I don’t object to difficulty by itself, I just object to success resulting only from memorization. The other planets are much better with this, though, a few surprising flames in Desolatus aside, and for the most part you’re just treated to pretty graphics, new and very memorable level designs, and a sense of inspiration as you realize how many things JJ1 can do if you give it a chance. Foreseeable Future isn’t perfect, but what is?