Jazz Jackrabbit 2 Online

A beautiful premise with beautiful execution, Threed Realms looks small, then unfolds to be bigger than you ever imagined.
One striking setting and song become several, the new enemies are tricky and cleverly placed, and a ton of checkpoints and shortcuts prevent tedious backtracking.
Replacing the Blaster with the shorter-ranged Melee Sword really changes how you want to approach enemies, and it's a twist that stays fun throughout the whole level.
My favorite part is the boss battle. It's readable without feeling trivial or unfair, and it's really fun to swing at.

With original gameplay, lovely presentation, and the most groan-inducingly punny title I've read in a while, you don't want to miss this level.

All that said, I'm not gonna try to find the remaining 3% of the skulls. I spent enough time looking for skulls back in Monster Bash…

A futuristic vision of how much better our cities could be. Efficient yet cozy apartments. Progressive zoning laws recognizing the utility of mixing residential buildings with cafes, optometrists’ offices, and fireworks. Spacious, scenic sewers. Neighborhoods navigated with rocket jumps instead of noisy, dirty, dangerous cars.

Central Park’s a big level with lots of paths, but with all the long-range powerups and ammo around, you can expect to roast and get roasted pretty fast anyway. Cool all-directions gameplay in the center, with the carrot and powerups being tempting but difficult to control, and the bases are also vulnerable to long-range attacks from several directions.

It’s a Loon level, so of course you can expect lovely visuals with inventive tileset edits. The park and buildings are nicely rendered, with lots of neat little details and color choices that distinguish them from every other town level, and a few simple additions even breathe new life into Colonius’s sewer tiles.

Be warned, this level has a very demanding script (every pickup has a custom behavior to prevent being shot down), so you’ll need a fast CPU for the best experience.

A great twist to normal CTF gameplay. Flag scores happen a lot more often, the rules are simple enough to explain to people, and it’s always entertaining when one base has both flags and everyone in both teams ends up fighting there.
This was really fun in JDC events and I think it will be really fun for 3vs3 and larger games in general, too!

I didn’t think Jazz 2 levels would make me cry. I didn’t think Jazz 2 levels would make me cry three times.

Gorgeous looking level. You somehow made a Diamondus/Inferno wall mashup look so natural that I didn’t even consciously think about it when I first played it. The large crystals from Ceramicus in the foreground do look a touch out of place with their lack of detail. But that’s more than made up for by screen-filling parallax background layers that give the sense of an expansive landscape behind the sprite layer – moreso than any other JJ2 background I’ve seen.

In gameplay, it’s a traditional CTF level and wears that on its sleeve, no wacky gimmicks. But I always like when levels are asymmetrical and I always like when carrots are placed in out-of-the-way areas, and this level has both of those things so I like that.
Besides, there’s next to nothing to actually complain about here: balance seems good, the level flows pretty well thanks to extensive usage of One Way events, and both flag bases are interesting to approach and defend.

Definitely looking forward to seeing more, and being doubly impressed if you do pull out another great level within 23 days!

Sonic With A Gun is probably the fourth most ambitious Jazz-related project to ever see completion. The first three are Jazz Jackrabbit, Jazz Jackrabbit 2, and JJ2+, and now that I think about it, I’m not really even sure about those.

In case your country has censored the upload description: SWAG offers six new Jazz 1 episodes, most with two normal levels, a secret level, and a bonus level. If you only include the normal levels then you would expect roughly the size of two original Jazz episodes, but most of the SWAG levels are much longer than the original Jazz levels, so it is closer to 3 or 4.

The levels do a remarkable job of stuffing themselves full of Sonic references, and while the game is still, at its core, Jazz Jackrabbit, SWAG feels very distinct from that. I wouldn’t go so far as to call it a different game, but it feels much more like a full-fledged expansion pack (one of the cool ones, not horse armour) than a mere set of custom levels. Every planet has its own complete tileset, most of them more intricate than the original Jazz ones – Emeraldus is certainly a lot more attractive than Muckamok. Despite most of the graphics coming from some part of Jazz, the environments feel completely fresh, due to how much those graphics have changed. Just look at the 1st and 3rd screenshots. You won’t see a single enemy reused from Jazz, either – every single one is new, and there are lots of single ones, too. This being Violet, some of them are positively evil in their behaviour and placement. Even the pickups have new sprites!

The level design is tight all around, several times more appealing than that in the original game. Levels are filled with multiple paths, cool tricks, and interesting challenges. Despite many levels having complex layouts, it’s rare to feel lost; there’s a fantastic job done of showing the player where to progress. Or maybe that’s just because you always want to get from the left side of the level to the right side of the level. Whatever. The only planet that didn’t really impress me was Gravis – the graphics were surprisingly dull, with little detail and lots of floating coloured lines, and the pinball portions were really awkward with Jazz’s physics.

I was also very impressed by how well Sonic’s bonus levels were recreated. They’re certainly a lot more exciting than the original Jazz bonus levels – although I would have loved to be able to see the UFOs from more than 2 centimetres away.

The boss fights are on par with Sonic 1, and a good deal more interesting than the ones in the original Jazz. Then again, a trained gerbil could beat the boss fights in the original Jazz.

Playing SWAG, the only things that really bothered me were the timer running out on later levels (like I said, they’re long!), the small field of vision in Jazz (but SWAG handles it /much/ better than the original levels), and the limitations of the Jazz engine itself (every now and then you might notice a spike ball or spring spontaneously ceasing to exist).

I don’t think the difficulty was actually that much higher than the original Jazz levels, I didn’t have much trouble beating it on Hard. Mind you, Jazz 2 single player is about as difficult as drinking a glass of chocolate milk, and by comparison Jazz 1 is more like eating a small cactus. Except the cactus is actually delicious.

SWAG even has its own title screen. This is a product that is impressive in every respect, well worth the time it took to develop. I mean, the worst things I could think of to say about SWAG were actually complaints about the ORIGINAL GAME. I haven’t ever had that reaction to a mod before.

Rating? 9.8, because I’m reserving 9.9 for an especially large piece of the True Cross, and 10.0 for a machine that turns my toenail clippings into money.
Quick Review? I don’t think so.
Download recommended? What do you freaking think?

P.S. After completing SWAG, I managed to fix my Windows computer. Coincidence? Okay, yeah, it probably is a coincidence.

Definitely a few notches above most JJ2 remixes! Good composition work and mixing, though it would be nice if the leads stood out more IMO. I like the drums starting at 2:13.Really disappointing ending though; there’s no interesting resolution. In fact, there’s no resolution at all, it just ends. Overall though, a very good effort.

Pretty much useless, because http://www.jazz2online.com/downloads/6627/password-remover/ already exists.

The first public full implementation of a custom game mode in AngelScript, and it’s well worthy of it. While the included level is a bit plain and questionably balanced, the concept of the game mode more than makes up for it. I hope someone makes more levels for this game mode!

The original tileset in Super Meat Boy isn’t too bad, and it fits JJ2 pretty well.

Unfortunately, it’s been scaled and palletised completely naively. It’s now blurry, distorted, and full of stray pixels. The layout is also poor in places, with closely related tiles place far away from each other.

My advice is to just try again and put more effort into making it look as good as the original. If a tileset is worth converting, it’s worth converting well.

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!

Trigger zones work in 1.23. They just aren’t listed in the JCS.ini that comes with most versions of it. Just add this line to your 1.23 JCS.ini: 246=Trigger Zone |+|Trigger |Trigger|Zone|TriggerID:5|on/off:1|switch:1
Or, heck, just use the converter; if it messes up the triggers, that is a bug in the converter and not an actual difference between the level formats’ or JJ2 versions’ capabilities.

Also, they only apply to the connection that triggers them, so unless the 2vs2 is in the form of four players splitscreening, touching one yourself does nothing for your teammate or your opponents. Test your levels!

(also you spelled claustrophobic wrong)

Put in technically incorrect “layman’s terms,” 1.24 has a greater supply of internal animation structures, so it doesn’t run out as easily as 1.23.

First of all: I can’t seem to host at the moment, so I was not able to play these online. As such, I am not giving a rating, as I cannot say much about the balance. However, I can still evaluate some things.

Big Apple Beatdown is great. Nothing particularly novel, but very well done – flow is nice and intuitive, the level is good-looking, and so on. The only thing I really dislike about this level is that there are too many powerups and they’re too easy to obtain; you can expect to see powered-up seekers and bouncers flying everywhere.

I am not so fond of Escape from Precint 83. The concept of having all the players permanently flying is a good enough one, but I feel it could have been implemented much better. It’s really easy to get caught on the edges of the many, many ceilings, and the “pits” at the bottom just seem to get in the way. The level also strikes me as looking downright ugly, though I think that’s more the fault of the tileset (someone make a good Technoir conversion already! And then give it a palette swap so it isn’t so hideously pink!). Also, it completely breaks in 8-bit color for some reason; the background turns completely black and my FPS goes from 100 to 30.

Anyway, this “pack” didn’t blow me away, but it’s certainly worth a look.

It’s Medivo. That’s about it. Glad someone made a better conversion than CelL’s old one, though.

Simple and inoffensive, but quite well done nonetheless. There are some interesting visual experiments, most notably the pond, although in some places they come off as messy. Layout and general gameplay is very good, no complaints there.

What part of this upload are people supposed to rate? The tilesets, the levels, or both?

If you react to all JJ2 tests with disdain, you obviously weren’t around in the EvilMike days. The biggest problem with this upload is that it took about five years to appear.

Very ugly and inconsistent in style, but quite functional. The various stolen tiles were completely unnecessary, though (you didn’t even give credit – for the record, those gems are from Bookworm Adventures).

You have a good grasp of tileset layout and what tiles are needed – a shame this isn’t backed up by competent artwork.

Next time, please do not upload tilesets that are not used in your level.