Jazz Jackrabbit 2 Online

The tileset looks all right, but it’s entirely lacking in extra decoration. Besides the token background hills and precious few “variety” tiles, there’s nothing of the sort, in fact. Hence, any level created with it will be terribly bland, and so I cannot really give this a download recommendation, but it deserves a decent score for effort.

Versatile and nice-looking for the most part, but some things, most notably the second set of destruct blocks, are pretty poorly done, though that’s probably to be expected of something like an LMAT set.

It took me a while to decide how to approach reviewing this pack. As others have stated, its quality is…variable, to say the least. So I’ve decided to split the review into three sections: one on the levels I really like, one on the levels that are passable, and one on the levels that just don’t work. In that order, because it will make the ending that much funnier.

So, first. The best levels. Opinions vary, of course, but I’d say Technologized Sonicwaves, Pleased with Presents, and Hard Cheese qualify.

Technologized Sonicwaves is a very well-designed and well-constructed CTF level. It has few flaws if any, and is highly suitable for both duels and larger games. As with most such levels, however, there is not a lot to say about it.

Pleased with Presents is a battle level which I actually helped quite a bit with, as far as design decisions and balancing, although admittedly most of this was in its earliest stages. In particular, I am afraid that I am to blame for the belts. I beg forgiveness from anyone who has fallen into a pit because of them.
That aside, the level has a nice, learnable layout, and good eyecandy (although the background may be a bit too strange for its own good). Its biggest drawback is probably its inconsistent placement of Fly Off events – you can enter some indoor areas, but not others, while flying. Still, the level is fun to play in.

Hard Cheese is a simple, yet moderately unconventional, CTF level. It’s mostly horizontal, even moreso than most levels, and although you’d expect this to lead to a ton of awful bottlenecks, it actually works very well. I am not, however, especially fond of the eyecandy here – it feels like it was sort of thrown on in a rush, as the style is rather inconsistent.

Now, on to the levels that missed the proverbial mark in some way or another, but still manage to be (barely?) playable.

I’m going to start with Knight FurnFace. This is one of the most graphically striking levels ever made for JJ2, as the tileset lends itself to FawFul’s use extremely well. Unfortunately, this lovely eyecandy comes right back around and bites the level in its wrinkled 8-bit rump: it’s rather difficult to tell whether or not something is on layer 4 or 5 (or 3 and 2 in a few especially bad cases). This means lots of bumping into things and falling through things, probably into one of the level’s pits. Mercifully, a pitless version is included, but the level still requires memorization before it can be properly played.

Neglected Future is a level that, while nicely balanced and well-designed overall, has a lot of annoying quirks. I could describe them, but 30 seconds of playing will demonstrate.

Myopia is a level which suffers primarily from being too large for any fewer than 10 players, and even with 16 it feels rather too large, especially given the nature of its layout. If JJ2’s netcode were reworked (hey, BlurredD…wait, where are you going? BlurredD?) to support more connections, I have no doubt that this would make for some great 12vs12 games. But that hasn’t happened yet, so this level is not especially useful.

Radioactive is simply too boring to be given any more than an acknowledgement. Unlike pretty much every other level in the pack, there’s nothing unique about it, and when that’s added to the fact that it isn’t exceptionally well-made in the first place…

Alien Heart. This level has been played a lot, and I’m pretty sure that’s only by dint of there being so few Domination levels around. Although it’s playable, it’s not very enjoyable, especially with things like that seeker powerup…

Hideout Center I never got the chance to actually play, since Flag Run isn’t exactly the most popular gamemode around. It feels a bit too complicated for it, to be honest.

And now the part you’ve all probably skipped to: the bad levels. There’s just no excuse; they’re bad.

Favourite Park. Horrible usage of sucker tubes, and a limiting layout, combined with mediocre eyecandy.

8th Heaven could simply be described as an idea that seems good but isn’t. The towers make gameplay feel both limited and repetitive, and the pillars of light are downright silly.

Downtown Maze is pretty aptly named, because trying to navigate the level is like trying to navigate a maze. In other words, worst layout ever. Wait, no it isn’t; I forgot about…

Klassieker for the SnOOzE. I don’t like Snooze very much now, because if he hadn’t existed, we wouldn’t have to suffer this level. The bases are extremely close, the layout is small and very strange, and the level is terribly unbalanced – what were you THINKING with that seeker powerup?

Electric Factory…well, it’s not a serious level, and so shouldn’t be treated as such. I honestly can’t imagine anyone wanting to play it though.

But I’m basing my rating on the levels that ARE worth playing. And the pack is definitely worth downloading, just don’t be disappointed when the later levels don’t hold up to the standards set by the earlier ones.

PurpleJazz: I was going to add a textured background, then realized that I couldn’t think of anything that would fit. I could’ve just added a generic JJ2 textured background, but I doubt anyone would have actually used it.

sonicnathan: Which tiles are missing? PM me if you have to. Also, the animations in JJ1 have as many frames as they do in the tileset – you can’t complain about missing tiles AND complain about them taking too much space. Well, you can, but it doesn’t make much sense. I guess that’s what quick reviews are for, though.

I can’t really bring myself to give this a higher rating than I am. It’s a very small level, presumably intended for instagib, but it fails to pay attention to the necessary details in making such a level. It’s too open. Way too open. This means that the gameplay is thoroughly chaotic and luck-based, unless you have, say, a 10ms ping time.

This level is done. I’m not going to make any changes other than extremely small ones.

I knew when I uploaded it that it wasn’t very good, as you can perhaps gather from the description, but I didn’t feel I had any ability to improve it.

Fairly well-drawn and usable…but that’s it. There’s just absolutely nothing notable here, nothing that separates it from other tilesets. Nonetheless, it IS a good tileset – just not a great tileset.

Rather too similar to Happy Semiconductor for my tastes. I found the way the same tiles are on multiple layers to be rather confusing with regards to figuring out whether or not I can stand on something. Eyecandy is all right, but is rather messy and could be much improved.

A very nice level, but also extremely small. Play promises to be quite chaotic due to having three powerups and a shield all easily accessible. The eyecandy is extremely well done given the tileset used.

This is a somewhat typical, moderate-quality CTF level. To give you an idea of how typical: it uses Desolation.

It is rather small, and has one of the simplest layouts you’ll ever see (though “simple” shouldn’t imply “bad” here).

The eyecandy is…acceptable. It’s rather messy, to be honest, especially with all the random numbers in the background and the all the tile mixes, but it is a controlled messiness, and there are few tilebugs. The level doesn’t look bad, per se, but it is not about to make you gaze at your monitor in awe.

The gameplay is where the level’s true flaws begin to show. It contains two full energy carrots extremely close to each other that are rather too accessible for my liking – there are warps leading to them that are about twenty tiles from the bases, Spaz can jump straight up to them, and Jazz can do the same with the sacrifice of a single RF missile. This is not really ideal. Large games would see the carrots utterly swarmed, and duels would likely last for an unbearably long time with the easy access. At the very least, can you say “camp spot”?

The level’s flow is also far from being in a position to win any awards; expect to be constantly running into arbitrarily placed blocks.

In the end, this level is playable, but only barely. It is definitely not suited for “serious” games.

EDIT: The two easily-reachable carrots have been replaced with a single one that can no longer be obtained through jumping; you have to use the warps. This solves one problem but introduces another: it now uses an exit warp, which has two targets – one above each of the powerups. Powerups being a natural focus point, it is hard to restore your health without having it torn right off again. This, frankly, is not really an improvement. Also, 15 seconds is rather a short respawn time for a full energy carrot…

EDIT, ANOTHER ONE: In a lovely display of Can’t Leave It Alone, the warp has been done away, in favor of a one-way trigger gate. Unfortunately, this makes the camping aspect worse than ever; one can simply stand under the carrot tube and shoot forever, resting with the comfortable knowledge that they’ll hit any bloke dumb enough to try for the carrot. Furthermore, it’s now possible for someone to stick their fat rabbity butt at the end of the carrot tube itself, potentially followed by a wallclimb that will make them essentially invincible, while retaining the ability to rain death on any warp users before they even get the carrot. While this is only useful for that player’s team if the player actually has a team, it remains a complete gamebreaker.
To be fair, though, the carrot’s respawn time was at least made more reasonable. Or rather, what would be more reasonable if it were at all feasible to go after the bloody thing in the first place…

“MSPainty” is a good descriptor for the tileset. This is to say that it doesn’t look very good. It is very, very poorly drawn, I am afraid, and this ruins any hope of people using it in a level; therefore, I consider it nigh-useless, but nonetheless offer a three since it at least had a little bit of effort put into it.

spzr: the included tileset, being 1.23, has a limit of 1020 tiles. And while it indeed scrapes that limit, it doesn’t offer thousands of tiles. Yes, I am an anal-retentive dipwad.

This is a level that appears to have been made for Battle duels, or perhaps an ODT. It has a filename that prevents you from “directly” hosting it, and a password. These two things combined mean that it’s kind of a pain in the (-) to try it out.

As far as the level itself, it has a few considerable problems. A player could hide in the starting areas, rendering LRS and Roast Tag highly undesirable here, and an ODT (the only thing that would really be appropriate) impossible. All the stuff – powerups, two carrots, and some gun 9 ammo – is in the center of the level. Thus an already unbearably tiny level is focused further into its center, essentially a black hole. If a player is not in the center, it is either cowardice or blunder. Or LRS, but as I already said, LRS won’t really work here because of the starting areas.

I can’t really rate this level. It’s too small to play properly in anything except an ODT, but the starting areas make ODT impossible. It is, by and large, unplayable because of that.

RAIN SUX. LEARN HOW TO MAKE GOOD RAIN.

This is, as you may have guessed, a battle level made with the Castle 2 Night tileset. It is also not an especially good one.

Eyecandy in this level is unpleasant. There are background tiles in the foreground, and some tiles even appear in both. This is not pleasant.
The walls are particularily bad; they consist mostly of the ordinary wall tiles, slapped together fairly lazily. Most parts of them consist of less than a quarter of the wall tiles available, making them look plain, yet sloppy. Furthermore, in the areas where tiles are more variable, tilebugs abound.
The presence of the pillar tiles and slope tiles inside the walls completes the emsemble. It could be likened to a painter who, after completing a particularily uninspired work, proceeded to eat five pounds of grapes and vomit all over it.

Chains (which, by the way, haven’t been put together right) are slapped all over 3, with little regard for their location.
The background walls consist almost entirely of straight lines, and don’t use the shadow tiles properly.

Perhaps that’s enough about the level’s graphical side; there isn’t actually quite as much to criticize about the level’s actual gameplay.

The first thing to note is that the level is filled with ammo. There is too much. Way too much. Frankly, this level would be near-unplayable if indeed anyone bothered to play it, as it would simply be a cesspool of seeker spamming.

The level’s layout…well, it isn’t BAD, exactly, but it’s certainly not that good. It’s pretty generic, and, honestly, rather restrictive. The only really annoying thing, however, is the level’s single vine, which is an ungodly, aggravating, dead-end if you approach it from underneath. (You could RF climb up, but this is nearly impossible for Jazz, which, I suppose, basically creates a bias.)

On the whole, this level strikes me as being thoroughly uninspired. There isn’t much else to say.

Napoleon: I don’t have anything in particular against Robee. As it happens, however, I don’t like this level.

ANOTHER EDIT: Just to clear up the whole start position thing: when online, JJ2 uses Jazz Starts first, then Spaz Starts, then the MP starts. PLUS HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH IT.
(Yes, with careful placement of start positions you could very well determine the order in which people start. Unfortunately this is unpredictable and glitchy as crap, and will almost certainly break if you don\‘t do things exactly right, and is fairly pointless anyway. Prefer to use warps, though it should be pointed out that netiher one resets when the level cycles.)

To prevent a possible exploit and a possible error (which may have been fixed in Plus but that\‘s beside the point), you should always use Jazz Starts, and ONLY Jazz Starts, in Battle, Treasure, and any other game mode that doesn\‘t have teams.

minmay: the flow here isn’t very good
™DanZeal: just like the UT map ;p

That’s just about all you really need to know about this level. It is, perhaps, a bit too faithful for its own good.

The main problem with this level is probably the fact that it’s godawfully difficult to move around without constantly bumping into things. Other than that, it seems perfectly good as a level, though it’s definitely one for smaller games (anything bigger than a 3vs3 is asking for trouble).

Overall there’s not actually anything really notable here; ammo and carrot placement is fine, no major problem spots. (I barely exceeded the character limit for a quick review, so I’m trying to justify it now.)

I think I liked DZ’s other recreations of UT maps considerably better than this one. Still, it’s worth a download if you need another CTF level for whatever reason.

Very well drawn, but missing a lot of things. There isn’t really enough foreground eyecandy, and there’s a blaring lack of certain necessary gameplay tiles – vines, destruct scenery blocks, et al.

This level’s passable, I suppose. It has a very simple but balanced layout, without any huge problems.
My main complaints are twofold: the eyecandy is pretty subpar (the background is basically torn right out of the example level), and the powerups are much too close to each other.
All in all, though, a playable level.

Apparently comments get deleted after a few days in JAZZ2ONLINE 2009, so I’ll write a full review.

Obviously, this is the last of five episodes of the Devres (or whatever you want to call it) series. And, obviously, prior episodes were very well received by most everyone, as well as this episode, for that matter.

Nonetheless I think it suffers from a lot of flaws, and those are what I’ll mention in my review, since it seems everyone else has covered everything else.

The first level reminded me of Dreamless (a much lower quality level pack). This was because I fell into a death pit after three seconds, and because it was full of float lizards. Fortunately, it turns out that unlike in Dreamless, all but a few death pits have a lot of warning of their existence (the beginning of the first level is one, and pretty much all of Tempest is another; expect to die once and exactly once to not knowing where they were). Nonetheless, I did not really appreciate this.

One thing to note is that the pack is filled with time-based challenges. Your first experience with this will be rushing up the tower to the first boss, but once you reach The Fortress of Floods you’ll see what I really mean.
Honestly I think these were overused and overdone; if you say that they wear thin after about three of them, then you will probably agree with the rest of my review.

I can’t help but be annoyed by the number of people praising the originality of the challenges. These are not the first implementations of these concepts. Mike made extensive use of frogs in his Platform Jumping levels (they’re not on J2O, to save you some time looking for them); BlurredD implemented the rock-riding in a very similar way with the Jazz Unleashed mini-pack; Violet used rising water in a race level or something (okay, not sure about this one). I really don’t need to mention where the inspiration for The Fortress of Decay’s bridges comes from.

There is also a lack of variety in enemies. Expect floating suckers, float lizards, Tuf Turtles, and more floating suckers. You are going to get sick and tired of shooting ravens. Sick and tired.

However the important question is always is the pack fun? And that it is, as the hordes of 9.7 ratings will tell you. Quite a few things are going to annoy you to no end while playing, but the fact is that this is a really, really well made pack despite its flaws.

Again, I’m not bothering to mention the stuff that’s really great because everyone else did. Download the pack and play it. That is the recommended course of action.

You can pretty much tell by the screenshots that almost no effort was put into this level. Not really any redeeming features here.

Also, the level is TSF, despite being marked as 1.23.

To make a 1.23 version would be trivial at worst. There are plenty of things that could be cut out without heavily impacting the tileset (such as the varying background colors, mine cart colors, etc.).

However, Gus shouldn’t feel pressured or obligated to make/not make a 1.23 version. It’s all up to him.

EDIT: Now updated with PROPER REVIEW! As follows:

The first thing any prospective downloader is going to see will be the screenshots, and they are bound to notice what really separates this tileset from pretty much every other tileset out there: its style.

It’s a great style. The whole tileset looks very “soft,” almost as if made of clay, and I love the way it looks. I love it.

And the tileset itself? Not at all typical, and very, very well done. The most notable part of this set is actually a single group of tiles: they are, for gameplay purposes, simple slopes, but graphically, they create an impression of depth and distance, allowing levels to look almost 3D.

There are plenty of things in the tileset that scream out “mine,” from the cliffs, to the tunnels in the cave background, to (of course) the mine carts. This tileset deserves extra recognition on the point that its theme holds together really well; there are many tilesets that have no real central theme and fall apart on that point.

The tileset has a great variety of decorative tiles. Moss, chain lifts, broken chain lifts, rocks (destructible ones even), fences – all manner of things, really, and I love it. Again, it deserves to be mentioned. Especially the cabin/storage shed; a great touch.

Tile layout is solid; not exceptionally user-friendly, but it’s not a nightmare to use like Fortress of Forgotten Souls. Nothing really special on that front, so I’m not going to go far into it. The same applies to masking; there might be a few bugs but I didn’t see any.

My only real complaint about this tileset is the gold: it doesn’t look like gold and it doesn’t look good. It looks like honey or something.

Again, at this point: very, very well done. Deserves a very high rating.

OTHER EDIT: I’ve found one considerable bug in the mask since posting this review. Specifically, the outdoor hole tiles (but not the indoor ones) are fully masked, making them pretty useless. I’ve lowered my rating for this, as it’s quite serious, and shows no signs of being fixed.

SUPER MEGA NEW EDIT: Oh, so the bug’s been fixed. So, hey, extra .3 points, yay!