Jazz Jackrabbit 2 Online

Well, it’s a Letni conversion, and it’s a working Letni conversion. That much is good.

Beyond that, I was massively underwhelmed by CelL’s JJ1 conversion.

In his defense, Letni is a pain in the donkey to work with. The visuals are limited, the music bland and unappealing, the levels boring and unengaging, the tileset even more so. Letni is one-dimensional and uninspired, and it’s arguably the most unpopular JJ1 planet of ALL time (Matched only by Raneforus, Muckamok and Ceramicus).

However, if one is making a JJ1 conversion, one must gut through the pain and misery and do a good job.

While most if not all of the Jazz 1 tiles appear to be there, not all of them are the right color (Especially the yellow, blue and red pulze lights mounted on the dark blue background). There’s no clear background duplicates of the orange and light blue floor tiles, limiting the JCSer to one measly BG choice. Speaking of this, there’s no fancy backgrounds or anything. No fluff tiles (Which are extraneous tiles that weren’t present in the original set, but still add a positive element to the conversion. These are things like sucker tubes, blast’em blocks/buttstomp blocks, vines/hooks, et cetera) of any kind. Grouping was absentminded at best, sloppy at worst.

There’s extremely little present here in this tileset to work with.

In short, it looks like CelL just copied all of the tiles from Jazz Jackrabbit 1 over to the conversion and slapped everything together.

I wish he had done a better job with it, because J2O is STILL waiting for a decent true-blue Jazz 1 Letni conversion (Not remake, conversion) to be created.

Neutral DL rec, since it’s not a very good tileset, but it’s the closest thing to an adequate Letni conversion out there at present.

@Blackraptor:

Hold that thought. “World of Jazz” will be coming out later this year.

Well what we have here is a pretty nice looking and polished level that’s in singleplayer mode, something I don’t see much nowadays. Cold Flash (i keep spelling it as cold lake :/) uses an edit of the diamondus set I’ve never seen before, a relaxing tune, and a custom boss music. It’s fairly sized, though pretty straightforward, and is good for a quick fix of singleplayer JJ2.

One of the reasons being, is the consistency of the level design throughout. The detailing on the eyecandy is good but not spectacular, although I really liked the look of both the background and the boss arena, however its done well throughout and without bugs or any ugliness. The only complaint I really have is that the rain in the foreground looks too mechanical or patterned. It results in looking kind of unnatural, but this didn’t bother me much.

The gameplay of the level is pretty solid as well. There’s nothing I found new in it or jaw dropping, but if you’re in the mood to play some good ol’ sidescrolling action this satisfies the craving. The whole level mostly consisted of traversing areas in a usually linear fashion or finding some crates. There we’re plenty of checkpoints placed throughout and although some of the enemy placement could be tough the number of them you face at a time is mostly restrained. This is quite a contrast from the SP I usually play, which includes my own levels :P I mostly breezed through this level, with a few occassions during when I fell to 1 health and had to be more careful. The boss was a nice touch, especially as this was a small(er) standalone level and so really needed one. The custom boss music was also a perfect fit and I really think more people should use this as an example and take advantage of this option to use custom music for boss fights. I also liked finding the secrets placed in this level. The horizontal green spring in the one at 143,28 shoots me into a wall though.

Item placement was also good. I felt it may have been scarce sometimes, but the ammo I thought was done well and fit the situations presented in the level.

Overall, as I’ve said already I think this is a polished and well done level. In my eyes I couldn’t find any single major weakness or significant problems that would impede my enjoyment playing it. It’s only ‘flaws’ is that it isn’t really outstanding in any way, that it could use more improvisation and bring something new to the table. Also, for a standalone it is quite short. I would’ve loved to see it in a pack of levels. My rating averages out to a 7.7. I think you should try making a single player campaign, and I hope your experience in level design encourages you to experiment more.

-br

Well after so many retries and so many falls i have finally completed the lvl. Phew.

Eyecandy:

Eyecandy here is really good. I generally hate psych tileset, and i hate the looks of shrooms in general but br used this tileset rather well, the lvl actually looks nice. There were a few tilebugs i encountered but very few, since some flowers were “dancing” and they were near layer 3 tiles it looked is if they are punching their “heads” trough walls.Anyways not much to say here the tileset was more or less used up to its maximum

9.5/10

Enemy placement:

Theyr pretty well placed. They get alont with the tileset well except for the christmas enemies i dont think they quite match the tileset. Enemies are placed in a way that u cant quite just charge upward and shoot and do whatever u like, most are even hidden behind layer 3 but they can still be seen if you focus. The witch i beat quite too easy with the seekers (3 boxes) you’ve put, i just dodged the umm “yellow thingy” and just kept spamming all seekers i had. I’d say that most annoying enemies were definetly the bee’s as they always are for me. They were well placed in this lvl

9/10

Gameplay

Well its quite hard expecially those pit parts. After i fell the first 10 times i just did /r and tried again, since i knew where i was at i finally passed that part. Its not that hard, u just mustnt shoot those platforms otherwise they will swing like hell and it will really become troublesome. 2nd hard part was the other pit, the one with boulders, god i lost all my nerves with that one. Either jump wouldnt work, or i’d get hurt or i’d miss the boulder eh… after many retries i finally passed it. I think there should be atleast 2 checkpoints thou, its quite easy to die and it can get VERY frustrating to have to do everything all over again. All in all the gameplay was really nice it was rather fun to play this lvl. Just have to focus a lot and be carefull is all it takes.

8.5/10

Pickup placement

I will include secrets areas in this one aswell. The ammo,gems,coins and food placements are really good placed i like it a lot. I had 2 sugar rushes but surprisingly that wasnt much at all. I think i found most of the secret placements but one of the secret area i accidently discovered because a boulder rolled there and when i went there it was definetly the MOST HARDEST PART in this lvl. It contained spike balls which left u out of footing and some well placed bee’s which was just far too frustrating. i really stopped bothering trying to pass that one it was simply too hard for me. also there is that area placement im not sure how to get there, i just used RF climb, maybe i was suppost to push that crate with a blue spring there? but i cant push crates and i dont know what was that spring doing there in the first place. well the pickup placements are really good placed there were a lot of carrots which was just about enough for this lvl, no Full C’s thou (atleast i havent found any).

9/10

Music:

Umm… when i played this lvl i couldnt even hear my own blaster or any kind of sound except some messed up high piched noises or sth. Too bad thou :s

0/0

Overall Rating: 9/10

DL recommendation?

Definetly. The lvl is a bit hard and requres quite a lot of skills but its definetly fun to play.

Hey, better late than never.

- The flag direction shouldn’t actually matter.
- Added that MCE event (never bothered to actually fall in the pit during my own testing!)
- Can’t reproduce the JB4 bug.
- This scoring issue in BR2 only happened because someone managed to get a flag without returning it to a base. It was actually possible for this to happen due to me using an unmasked tile where I wanted a masked one (and not noticing); fixed now!

Nice tileset with awesome palette swaps and some…well, interesting, I suppose…black-tile eyecandy. Definitely worth a DL. Great for building a Credits level for your singleplayer pack (which I’ll be doing with World of Jazz). Download rec.

Wow. I can’t believe the things that slip through the cracks of J2O.

Great level, solid eyecandy (although the back layers were a little too standard for me), excellent music and layout. Events were nice, too.

Definitely worth a DL.

I feel like I failed you as a tester, but I’ll tell you here in hopes that you can update it!

In JB2, flag direction to top right jail doesn’t work.
In JB3, no MCE event in bottom right corner.
In JB4, there’s a bug whereby you keep dying if you fall in the pit in the pregame.
In BR2 there’s a bug where every 4th point for blue scores for red instead…

The rest seem perfectly functional though!

Sorry for not spotting this sooner.

—Foreword—
I have to say that it gave experience playing this creatively channeling level, the name is strongly fitting the look, music and gameplay, in one word, the theme. I guess there are pelolpe don’t understand it, it means a trip after using drugs, appropriate isn’t it? The level doesn’t got story, but in my opinion, a SP pack needs it, not a one level trial, also, here we are going trough a psychedelic experience, so we aren’t aware of the world. lol.

—Look—

Background
Mushrooms going towards the upper right corner, some of them are “dancing”, spiced with changing colors. CraZy. It is cool, and exciting anyway, i never got bored of it. This makes the view even more colorful.
Eyecandy
Well i could leave the praising but i don’t. It is amazing. Hanging leaves, branches of trees, lava lamps, waterfalls, and mushrooms all around, even parts of originally background items. Great use of Layer 4-5(maybe 6 too, i couldn’t check it in JCS) walls, times going black. Decent tileset usage. The pickups and other events improve it too, i like the foods used and the the gems, big rock was also in it, and the mass of trigger rocks, nah that rocks at all. Rare timebugs can be found hardly, easyly ignoreable, overally, the look is a comple masterpiece. Dammit, it’s magic.

Rating: 29/30

—Layout—
As the game gets started, it leaves you to choose left or right way to go what makes me feel confused. By the way its not bad, and the whole level is baised on this thing, there is a main path, with lots of byways allaround consisting pickups and enemyes. I think it is good, because once you saw a place not needed in going forward, next time, after you got roasted you won’t be forced to go to all the places. Next thing to mention is that in some cases, you had to find a secret alike way to get trough what is a bit werid, altrugh, yes, i know there are arrow posts but they are hard to notice because of the exuberant eyecandy. Otherway it was natural, cool and long so what to say? it must get high rating.

Rating: 14/15

—Gameplay—

I was wondering. Wherever i’ve gone, i met unordinary things. Yet it was kinda difficult, thanks to the lots of hurting and pits. After a bunch of deaths i startd to care a lot and go slowly. The first pitty part’s first part with the swinging vine and plaform got me 20 times that i said okay. this is cool but i just don’t get how to, so i skipped it. I think this level is hard for any skilled player, this makes it just more exciting. Something new that waits for beating.
The great deal of separate events were loveably infrequent. The best was the Trigerr rocks as collapsing scan alike platforms, if you touch it by sides it falls.
One thing to mention, at least one more checkpoint could’ve been added, somewhere after the first pits, because the second pitty part is very deadly, and getting back to start from there kills the spirit of playing without cheats -> :(.
By the way i found that in easy mode, it gets skipped if you fall into the pit at the left, lower corner. Also easy mode let’s a second chance after falling into a pit, brilliant idea. As i saw hard gives a lot more enemyes, and so, it make them in crucial places too.
Overally it’s very creative, nicely done, not as a bad point, it is hard.

Pickups

Due to the several byways this is a truly rich level in gatherables. Countless gems and foods, good amount of armours, imaginitive coins.
Both gems and coins were greatly placed in boxes, and in many different way, it was cool. The toaster ammo was the most precious thing, right after carrots. In some places the thing was proposally in the walls, i see how this is new, but it is hard to collect, anyway it fits to a SP level.
The secrets were hidden unobviusly, for the fourth – fifth time (i mean restarts, not only meant by dying) i started to find them, they were very imaginitive. I even found new secrets for the tenth time, this made an adevturious feeling keeped long. and still there are some that i dont understand, like the Toaster PU at 270,46. I really ‘d liked to see it in JCS.

Enemyes

There were a lot of enemyes fitting the theme, decently placed. The witch was nice that it was there, well i could consist an end boss, but the level was complete like this too, i felt exhasuted enough reaching the exit.
One thing was annying, those hidden enemys. they really husted a lot, it is ignorable to have a few, but this was a bit much. In hard mode i would add more Fencers, to increase difficulity, becasuse more helmuts just need some more shoots, anyway the beeboy useage was great in it.

Rating: 44/50

—Music—

The genre is Psytrance, even by that is fits, moreover it superly suits the level. Its also great because it is new. The only backward of it is the hefty 17.7MB size.

Rating:5/5

—Last words—
I would really respect the man that beats this level without deaths (and cheats) for the first time. It is truely hard, it makes a challange for anyone. Altrough it is fun and recomended to play it.
DR : is it a question?

Total Rating: 92/100 -> 9.2

RabidRabb

Good enough, don’t get it why noone reviewed this one.

Interesting pack, to say the least.

I can’t believe a decent review hasn’t been written about this yet, since it’s arguably a great pack. Good eyecandy, good mechanics and smooth flow.

In short, it’s a good pack, and DEFINITELY worth a download.

Nice level. Good, solid eyecandy, decent layout. Music wasn’t the greatest, but it’s still worth a DL.

Wortless not being able to help TSF :(

Well, this is an interesting and different approach to a CTF map. DEATH STAR by PT32…

First, this isn’t your typical ctf layout. The entire level is based on a pretty cool theme and as a result the layout is more gimmicky and unorthodox.

The eyecandy is definitely the simplest to comment on. It’s not too outstanding, but it’s pretty solid and it works well aided with the theme of the level. However, you did use tiles that look solid in the background, and combined with the somewhat confusing and unintuitive layout I found myself running into walls occasionally throughout my playtest because I thought they were passages. Not too big of an issue, but it took a while to get used to and certainly didn’t help the layout look any less confusing. The elevator was a gimmicky but cool addition and a way to split the level into two nearly symmetrical halves.

…speaking of the layout, there is an interesting feature of an outside path that encircles the entire map. It’s basically a long, narrow winding passage that I would call something between a corridor and an almost vertical shaft. I actually really liked how this played out, because it was sort of the ‘hub’ of the level if you understand my meaning – its the most used passage because it connects to everything else in the map. The vertical gameplay was also a plus here, but it could’ve been capitalized on more (part of which I will get into further). I felt that it was too narrow, and some parts could have been less steep and used more slopes. I found myself getting “caught” in the walls of the passage while running at full speed a number of times and it really threw off the flow. This encircling passage and the elevator were my favorite layout designs, despite of the narrowness of the corridors. From here on however things start to fall apart…

The bases were placed in air vents in passages at the vertical center of the map, accessible through corridors from either opposite side (left/right). [REDACTED]

To explain what I mean, the carrots (both +1) are symmetrically placed at the end of two very long corridors on each side. The corridors end with a small room containing a +1 carrot. This is basically the worst death trap possible, because there is almost no chance that you will be able to heal without getting trapped there and having to fight your way out. To make it worse, this is one of the only areas the RF powerup can be unleashed to its full potential, and grabbing a +1 carrot only to be blasted to pieces by RFs from the guy(s) following you is NOT a good trade off. I played a duel in this map and I thought the big and elaborate layout would at least give me time to lose my pursuers and sneak away with the health, but even in this scenario I often found myself being trapped and killed often, and vice versa. The only chance someone had of escaping that carrot death trap was when one time by some miracle I ran out of RFs right before I was about to kill that guy who was hiding and praying for his life in the corner of the room. There seriously needs to be another way out of that room, probably into the elevator shaft or something. Otherwise, you can expect to be destroyed trying to regain that health and your opponent knows it. Basically it came down to people making a last stand and fighting to death instead of disengaging the battle and fleeing for health, cause it was such a death trap area.

The last thing I want to address about the layout is the large number of pointless dead end rooms. They slow the game down and make it more campy, most of them have no real purpose besides to trap you, and it makes the layout pretty confusing. It looks like a remnant of an SP map which doesnt belong in a multiplayer game – I think some of them should either have more worthwhile reasons to visit or just be removed completely.

The gameplay of the map was actually fun. Besides the annoying carrot death traps and the base areas (the dead ends weren’t too much of a problem since after a while people just instinctively avoided them) the level was fun and has the potential to play really well. It was enjoyable sniping people through the thin walls with EBs (and in the elevator :P), using the RFs as a super shotgun kind of weapon, and sidekicking people in the outer passage. Besides the RF I actually found the next best weapon to be the sidekick/buttstomp in this map. This gives a bit of an advantage to spaz here, but I really liked the tactics it brings. Often throughout my game here I would struggle for high ground, or find ways to cut my opponent off through other passages, or trap them in some room etc. It’s just too bad, because if it wasn’t for some of the inconveniences in the layout I would’ve had a blast with this.

The ammo placement is also the weaker focus of this map. I thought the free floating ammo was way too space here – it was barely enough just for a duel, and this is a pretty big level so I can’t imagine people would find it satisfactory for a team game. I think it could’ve used more bouncer and electroblasters. The powerup choice also did not fit the map. I liked the RF powerup, because it was only useful to it’s full potential in a few zones, and mainly serves as a close combat shotgun equivalent. Despite it’s limited power, its still the only weapon here that can deal 2h damage, which is a problem. The freezer powerup was completely useless, and it broke the balance of the game because the RF powerup it’s supposed to balance out with is the weapon of choice here. It should be replaced with a gun #2 powerup, which I felt was severely lacking in this map. In any case, having only one powerup capable of dealing max. damage severely breaks the balance of the game. Please replace the ice powerup :P

Next, the hardest part to do in my review was to actually find some people I can play this with online (nobody ever plays in my timezone lol). I did manage to have a duel here, although I think this level SHOULD be better suited for 2vs2/team games (once it gets more ammo and the camp scenarios are fixed). The issues I thought would affect the way the game played out did in fact do so (no surprise) – the carrot areas were death traps, the dead ends did make the layout confusing, and although I had no problem finding the bases (other people apparently did) I found it to be more of a problem to actually get INTO them. The gameplay was fun, as long as your opponents dont take advantage of cheap tactics like camping the base/carrot.

[REDACTED]

[REDACTED]

Some of the passages could benefit from being less narrow, specifically the outer circular shaft. Every part of the layout should serve at least some purpose. I’m not suggesting that every dead end needs to be removed, but at least more incentive should be given to visit those places or else they become pointless and bog down the map.

As it is now, I liked the concept behind this. I liked the unorthodox layout and the interesting gameplay. I liked not having to rely on seekers, but melee combat and sniping with electroblasters and using the RF as a shotgun. For the most part I liked the eyecandy as well. Generally when levels are revamped into other game modes from what they were originally purposed to be they don’t turn out quite as good or balanced as they should be. This one actually came close to breaking that rule, but some existing faults and remnants of zones that don’t look designed with MP in mind prevent it from realizing its potential.

[REDACTED]

EDIT: So I got a chance to play the updated version of this after I bullied some unsuspecting victim into hosting it. I’ll quickly go over what I noticed that’s been changed and then give a brief overview on what I think. So firstly, a lightning shield has been added into a fairly out of the way warp (that I didn’t even notice the first time I played…) which was kind of surprising the first time to see a bunch of people with shields running around. I was never a fan of 40 second shields that are easily obtainable in MP, especially when placed in an unneccessarily out of the way campable warp room, and my POV doesn’t change now. I think this kind of breaks the game here (evidently there was a pepper powerup pre-existing in that spot..). On a brighter note, the partially opening doors to the bases have been removed. An additional passage has been added to the base, with some slightly bad flow, and wind events have been added in the base shafts to force encourage you to take it. The freezer powerup has been replaced with the bouncer. For some reason some gun9 ammo has been exchanged with TNT, and shafted to the R&D room confining it to the top portion of the map. The former deathtrap of a carrot room has been much improved by the addition of the passage cutting through the base area and the access to the elevator. Also, 2 more +1 carrots have been added to the bottom warp area, as far as I can tell I don’t believe they were there before. Basically, while some of these updates were good (since they were responses to the biggest criticisms this map faced) they are intertwined with new stuff I don’t like, such as the lightning shield, somewhat annoying wind tunnels (tho conceding theyre not as bad as the doors), and doubling of health. The balance of this is questionable, and the flow still remains clunky and complicated. Also maybe noticing this because I played with a pretty large group of people this time, those text strings everywhere get pretty annoying. I don’t want to be told where I am all the time, the nth time around. Can’t really make my mind up on the adjusted rating of this, I don’t like a bunch of stuff but effort has been taken to fix a lot of the original criticisms I had about this. So until I change my mind I will keep it the same.

*I had to remove some chunks of my review because J2O has this annoying character limit of 10k :(. Its not my fault if I have a lot of things to say damn it.

-REDACTEDBlacky

Small but good level, I like it. Eyecandy is great, gameplay too

yeah, good!

@KRSplat:

Thanks for the review, but could you please be a little more specific?

P.S.-The flags are in the Airlocks, in response to your question. =)

Fine enough, eyecandy is fine, though I expected much more.

Two functions crash jj2 and you give it 10.0? :p

What makes this level good? For starters, it’s made by Ragnarok, and a lot of things he constructs have the habit of turning out pretty darned well.

Just as this level, Starlit Basin, does.

It’s a battle level, but it feels more like war games on a deserted tropical island. Weapons and powerups are distributed liberally, and plenty of springs and escape routes are provided to make this stage a blast to play. I was a little skeptical about the blaster PU with accompanying fast fires right out in the open, but it’s not a game-killer.

Buggage is minimal, and the music fits the level quite well.

I think my only real complaint is that the Mystic Isle tilesets are so limited, and it’s difficult to come up with something original with them since everyone else has already done it to some extent. I feel that holds this level back to some extent, and that’s too bad.

In any event, Starlit Basin is still a very satisfactory level, and I’ll gladly give it my seal of approval. Download today.