Jazz Jackrabbit 2 Online

Is this the Halloween Hare level pack?

[No it is not. ~PurpleJazz]

This is basically Diamondus, the Sepia edition. It’s not unpleasant, but I really wish it had some secondary color to break up the monotony. Note that this lacks any of the additional content/quality of life improvements found in other editions of this tileset, so you may as well just extract the palette using MLLE and apply it to one of those.

I played through this pack a number of times while testing it, as it gradually shed the details I found most onerous, so it kind of made sense to wait a while and give myself a comparatively fresh perspective before reviewing it. However, six months was perhaps too long. Oh well.

Reviewing big packs like this always forces the choice between writing separate minireviews for every level in a row vs. writing one big review that tries to encompass everything, and I am going to try to compromise a bit by listing the highlight of each level and letting that mostly stand in for a bigger picture review:

1. One of the cooler Rotating Rock segments I’ve played. Rocks almost always follow the template in the official Jungle levels: you get chased down a horizontal passage and eventually outrun it. Here you climb up the area first, not sure why it looks how it does, then the rock appears and you clamber back down again, faster than it, and let it land in a pit of spikes below. It’s hardly difficult, which makes it all the more appropriate for the very first level of an episode.
2. What’s special here is how different the entire level feels from the first one. Level 1 had mazes of tree branches, level 2 has lots of little platforms all across the face of a giant building. They both have indoor temple areas, but level 2’s are much more curvy and feature a bunch of traps and things. Already this episode is using its layouts to emphasize the unique features of each tileset, rather than treat them as interchangeable collections of textures.
3. The water pool area. This is probably a controversial choice, because there’s some clear copying and pasting here, reminiscent of some of the less popular parts of HH98 and TSF. But it’s a break in the middle of a level that’s otherwise dominated by tiny platforms and tougher enemies, and not only that, a break that’s only as long as players want it to be, because it can be skipped through entirely. Also there’s a powerup in one of the pools, because of course there is.
4. It’s a town! JJ2 levels (and platformer levels in general) are often illogical messes when viewed at a macro level, with structures only existing in individual places. A forest could easily be on top of a castle. Not so much here. The levels in this episode tend to have very distinct areas, one after another, with some semblance of internal continuity as well. Look at the file preview for this level, though, and you can see, yeah, there are a bunch of buildings with reasonable shapes, next to each other, with mazes drawn inside of them for the actual navigation. The constant straight line nature of these particular mazes is sometimes too obvious, but the flow of enemies and pickups keeps things fresh.
5. The variety of enemies (and pickups). Destroyable/collectible objects always do various jobs in levels besides their individual functions: they keep the player’s attention between platforming segments or other challenges, and they show where the player hasn’t been yet. Both those jobs are important here in a non-linear level, and what’s especially nice is how the enemies aren’t all super hard just because this is entering the second half of the episode. If anything, this level should be fairly easy, because dying in it necessarily loses the player so much progress. So it’s good that there are still fairly simple walking enemies, like cats, dotting the floors here in places that don’t offer much challenge but do make themselves useful in other ways.
6. The fireballs. This is an obvious pick as the level very much has exactly two prominent features (both inspired directly by the choice of tileset): the fireball sequences, and the maze of colored keys and locks. But I think what’s clever about the fireballs here is that every time they show up, the player has to dodge them in a slightly different way. Jumping, springs, springs between pairs of fireballs, vines, a fly carrot… it keeps the mechanic fresh every single time, even the times it’s totally optional for progression.
7. It’s remarkable how painless the airboard segments are here. JJ2 levels rarely feature a lot of flying, and when they do, you can see the level makers trying hard to figure out how to possibly make the experience difficult… spike balls, maybe? Either that or they’re there to let the player navigate an earlier area and escape from it, like in the previous level. But there’s a very pragmatic (and JJ1-like) approach shown with the airboards here: they’re just one more tool that a level can have for a little bit, with no need to be incredibly difficult, and then the level can move on to something else. It’s an interesting contrast from the levels earlier in the episode with stronger divisions among sections… here airboards appear twice, and there are a couple sections with the big tubes as well. Most things are still pretty unique here, like the swinging platforms (with the nice pickups in case you fall down), but not the airboards. I suppose it helps give an identity to a level with a more bizarre/abstract tileset and somewhat less visual variation.
8. The doors after the trigger crates get my attention. I can think of two ways this level could have been created wrong: make the player backtrack through each of the four missions after hitting the crate, or make the player go through each door without hitting a crate at all. The former would have wasted a lot of time with repetitive/less fun challenges, and the latter would have lessened the sense of accomplishment from beating each mission. The combination of crate, then immediate warp, solves each problem elegantly.

If it’s not clear, I like this episode. It’s not perfect—there are times it’s a little too obvious the level layouts are just filling available space, often with straight lines, rather than obeying any higher principles, for example, and the switch between small platforms and indoor tunnels is a little too repetitive across multiple levels—but there’s a lot of good stuff here across multiple tilesets, and the difficulty is always kept reasonable and moderated by generous supplies of pickups. All levels feel like they’re of similar length and don’t drag on for too long. New gimmicks and challenges keep being presented throughout. The graphics are always functional and appropriate and rarely obscure the player’s vision. It’s a good time.

Refuges from that familiar school of level design that places a new thing every few tiles and doesn’t worry about petty things like “overall layout” or “dead ends.” Raven Pride is comparatively normal, despite managing to be both incredibly platformy and also incredibly cramped, but the other three go wild with tubes, vines, weird shapes, and everything else. It’s a style that can only possibly work in battle but can be a lot of fun to mess around in. Sometimes it’s a little hard to see what’s going on, and the layouts aren’t always quite as conducive to exploring as you might expect, but in general sometimes it’s just nice to play around in something where you can’t predict the rest of the layout based on sound level design principles. Get a lot of players together and chase each other around the weirdly shaped blocks.

The visuals and music make unforgettable a map that would still be a welcome moment of gameplay innovation even without their help. Some of the dark pink is a little too bright though, and the bomb could respawn a bit faster imo?? but like overall this is good, good job, get punched.

The density of cool tricks per square inch of level here is out of control! Deeply copter-ear-phobic, of course, but a cool ride. The QoB theming is cute but not enough to derail the gameplay (although the underscore is bad for typing the filename in the server menu), and Mez01 gets to look good and not empty. Platform above RFs maybe unnecessary.

It’s hard to find things to say about single-screen levels! This looks like it has the right sorts of layout opportunities for melee attacks. The fruit are slow enough I don’t know anyone will get 100 of them before everyone is dead, with so few ways to hide. The colors aren’t too common and they look very nice together. Hooray for waterfalls.

For the most part, these are less full-fledged test levels and more ideas, suggestions, hey what if test levels tried doing this too? And viewed that way they’re pretty interesting. The timing required can be incredibly finnicky to the point of feeling random—I could never climb the fencer tower without setting off two at once—and there are lots of moments that would work much better with some scripting, e.g. to keep me from dying, or to restore Uterus’ spike balls, or to get around the need for all those smoke rings. But if you abstract away from the implementation, with its bare-bones graphics and its empty win areas, and think about the ideas being presented, then sure. Maybe some test levels could benefit from things to stomp (that don’t lock up the camera after a while), or some of the other funny tricks that are presented here, albeit preferably with a little more forgiveness.

I’m always wary of WBRG levels because they run the risk of being brightly colored monstrosities where I can’t tell my rabbit from the sky, but the simple measures of diminished lighting and a translucent black background layer work wonders here. This does, though, reduce the number of available layers to the point that all the chains move at 1/1 speed, and frequently confuse me into thinking they’re vines. Oh well.

CTF levels tend to be pretty horizontal, what with there being one base on the left and one on the right and all that, so it’s neat to see such a vertical focus here. Lots of chimneys break up the larger platforms, mostly with blue or green springs at the bottoms, so you spend a lot of time bouncing or falling around. That provides a lot of opportunities for taking opponents by surprise as you suddenly enter their field of vision from above or below. It might be nice if there were a toaster powerup for spraying wildly around you as you bounce. The very-hard-to-reach seeker powerup in the middle is seemingly the only use for the electroblaster ammo—nothing else in the layout obviously invites its use—but this doesn’t actually strike me as the most seeker-encouraging level.

Sadly, a lot of little bits do kind of bother me. There’s an unfortunate masking issue at 106,42 that messes with the usefulness of the nearby spring. Some sucker tubes and alcoves don’t make obvious layout sense to me. There’s some weird layer 3 usage near the right base. But there’s a fair bit to like here as a CTF level that doesn’t just paint by numbers.

While the tileset use is, as ever, detailed and competent, I don’t really see the reason for making almost the same layout so many different times from scratch. I suppose I encourage the gameplay experimentation—give flagholders much less room to hide in—but worry the recommended maximum of 10 players is probably much too high.

One thing the official JJ2 releases did that didn’t catch on too much in fanmade levels is creating multiplayer levels to accompany single player levels. All the different commercial JJ2 releases included multiplayer levels, some of them better remembered than others, but only a handful of fanmade single player packs—e.g. Rabbit Honor Guard, Lost World—have done the same.

So, it’s nice to see a CTF version of Snowball Valley.

CandionV, which this is ostensibly based on, has always been an incredibly garish tileset, but Frosted Peaks plunges deep into the soft blues and grays area of the color spectrum and never leaves, with just enough contrast between ground and background to make clear what is solid. A lovely static aurora in the background adds a little bit of green but is rarely very visible, as layers upon layers of trees and mountains fill the distance lower down. This should serve to make it easy for the player to know where they are (at least vertically), though the different layers all look similar enough in their color distribution that this effect is somewhat muted.

What’s especially interesting about the gameplay is the focus on weapons that shoot downwards, with both bouncer (powerup)s and rollers included. The layout also goes out of its way to support them: not only are there lots of platforms hanging above the main structures of the level, the CTF base areas also invite downward weapons through the bridges that otherwise serve as ways for flagholders to escape. But these guns, which have perhaps the most utility when fired from the top of the level, are found mostly at the bottom. So a player who takes the time to explore and gather resources from multiple areas in the level should have the advantage over a player who spawns and immediately runs back into battle around the bases or carrots.

In general there are a lot of clever details here, both visual and mechanical. Waterfalls are frozen in place and don’t use animated tiles. The thin Stonar platforms are everywhere and make navigation more interesting, and the constant poles surrounding them make them feel that much more integral to the level as a whole. The slide events will probably have minimal effects on competitive gameplay but they’re nice to have anyway. It’s good.

The overwhelming impression I get from this level is huge. It’s rare to be in a spot where ceilings are a concern: instead, the planes of the outside areas are separated by a significant vertical space, and the inside area has a lot of tall, open halls. Even some of the horizontals feel a bit stretched out, suggesting a level that’s trying to accommodate a larger number of players without significantly modifying the layout principles of a smaller map. The outsides are especially empty in this regard: all that height, and yet only two floors, each made up of one-tile-thin wooden platforms. There’s a lot more substance in the center, though, to be fair.

What I do quite like is the commitment to being a Pit Level and not just a level that happens to have a pit somewhere. The use of orange leaves around the edges to indicate “this is where it’s unsafe to fall” is quite welcome, and also there’s a bunch of ice ammo (even a powerup!) near the bottom, to make it easier to get your opponents to fall in. I’m not sure without playtesting how likely people are to be in the bottom corners, though the presence of copters and carrots should help… on the other hand, there are other carrots elsewhere… dunno. But it’s a solid design decision.

The graphics are generally pretty solid and it’s mostly easy to tell walls from background, though the thin branches do have some trouble standing out. I’m unsure about the rampant bright orange and green, however. It’s distinctive but maybe not actually pleasant to look at?

There’s something cynical about these maps, with their flat, linear, open spaces and single weapons only. They seem to leave combat up to chance without giving players opportunities to hide behind walls or otherwise position themselves strategically. The graphics (besides the pink sky) are generally detailed and lovely, but the maps are so flat…

One of the more interesting multiplayer level design patterns that’s emerged in JJ2 is the commitment to making it easy for the player to get around without bumping into things. You wouldn’t necessarily expect this from the sometimes downright nonsensical layouts of the official levels that served as our earliest examples, and yet here we are. Arguably this pattern has two main components: if you see somewhere nearby, you should be able to get there easily, and if you’re moving around at high speeds, you shouldn’t get unexpectedly overly impeded. In general, movement through the map should be intuitive, leaving you to focus on where you want to go more than how to persuade the level to let you get there.

And as you might imagine, this pattern really shines through in Crayon Valley. With only a few exceptions—high jumps in the bottom corners, occasional moments of losing speed by bumping into ceilings—it’s very easy and pleasant to get around here. Edges of platforms are perfectly positioned to let you transition to other nearby platforms, which is made the more impressive by how how many tiny platforms there are, all of them more or less working with each other. And yet, miraculously, the layout doesn’t feel clinical at all.

In fact, the level even finds time to divide its layout into two halves, top and bottom, distinguished both by different eyecandy (outdoor trees and hills vs. indoor sand and blocks) and by the thick walls between them, with only a few carefully defined points for the player to switch sides. This should make it easier for the flagholders to escape capture in the lower half, as it can take more work to reach them there—reminiscent of such stalwarts as Happy Castle CTF—but also defines a lot of clear structure. You can get a general sense of where you are at a glance by looking at the graphics around you.

Better yet, the two graphical halves of the level don’t clash at all, thanks to careful use of the same general color palette (rainbows, pastels, and pink walls) and a few common elements like lampposts. With eyecandy doing so much informative work in this level, you might worry that it would be overdone and get in the way of the gameplay, but it manages to accomplish its goals without those pitfalls, succeeding through color palettes and broad strokes at what other levels might need entire arboretums to accomplish. The distant parallax background of the top half uses the same general palette as the rest of the level, but sufficiently faded and low-contrast as to not look confusing solid.

Ammo choice is mostly standard stuff for a CTF level, with the normal set of powerups (bouncers/toasters/RFs). Seekers and fireballs (forced by the level to exclude pepper spray) are also present but can’t be powered up. Electroblaster is the more interesting inclusion and tracks well with the level’s layout, which does have a lot of key spots (in the top half) with thin enough walls to attack other players through. The handful of TNT pickups I’m less sure about, but maybe that weapon is enjoying a renaissance, I don’t know.

All in all, a delightful showing with an uncommon yet vivid color palette. The layout is strictly symmetrical on the edges but not in the center, an interesting choice that gets around an awkward center area where players can clearly see the exact spot the mirroring happens. The CTF bases are in clear visual fortresses but are still quite open, approachable from three different sides. The music is cheery without becoming inane.

I really like how this looks—the colors work well together, the leaves are charming and make the screen look alive without obstructing visibility/gameplay—but not how it plays. There’s definitely room to explore how to use Hurt events (and other things that hurt you) in multiplayer levels more, but I don’t think this is the answer. Right now if you want to get the carrot, you have to take a sucker tube out of the carrot room and into a bunch of Hurt events. I’m really not sure what the reasoning here is but it’s not enjoyable.

I wonder if this level was only tested in local splitscreen multiplayer, not internet/LAN multiplayer? When played in local splitscreen, the various destruct blocks respawn after a while, and even a bunch of enemies(!) appear, but neither of those things happen otherwise.

The layout is odd for a battle level. There’s only one start position, and from it you follow one of two linear paths (one of which loops back around to near the start) in search of powerups. There’s not a lot of stuff to pick up between powerups—and most of what there is to pick up is gems, which are useless in battle—so battles may end up clustering around those powerups as players who already have them defend their positions against their recently respawned opponents. The flow isn’t the smoothest around: you can bump into walls and stuff trying to progress along the linear paths, and again there are Hurt events to contend with.

I dunno. I’m reluctant to opinionate too much about the non-technical aspects of this level, as it’s clearly aiming for a very different style of gameplay than most battle levels (especially when the enemies work), so how reasonable is it to judge this by the standards of a more traditional style that it’s uninterested in emulating? Maybe if I got some more people together to play this with, we’d have a good time advancing along the level’s main linear path, kind of like an assault level. Maybe not. But the graphical experiments going on here are certainly pleasant to look at in the meantime.

There are two things about the designs of these levels that really stick out to me, so let’s start there.

The first is the trigger crates. There are a lot of them here, and I think some are handled better than others. The ones in the first level are both pretty bad… you have to take a long path to find each one, then take the same path again in reverse after hitting the crate, only all the enemies are gone and you’re just running around to fill time. To get to the first crate, you got bounced by some horizontal springs, but on the way back you have to avoid them… I’m not sure whether this is an intentional challenge or confusing, but I couldn’t find any other path to take.

By contrast, there’s a trigger crate in the second level that is handled much better: hitting it takes you into a new area of the level, with new enemies and other challenges, and you have to navigate all those things before you get back to the main flow. That’s actually interesting, rather than filler.

This may be my personal preference talking, but I think it’s probably better to ensure the player sees the trigger scenery blocks first, before they go hunting for the trigger crate, so they know where they have to go back to. Otherwise you get moments like the second trigger crate in the first level, where the path branches in two directions, one with the crate at the end and one with the blocks at the end, and which direction you choose at random dictates how much time you’ll waste on backtracking.

The other main thing here is that there are points that seem to expect the player already knows how to beat the level. This is a common/easy level design mistake: the person making the level obviously knows where everything is, so why doesn’t everyone else? The less problematic cases of this include unlabeled warp events, or mandatory coins (in the secret level) hidden inside walls; the more egregious case is in the third level, where you twice need to shoot some normal-looking walls (using bouncer bullets!) or else you’ll fall into a bottomless pit. (The pit doesn’t even hurt or kill you, so you have to cheat or else quit the game.) I’m comfortable saying that this is just objectively bad design. (Some of the trigger crate hunting also feels to me like a bit of mind-reading, but I recognize that some players may be more into hunting than I am, so that’s just opinion.)

Those are the main offenses of this pack. There are a few things that are just buggy—bad masking on the ends of vines or poles, springs that don’t keep your x/y speed properly—but whatever, those are easy fixes. Giving the player a whole bunch of powered-up seekers right before facing Bilsy renders the fight meaningless, but it’s never been easy to design a compelling boss battle/arena.

Apart from those focal points, though, I think these levels are decent. There’s a good mix of enemies and pickups, with various nice features like stomp/destruct blocks, springs, vines, and poles to mark that these are distinctly JJ2 levels. Trees and lakes both make appearances in places to make different parts of the levels feel distinct from each other. Sometimes there are little platforms and sometimes there are larger walls… the walls look a bit flat at times but that may be a consequence of the tileset choice. I think in general the moment-to-moment gameplay is pretty solid here, but some more thought needs to be put into determining what moments the player encounters in what order, and how the player is supposed to figure that out.

Do you want to play some Jazz 2? Yes? Great, here you go. These levels feel like Jazz 2.

These are fine levels. They are short, but that is probably why there are three levels with each tileset and not two levels with each tileset. There are enemies and ammo and food and even some springs and blocks. All JJ2’s main things are here in these levels. You mostly go right but sometimes you go up and down, and that’s good.

I think pickups could be placed better. There are many pickups, but often all pickups are in the same place. There are parts of the level with no pickups and then suddenly a part with many pickups. They could be spread more evenly.

The snow levels are especially good because they are not single paths. Sometimes you can run around in other directions for a while. That lets you have fun and make choices. That is a good thing. The Diamondus levels do this less… maybe they are older. Coins are always a fun thing for running around but these levels do not have coins.

The graphics are not very different from normal. They are well made but I will forget about them because I have seen other levels that look the same. Trying out more different things might be interesting.

These levels are fine. I enjoyed playing them. The author is doing a good job of making levels that feel like Jazz 2 levels. They are shorter and maybe easier but still similar. They are much better than Medivo 3, and Medivo 3 is only one year old. I am impressed. I hope the author will soon make levels that are unique.

Treasure Hunt is a multiplayer gamemode, but this level seems to be designed to be played by only one person.

The big problem is the giant pit… if someone falls in it, there’s no way to get them out. if they have any gems, those gems are lost for the rest of the game. If they have a lot of gems, that means it’ll be impossible for anyone else to get those gems from them, and nobody will be able to win.

The other problem is there’s no ammo at all. It’s certainly possible to steal gems from other people using blaster alone, but it’s not very fun. A big part of the draw of multiplayer JJ2 is using different guns for different situations, and that’s not available here.

Other than that, the level looks nice enough, if a bit cramped in places. The walls don’t always tile properly but that’s a common thing with Carrotus/Easter. The background idea is neat but doesn’t quite work right when played in 800×600. Treasure hunt levels and Easter’99 levels are both rare. It’s just a pity the pit makes the level functionally unplayable.

Thanks for the screenshots!

It’s a nice little tileset, I like it