Jazz Jackrabbit 2 Online

Pretty decent level overall. Has some platforming challanges added in, which was a nice addition. There’s 1 secret, and a detour to break a crate to be able to progress.

Issues are mostly the same, a bit too much ammo packed right at the start of the level, while the level isn’t really difficult enough to warrant that much ammo, and especially that many health carrots.

All things considered, I had a decent time.

Second map by this user, and I have to say it’s an improvement compared to the first one.

Let’s start with the positives:
The level layout is pretty good. While the first map was pretty straightforward, being a straight line with some platforming for extra goodies in some rooms, this one feels more like a complete level. No branching paths that loop into each other, but there are some areas where you can go out of your way to get some extra goodies.

Luckily the pickups have been spread out much more sensibly this time, so there aren’t just a bunch of areas with a ton of goodies as if you entered a coin warp.

Same can be said for the enemy placement, while nothing challenging, they are competently placed.

Also, a coin warp and boss fight is present as well.

Now for some negatives:
The biggest one I can bring up is the difficulty, the lack of it to be more specific. While the enemies are much better placed than in your first level, there are a still a bit too few of them. There were multiple pretty long streches where I was just walking in a straight line because there were neither pickups nor enemies. If you are afraid the levels would become too difficult if you put many enemies in them, you still have the option to make some of the enemies be “hard difficulty exclusive” in the level editor.

While I don’t think the level itself looks ugly or empty, I did instantly notice that you only used layer 8 and didn’t do anything with layer 5, 6, 7. Diamondus is one of the best tilesets for beginners because the it has a lot of potential to be made interesting looking. The boss area for example stands out in a good way, since you had a bit of fun with how you made it look.

Here are 2 examples of what can be done with this tileset:
https://www.jazz2online.com/downloads/5775/mines-of-diamondus/
https://www.jazz2online.com/downloads/6921/cold-flash/ (this is an altered tileset, but most of it are still the original Diamondus tiles)

Some extra advice: Adding some secret areas make levels a bit more interesting. Use layer 3 to hide secret rooms, or just place warps in certain particular places for warp secrets. Don’t make them obvious, but give small hints through tileset patters.

As for the coinwarp, that isn’t part of the tileset (even though there is a partial tileset for it). All you have to do is place the warp, set the amount of coins and change the “ShowAnim” part from 0 to 1 to make the coinwarp rabbit appear, though this only works for 10, 20, 50 and 100 coins in the vanilla version of the game. If the coin warp requires any other amount of coins, then yeah what you did is a viable alternative.

Summary:
A rather significant improvement over your first level. Improved level layout, improved item and enemy placement, improved the general use of events. It’s a competent decent level.

What a nuanced colour palette and sweet atmosphere. All the incredible details and animations. Is it a bee or a mosquito? A Beescito? True to your distinctive style. Amazing set Blade! I don’t dare to rate that magic.

First upload by this user.

Let’s start with the positives:
For how linear and straightforward the level is, it actually looks pretty decent. The different layers are used pretty well, so even though you’re mostly going in a straight line, at least it doesn’t look boring or lazy.

Though it’s short, some areas have potential, as far as the layout is considered. Sure it still needs to be filled with some enemies and the variation of pickups need to differ, but it’s apparently a test level, so there’s that.

Now for the negatives:
Most importantly. Variety in pickups and item placement. Don’t just make a room with 8 large gems, and 4 weapon powerups. It’s like placing all the gems at the beginning of a Spyro level, so then you don’t bother to explore the level itself. The level is basically a continuation of rooms with a bunch of pickups, which don’t complement the decent layouts of the rooms.

Enemy placement needs to be improved. You only used normal turtles, but there are about 8 in the whole level, and half of them are in a straight line grouped up in each other (use the Stop Enemy function to keep them apart from each other).

The buttstomp and destructible blocks don’t work as intended, you shoot 1 and the whole row disappears (you also need to shoot the buttstomp block, though it’s irrelevant since you can jump over it).

All in all, there might be some potential here. Some of the issues are easily fixable (item & enemy placement), while others may need some practice in the level creator to learn (what functions each event has)

10/10 HYPE

It’s the perfect tileset for making, for example, sky levels! Good job Blade!

Well, it contains a vivid, animation heavy tileset with a beautiul 3 examples for know-how. Even though it’s overly-vivid in my taste, I see there are endless possibilities for levels filled with colorful eyecandy. Good job!

thanks Violet for the generous review!

I think Turtemple sounds good with these instruments, very ominous. The others fall into the standard remix trap: a bunch of random noises but every once in a while you get to hear the melody of the original song and think “oh yeah I like that original song!”

A bunch of duel-sized, high-concept CTF levels of varying quality. The pack starts off strong with krcage, which has some interesting gameplay around the carrots, with vines and electroblasters. The bottom area is a bit too simple, though, and the double vine rows could probably be reduced to single vines to make the level play a little faster. krdeep also has a focus on two +1 carrots instead of one full energy, this time paired with copters, but the rest of the level is too difficult to parse visually, and Spaz can get up the central castle much faster than the other characters. krlz I’m not a fan of, only Spaz can get up the central column in any reasonable timeframe and the rest of the level is blocky and hard to see in. There are other CTF maps that do this diamond layout more gracefully. krnj is a bold attempt to make a vertical CTF level, but I’m not convinced it’s any more successful than most others, since there’s nothing to keep you from falling down from one base to the other. Also I asked my brother, who lives in New Jersey, about its accuracy, and he says “Seems a little desolate for the most densely populated state!” krsand seems fine to me, I could imagine giving it a little more polish in certain spots but the basic layout is totally functional and enjoyable. krvolc is a letdown though, the bases are so incredibly close together I don’t see how this ends up playing well.

In conclusion, some of these levels are better than others, but it’s not a bad effort, and I like getting more bite-sized maps out there for quicker games.

I don’t really have anything to add. Just download it and see for yourself

Ah, 2015! A heady time full of promise. Let’s look at the angelscript API and see what it can do for a single player level. Different palettes at different stages of the level? Absolutely! Enemies with more health, other sprites used as enemies, other sprites used as (unremarkable) weapons. Sure! Totally sick fire-breathing platforms moving in all directions! Anything seemed possible. People were building on JJ2 gameplay to add exciting new elements to dazzle and amaze and entertain.

Good times.

Tweedle Wheedle is not without bugs, I suppose, and the eponymous boss battle is frustrating as all Tweedle fights seem to be, and the layout occasionally gets confusing, but it’s unrelentingly cool. And even without all the scripting stuff the layout is still really good, doing interesting things with the psych3 base, then adding lots of really distinctive design elements to the rest of the level. Just a fun time throughout.

This is a good glow-up! It’s striking how much of a difference the fade color and the foreground layers make, and the intro area from psych3 has a lot of cool edits with pickups off to the side and stuff. Using a Cheshire2 is very smart—surprisingly few psych3 edits seem to do this—though I don’t understand why the fly carrot was removed here, as it was the original’s most distinctive feature. The spring section that replaces it is pretty cool, though. The rest of the layout is also generally good and fun with some fun takes on Psych wall shapes, albeit with the occasional dud moment (everything relating to TNT, some alcoves it’s easy to get stuck in). This isn’t a transformational take on JJ2 gameplay but there’s a lot of aww yeah neat. A great take on psych3.

Pretty much the most bare bones Psych3 edit you can imagine. A handful of enemies, almost no pickups, no layout changes. Functional but uninteresting.

I’m not thrilled with the secret level entrances, particularly the Tubelectric one, but I guess they’re not horribly out of line with existing JJ2 secrets… if this were really part of the game, eventually players would have found them over a period of months or whatever. Still, more visual cues would have been nice I think. But whatever that’s not the focus here.

Far Out is actually pretty good in terms of new event placement while sticking to the existing psych3 level. There’s a decent variety of pickups and enemies, and the little pipe organs on the platforms after the warp target are a good touch that make that area much more interesting to navigate. The new parts of the layout kind of lose me, though. The idea of warping through a bunch of little rooms (kind of like in Medivo1) is nice but eventually I got tired of hunting for trigger crates, and there are too many invisible warps and weird blocks that need to be destroyed or removed in unpredictable ways.

The other, all-new level here, though, Pinball Land, I actually really liked. Toward the end it gets annoying in the part when you track down four trigger crates behind lots of layer3 and stuff, but the rest of the level is I think a really good take on a Tubelectric secret level. There are clever pinball tables, and crucially, they’re not all at once, they appear from time to time within the level so they don’t get stale. There are spike platforms, one of Tubelectric’s other main unique features. Goodies feel fairly plentiful and the graphics are nice and varied. This is a nice one.

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.

There’s not a lot of level design flow here. You kind of wander around, maybe collecting a bunch of goodies, maybe jumping over some enemies, not sure if you’re going the right direction, and suddenly there’s an exit. But what’s interesting about this pack is how much Talec is (already, in 1999) pushing up against the limits of what the game is supposed to support. Frogs, invisible enemies, secret levels, next level settings. (You’re asked repeatedly to use the JJNXT cheat code in order not to break the secret level bool, though in 2022, we know that using other events could have avoided this issue.) And there’s something thematically fitting about the pack’s focus on secret levels in light of how some of those features are kind of secrets within JJ2. The first level is an edit of psych3, an unfinished secret level, if not the most interesting one. There are more pickups, the warp target doesn’t go where I’d expect it go, but nothing truly remarkable. In general the disappointing factor in this pack is that secret levels are never really treated as a reward. Talec learns from Labrat3 that secret levels are supposed to involve turning into a bird, but there aren’t the profusion of goodies you’d expect from a JJ1 secret level. And you need a secret level to have some kind of desirable experience or else the player is actually working to their advantage to skip it, because they save time that way.

love the atmosphere and the good level design

Mieli = totaalisen puhallettu. Mind totally blown. Go blade!!!

I really like this “Forgotten Landscape”! With use of Diamondus tileset with night palette, this level is very challenging.

8/10

Weapons are cool! 10/10 HYPE!

BTW Naps made new types of weapons, like Anti-Gravitational Bouncer and Hornet Gun. Violet, you could update this weapon pack with these two new weapons.