Jazz Jackrabbit 2 Online

This is a review for just one of the levels in the pack, namely Ancient Abyss. I have nothing to say about any of the other levels at this time and because they’re not uploaded separately, there’s no better place to leave an individual level review.

Every once in a while I bring up how much I love Ancient Abyss, generally followed by weird looks from the audience and no acknowledgement. Hardly anybody remembers this level. It’s a weird experimental stage in Snooze’s level design career that could’ve only possibly made sense in 2008 and we’ve all since moved past it. Well, I haven’t. I remain forever impressed by what this level accomplishes.

The initial impression you get when you first see Ancient Abyss is that it’s a regular, simple CTF layout. A bit claustrophobic, with little room for premeditated combat maneuvers, and full of places to safely camp. Even at this point it’s easy to notice that the visuals are wild. There’s a clear disregard for the concept of tiling. The intended use of tiles is treated more as a suggestion than anything. Tiles are flipped and layered together to create complex abstract patterns. Does it look good? You could argue for either side. The sharp edges, or so-called tilebugs, might bother you, and it takes some imagination to see this as more than a mess. But I think it takes both courage and genius to attempt something like this on such a scale, and to me the result is impressive, interesting, and pleasing to look at, at least for the most part.

But that is not what’s really distinguishing about the level. What is, is the massive over-100-tile drops on either side of the level. Every time you take one of these, you spend about 5 seconds in freefall with nothing to do but look at the scenery quickly passing by. If you find these, fall down one of them, and you’re highly unimpressed, it’s hard to explain what’s so special about them, but let me try.

What you have to understand first is that making a multiplayer level doesn’t always have to be about making a level that facilitates competitive gameplay. Nobody will tell you this, but there’s no rule that a level must strive to actually play well. It can, and that’s great, but that’s only one direction of design. Deep down, all levels are art, and while most aim to be pop—easy to understand and wide in appeal—there’s plenty of room for exploration of other genres.

From a gameplay perspective, these 5-second drops seem like a terrible idea. Nobody reasonable would put them in a multiplayer level. No other level contains something like this. And that’s what makes them so great. Falling down one of these for the first time is a jarring, confusing experience, only amplified by the unusual changing scenery as you fall. You could never see it coming. It feels like finding a hole in the level geometry and dropping out of bounds, halfway expecting that your journey will end abruptly in the bottommost row of the level with no floor to stand on. The terrain looks even weirder and more foreign and it feels like you’re somewhere you shouldn’t be, exploring the unknown. When has another CTF level ever offered you that experience?

Of course, the problem with this perception is that it is entirely personal. To you, these drops might be 100 tiles of wasted space with a regular old piece of layout at the bottom. I can’t possibly convince you that it’s more than that, just as I have no way to convince you that a piece of abstract art is worthwhile or a song that sounds like noise to you is a masterpiece, actually. All I can say is that the experience exploring this level mattered enough to make me write this review—years after seeing it for the first time! It felt fresh and different, and it stuck with me.

So is Ancient Abyss a good CTF level? Well, no. At least I don’t think so—I never managed to convince anyone to play it with me and I had little desire to do so myself. Even aside from what amounts to 5-second cutscenes you have to watch every time on the way to collect power-ups, it has 3 full carrots and 2 small ones, which has got to be way too many regardless of the player count, not to mention how easy to camp they all seem. It’s cramped, hard to navigate, and probably just not very fun to play.

But also, yes. It’s unique and catches you completely off guard, and offers an experience unlike any other CTF level, so long as your mind is open to something else than playing another regular game of CTF, and willing to see it as art and not another toy. It’s not a good idea executed poorly, it’s quite the opposite: this is an idea that never had a chance to work, executed incredibly well. I think that perhaps not everything has to be "good" in order to be good.

Cute level!

This is a strange level pack. For one, it starts with a wordy tutorial for basic Jazz Jackrabbit 2 mechanics that speaks to the player like they’re a baby who’s never played not only JJ2, but any video game, providing insight such as, and I quote, “to shoot press SHOOT button.” This approach of placing signs with lengthy messages explaining standard mechanics continues far into the level pack, telling you, among other things, how every new standard weapon you collect works. It’s somewhat baffling; aside from a snarky remark very early on, it’s played too straight and goes on for too long for me to perceive it as ironic, and this information appears useless not only to anyone familiar enough with JJ2 to venture into user-generated content, but also, honestly, to people who have never played the game before. “Show, don’t tell” became good standard practice in teaching game mechanics over a decade ago; JJ2 itself does it, in a sense – it never tells you how a weapon you’ve just collected works, you fire it and find out! I want to give the author the benefit of the doubt and trust that this is just a weird aesthetic choice, but it does have the unfortunate side effect of wasting players’ time. It also has a side effect of making me cringe whenever attempts at comedy show up in the messages – the sense of humor in the pack is one that used to be really popular in media maybe 20 years ago, exhausted its potential back then, and nowadays sounds dated, unoriginal, and somewhat infantile to me.

What’s odd is how much this tutorialization of game basics stands in stark contrast with the actual difficulty of the pack. You should most likely not pick this up if you’re actually new to the game. I didn’t struggle with it personally but I can recognize that this is a fairly hard campaign. An unexpected difficulty spike occurs right in the middle of the pack, in River Ride or River Die, which is the only level that made me river-die, and a couple times at that – it appears that the level designer recognized this too, as it’s the only level that provides you with a free extra life right at the start, as if to say “this is the part where you die a lot.” Most deaths in the pack will probably be delivered to players by instant death pits, which is pretty much par for the course in packs that contain them. For credit where credit is due, I thought the pits were marked exceptionally well, with some sort of sign indicating danger almost every time they would show up. That said, despite being a feature that doesn’t make an appearance in the main JJ2 campaign, somehow they’re one of the few things the tutorial messages won’t actually tell you about, go figure (aside from offhandedly mentioning “the deep chasms” while discussing buttstomps).

Something else the tutorial messages say is to collect everything you can, for a simple reason: points. I think that’s the crux of one of the major issues with the pack. While the levels aim to encourage exploration by being full of optional paths and secrets, in practice there is little of value anywhere. The main pickups used throughout the campaign are gems, food, coins, and sometimes ammo and carrots. Gems are not given any new purpose via scripting, and the sole purpose of food – the sugar rush – is actually intentionally stripped away. Collecting enough coins allows you to access a bonus warp at the end of each level, which grants you access to… more gems and food, generally, plus usually one extra life. As far as I can tell, only one weapon power-up shows up throughout all these levels, and it’s on the main path where you can’t miss it, so that the pack can stick a tutorial sign next to it. JJ2 has so many ways to reward exploration – power-ups, shields, bird cages, invincibility carrots, even ammo that’s otherwise rare – and maybe I just somehow threaded the needle and missed all that good stuff, but I have not seen a single one of those things. It is 2022; “points” will not do. Watching a number go up is only exciting if that number serves a purpose. Additionally, I counted about 3 invisible, unmarked points of no return created with the Limit X Scroll event, that, if you unknowingly trigger them, may cause you to permanently miss pickups on optional paths, for no obvious reason, further hurting the exploration aspect of the gameplay. On the bright side, carrots, while not exciting, made the exploration somewhat worth it on occasions, and I applaud the choice of coin warp prices, which are just lenient enough that you should never miss them if you dedicate time to exploring, even if you fail to find some of the coins.

Now that my main gripes with this upload are covered, on to some of the positives; the levels are gorgeous. All of them are consistently beautiful. At times this is done to a fault – sprites can easily become hard to see in some locations, but it’s not a prevalent flaw. They are also very consistent in the selection of JJ2 features they use – if something shows up, it will show up again, no weird one-offs. Yet the pack doesn’t quite get boring and tries to mix and match different mechanics, present them in different contexts, and every once in a while break up traditional platforming segments with an airboard section. I can appreciate that. Most levels are fairly traditional, but several have a prevalent and more noticeable theme in their mechanics, especially the aforementioned River Ride or River Die. Aside from occasional rolling rocks thrown at you without warning at ridiculous speeds, and the rather mundane rock pushing sections, the challenges are quite fair and enjoyable. Collapsing scenery is used often enough that you know to expect it, and it’s quite consistently used on the same set of tiles. Usually masking is also what you would expect – there are some exceptions to that, but nothing too bad. Some of the early levels have slopes that make you run down them, and those are a weird choice that probably could’ve been cut. I never quite got used to what looks like normal JJ2 slopes making me suddenly accelerate, and they’re never used for anything interesting.

Lastly, as a note that didn’t fit elsewhere, at least one midway level where you can save your game would be a massive quality-of-life improvement. This is a fairly lengthy pack and making players finish it all in one sitting is asking a lot.

Overall, this was a bit of a mixed bag. The part of me that enjoys platforming and combat was reasonably satisfied, and the explorer in me was disappointed. As a veteran player I found the difficulty to be adequate, but was constantly confounded by the presence of tutorial messages treating me like I’m using the computer for the first time. I’m giving this pack an 8 because the things it does well, it does very well, and it’s worth playing through. Even experienced JJ2 level designers can learn a lot from this. Just try to only learn the good things.

Almost all of these are terrible for instagib.

This level provides an interesting environment to explore and fight in, but it is beyond too complex to be playable in CTF and thus fails to fulfill its primary purpose. At 6 very wide floors, the only way it’s possible to find a flag holder who doesn’t want to be found is through sheer coincidence.

Design-wise, Violet’s best level to date. You can clearly tell that this was made by someone familiar with actual game design philosophies. My biggest issue is that the boss fight would be a perfect time to put players’ skills acquired during the level to the test, but none of the cool custom mechanics taught earlier are brought back for it.

@DennisKainz: Yes.

This is the only tool publicly available on J2O (aside from J2E Creator by the same author) that provides the much needed functionality of creating and editing j2e files, so you kind of need it if you want to have custom episode files without writing your own software. So it was received well because it was software we needed. That is not to say it is a good tool for the job.

You open this up and you’re greeted with an awful, awful user interface that is hard to call an improvement over a console application. First thing you’ll do is probably try to open some file, either a j2e or a bmp, you’ll type in the file name (don’t count on a Windows file selection dialog), and you’ll be told that nope, that file doesn’t exist, because you’ve included the file extension like any sane person would do, but J2E Editor actually appends .j2e or .bmp to whatever you type in, so it just tried to open Home.j2e.j2e.

With some effort you get used to that and you load the bitmap you wanted. You know JJ2 uses palettes, so your bitmap already has the menu palette, so all that the software needs to do is take your indexed image and put it in a j2e file. Well, it won’t do that, because your menu palette is not the menu palette it wants. The menu palette it wants is in a file included with the software in a format that nothing opens. If you manage to open it, you can find out that the palette is blatantly wrong. Literally all you have to do to obtain the menu palette from the game is take a screenshot (F12 key) in 8-bit color mode and extract it from the file, so how the author managed to obtain his very discolored version of the palette escapes me. I sort of imagine that he tried to approximate it via trial and error until it more or less looked right.

But that shouldn’t matter, right? It can just take the bitmap, see that it’s indexed, and put it in the file as it is. No, what it will actually do is make sure the provided palette matches exactly, and perform color reduction if it doesn’t. Why? Just why? You take my picture crafted exactly for the menu palette and it’s ready for you to just put directly in a j2e file, all you have to do is zlib it, yet you have to convert it to your crappy wrong palette?

Writing text into prompts relies on key press events rather than character input events, and if you know what those two are, you should be cringing right about now. This means that handy functions like copy/paste will not work, long presses of a key will not produce multiple characters (including that you have to press backspace once for every character you want to delete), and what non-alphanumeric symbol you obtain by pressing a given button is very much dependent on your keyboard layout. Whenever I have to type in something like a dot, I just go through every symbol on my keyboard with and without shift because who knows which one will happen to produce a dot. This is an actual downgrade from a console application.

Oh, and here’s another fun fact, I wondered why I can’t edit the episode’s number in the list. So I looked into the readme, and apparently it’s the only thing that you interact with not by clicking on it like everything else in this program, but by pressing numpad plus and minus keys. Nothing indicates this, you just have to open the readme to find out. It was a matter of adding something like “±” to the user interface and it wasn’t done.

This is terrible software. It’s bad at interacting with the user, and it’s bad at its job of just taking some data and structuring it into a j2e file, but I guess the files it eventually produces are at least correct in the sense that JJ2 opens the j2e files and graphics software can open the bmp files it exports, so it’s not hopelessly useless.

5/10

Pros:
+ so far the only thing to be made by Violet this month
+ not sure if I helped write the ferris wheel code but I probably did
+ JJ to the power of an imaginary number
+ no tilebugs regarding Eva’s feet
+ animal husbandry and retention
+ practically no packet loss
+ This is not a test.
+ progressive non-binary enum Gender { Male, Female, Random }
+ edit: the story premise is the second gayest internet ever
+ edit: not a zero think, although by some that could be seen as a disadvantage

Cons:
- horrible
- deviates from the standard
- probably generates a security hole Someone Else will have to fix
- multiple ways to trafton
- the buildings are upside down imo
- only enemies experience orgasms
- now I can’t find my Nintendo Switch anywhere
- idling counter-intuitively not a valid strategy against the first boss
- edit: (-)(-)(-)(-)(-)(-)(-)(-)(-)(-)
- edit: boss dog

Final score: 861/839. Not bad but leaves -22 points of room for improvement.

(Acronym edit. -Trafton)[This review has been edited by Trafton AT]

I always looked at this tileset and thought that it has completely no theme. But upon working with it for a while, I discovered that actually it also has no usability. Some good art, but not put together well. Tons of tiles are missing, some don’t appear to have any use, and their placement in the set makes no sense.

This is one of my favorite duel levels. I find that thanks to very low carrot spawn times it enforces uniquely fast pacing. A nice degree of ammo control can be achieved but is not impossible to overcome. And the layout provides interesting fight environments while remaining fit for the theme.

I like this level a lot. I think what it’s missing is some more interesting fight environments, as currently no matter where you encounter an enemy, the fight is likely to go down more or less the same way. I also think the theme could benefit from more distinctive looking eyecandy, since at times it feels like a mismatch of colors and materials.

This level proves its excellence time and again during JDC events. The gameplay is in no way innovative but it is good and what battle events needed. The weakest point is the visuals – in particular it can probably take a while to learn navigation in the upper parts of the level due to areas looking samey.

This is an enjoyable level that’s somewhere between old-school and modern battle design. Despite having a lot of small platforms, it forms a very coherent layout. At this size I’d like to see some PU types repeated though, or faster spawn times. The tileset is used creatively and supports a strong theme, but not without tons of tile bugs.

By no means a bad level, but very plain in every meaning of the word. The winding S-shaped corridors are overused and having to go through them all the time gets tiring fast. I dislike both carrot placements but the top one is particularly bad. Lastly, it’s not atmospheric enough. No parallax layers. It feels like a soulless collection of blocks.

Likely the best tileset by Disguise, one that actually shows some artistic skill and includes a background that won’t make you feel embarrassed about placing it in your level. Not a whole lot of eyecandy and a few flaws here and there but overall a very decent set. Would be nice if warm weren’t the only tasteful palette though.

This is a great, versatile tileset when it comes to basic ground tiles. There are numerous ways to get creative with them. The glaring issue is that it has almost nothing else to offer. It’s as if the LMAT team challenged themselves to create a tileset without inputting any artistic prowess, only basic geometric shapes, CG textures, and gradients.

The decorations available for the ground are masterful and it’s good that there are two types of ground. That’s about it; the perspective on slopes is Picasso levels of messed up, the trees look like a bunch of flat Play-Doh pieces, and the background ones look like they were drawn by somebody who only knows trees from tales.

This tileset is functionally sound but not really attractive. The 3 types of ground all look very similar, and everything has a somewhat generic, unrecognizable texture. One could say it’s possible to tell what things are meant to be thanks to their shape, but not what they’re made of. Other than that, it’s just not a very interesting set.