Jazz Jackrabbit 2 Online

you have become really very good in drawing!!

Fantastic looking tileset, it fits the JJ2 aesthetic almost perfectly.

In a community that sometimes seems to strive to produce the most beautiful landscapes and luxurious buildings, it takes some courage or at least ingenuity to aim for something bleak, desolate, and screwed. This is a mixture of War Torn (by theme and perspective), Casualty Mines (by palette and, in some places, shading), and just a little bit of Baltyville Sewers. The aliens from Future that have spent the last however many years hoping to go mainstream make another appearance here as well.

Standout artwork here includes the tentacles, the ruined walls that curve away from the camera, the cozy lumpy background cave, the intricately pixeled background hills/buildings, the bones, and the barbed wire. The green slime is colored and outlined well but is a bit off if you look at it too closely. Giant Dreempipes-style tubes are always cool and these are great examples of the form, with lots of cracks and bones and things to keep them from being nothing more than gradients.

Weaker elements include the pillowy garbage bin, the depthless floor texture, and honestly the palette, which is mostly a little too obvious and a little too discrete. The ruined buildings suffer the most here, looking for all the world like they use the sprite palette like in Shrunken Jazz. A soft tint to the tileset could help, to make the disparate elements blend together more, as could gradients that start and end in slightly different hues, so the player’s screen is a little less obviously a blotch of this color on top of a blotch of that color.

Right now, despite how comparatively unique they are, the ruined houses are letting the rest of the set down a bit—I also wonder if taking a trick from Haunted House would help, allowing some foreground walls for layer 3?—but this is a moody, elaborate, and downright innovative set with lots and lots of different options to try out, both the main elements (walls, caves, tubes, houses, slime, aliens) but also the sheer wealth of incidental drawings (tires, furniture, electrical poles, barbed wire…) to keep a level feeling fresh and interesting and not-machine-generated.

Really liking the continued commitment to tiny level layouts! The visuals are genuinely innovative, and the powerups seemgood. Maybe meteor shouldn’t have so many little rocks? The middle left is interesting for being super defensible (very hard to shoot at) but also containing no carrots or powerups, so the areas of interest get spread around.

+ eyecandy, looks
+ multiple access paths to the base and most points on the map
+ second carrot being accessible from an underwater path (great execution)
+ balance, ammo placement, choice of weapons

- nothing really, if I have to nitpick then the invisible walls above bases that don’t play with the otherwise, fully consistent, great map

It’s nice to see a level that knows so clearly what it wants to focus on: in this case, gravity flipping. Once the player gets out of the outdoor tree area, they embark on a gravity flipping adventure, navigating the same large space from two different perspectives in search of a trigger crate to remove a column of buttstomp scenery blocks. (Why the lock block graphic was unavailable is unclear.) It’s complex and puts a lot of faith in the player’s navigation skills, though there are a few places where the layout doesn’t seem to fully anticipate how much wandering the player might do… the top left has a rogue sucker tube in the ceiling, which is bad if your gravity is flipped, and it takes too long to flip your gravity upwards if you flipped it back downwards at the wrong spot.

Once you get past this first big section, the level becomes more linear, although a few more trigger crates do turn up, and likewise another (much shorter) gravity flip sequence. I almost wonder if the level’s order of events might have been better reversed, so the player could encounter the simpler stuff in the latter half of the level first, learning the level’s vocabulary in a more linear environment, before having to navigate the more complicated puzzle at the start. A similar questionable order of presentation occurs with the beer pickups, which temporarily reverse the player’s controls. They’re a neat idea and manage to avoid being used too frequently, but the very first one is directly above a pit of spikes. A softer introduction in a no-danger environment would probably have been better.

The last main non-vanilla piece of the level, besides the gravity and the beer, are snowflake pickups, which serve as a basic collect-‘em-all goal and use nice seasonally appropriate graphics. It’s a little confusing having both snowflakes and coins in the same level, but otherwise these are a fun addition to the JJ2 formula, and it’s good that the HUD lets you know how close you are to completion. They’re mostly placed fairly, except for a few in a vertical area that I tended to shoot down while aiming at ravens, which wouldn’t have been so bad if my gravity hadn’t been reversed at the time. The pickup sound effect kept making me think there were demon enemies nearby, though. The intro level also does good work on the snowflake front, showing the player (in a low-stress environment) that there’s no gameplay effect to collecting them, only some green HUD text and a sense of completion.

I haven’t mentioned the intro level before but yeah, this isn’t actually a single level, there’s also an intro and a boss and an outro and a silly bonus level. They all do their respective jobs admirably well and so it’s harder to find things to say about them, but here are some random thoughts: Drawing an entire alternate graphics set for an existing JJ2 boss is impressively ambitious. The steam events in the intro were kind of annoying. The sucker-tube-based dialogue (a holdover from Faded Story) still feels weird, especially immediately after a clearly scripted explosion sequence. The sciency base area from the intro/outro is a bit quaint but quite nicely put together. The bonus level is good and it makes sense it’s not trying to develop itself into a full map with a detailed layout and stuff.

Graphically everything in this upload is quite solid, as you’d expect from someone with a background in multiplayer levels. The palette and tileset choice are distinctive, leading to memorability, and everything has enough detail to be attractive but not overwhelming. A few of the spikes do cross the line into nearly invisible, though, but mostly it’s hard to know what to say about the visuals other than that they’re good. Same goes for some of the more linear gameplay sections I didn’t really dwell on above… yeah, they work fine, there’s a good mix of enemies and layout styles, platforming and vines and open spaces and caves and all that stuff.

had fun playing this, and the story made me smile/chuckle, so kudos for that.

Well over a year after Faded Story, a new SP from Lynx is finally here! While it appears to be a pack, it’s more or less a single level accompanied by a prologue, a bossfight, an ending, and a weirdo bonus thingy.

Anyway, the opening scene is done pretty well and introduces a brief but funny storyline about a monster escaping, using old fashioned foreground tiles to display the dialog. It also introduces snowflakes that you can try to collect for completion. The flakes don’t appear to serve an additional purpose other than ‘doing it all’.

The actual level is mostly vanilla but does focus on several scripted elements. Antigravity can be activated and deactivated by touching arrow signs and is essential to navigate the level. Beer is a custom food item that leaves you stoned (err, drunk) for a few seconds. Apparently the Jackrabbits are not used to drinking alcohol at all.

Ammo is the usual with Bouncers and Toasters being the most prominent. Enemies are Turtles, Bats, Ravens, and Hatters. With each of them being placed thoughtfully enough to pose a bit of a challenge. Sometimes backtracking is required to switch gravity or to get a Trigger Crate that couldn’t be stomped earlier with antigravity on.

I don’t like the floor/ceiling spikes that much. In a flash, they are pretty hard to distinguish from nearby tiles and I often got hit by the sides where I didn’t expect the mask to be. That said, the short spinning spikeboll section was a highlight. Overall, playing on Hard the level still felt fairly easy for the seasoned player, as I completed it with all snowflakes and the coin warp in less than half an hour.

The boss is mostly a sprite swap of a vanilla boss that only adds a barrage of smoke rings coming out of its top. You will understand why once you play it. Not a lot more challenging than the original boss but funny nonetheless.

Clearing the ending level will take you to a little bonus. A tiny level that has you fighting and collecting laundry (sprite swapped enemies & food). While funny, I survived the onslaught for several minutes and couldn’t find a way to clear it. That’d mean there’s no formal way to end the level other than getting a gameover which registers your score.

Anyway, it’s a very accessible, relatively newbie friendly, mildly scripted level that I recommend to everyone. Not the most original, but plenty of thoughtful level design is there.

The faded story part 2 is here! Everyone!
btw, who scripted these?

Is this the Halloween Hare level pack?

[No it is not. ~PurpleJazz]

It’s hard to find things to say about single-screen levels! This looks like it has the right sorts of layout opportunities for melee attacks. The fruit are slow enough I don’t know anyone will get 100 of them before everyone is dead, with so few ways to hide. The colors aren’t too common and they look very nice together. Hooray for waterfalls.

I like the atmosphere and the color scheme. I feel like the bricks are a bit mismatched with the tileset though. I also think the weapon balance is slightly off, with Fireball PU outclassing Blaster PU. The layout is decent, although the pit is probably unnecessary, and the hanging wooden beams were a bit obstructive. Overall, cool level though!

dragusela768943 ..I edited and paletted that tileset in mlle.

Cmon guys who removed rating xD

Wow! Good job, I like this particular tileset. How do you make one?

[Rating removed: this is a battle level, not a tileset.]

This is great and I love that it exists. There are flaws, to be sure, and Violet’s review does a good job of pointing them out. But there is a lot in here that is really creative, there is a solid story (by JJ2 standards), the levels are atmospheric, and overall it is challenging (for me) but fun to play. I’m really looking forward to episode 2.

Interesting map with unique visuals. However the recolouring of Aztec2 tiles has been poorly done. The level surely revolves around the Roller gun and it’s given powerup creating an hectic atmosphere altogether. This only applies in larger games, not in duels.
Download recommended

There’s a lot to like here, but not a lot to love. It’s also hard to escape the fact that Faded Story Part 1 has essentially two halves, so let’s talk about that.

The first half (and also a little bit at the end) is all scene-setting and story. At one point you’re free to walk around a village for a while, entering buildings and talking to other rabbits, but there’s no gameplay to speak of and you get the sense it only uses standard JJ2 physics for the sake of convenience. At one point you seem to have the chance to buy some powerups or food, but as far as I can tell there’s no way to actually get money; it’s just the appearance of a shop because villages have shops.

More memorably there are a lot of cutscenes. The episode opens by gradually zooming in on a closed book, then the book opens up and you get to turn the pages by pressing right. The art isn’t amazing but it’s neat that there’s art at all—even the more technically sophisticated cutscenes from devres only ever bothered with (lots and lots of) text. Design schematics for the robot boss are the highlight here. Some non-scripted JJ2+ features also make appearances: big flickering lights and fast warps for the doorways and dialogue sequences. Oddly some conversations use standard text events instead of the custom dialogue system… perfectly serviceable but less consistent.

The other half of the episode are the three or so levels of JJ2 gameplay, specifically the kind of JJ2 gameplay that thinks trigger crates (and occasionally trigger zones) are the best thing ever. There are also still some nods to storytelling in the more gameplay-oriented portion of the pack, with transitional areas between tilesets, but at this point it’s mostly about finding ways to head to the right side of the level by hitting this or that trigger crate and then figuring out what path it opened up.

Trigger crates do make up a lot of the level design, but not in a terrible way, and really the level design in general is pretty good, even if I did seem to find a couple sequence breaking moments. It’s much more in the style of custom JJ2 levels than official JJ2 levels but still acquits itself well, even if it does lean maybe a little too heavily toward enemies that are very hard to see. Not a lot of walking enemies to be found here. There’s pickup variety, some swinging platforms, some good spike placement. Areas with different graphics use somewhat different styles of layout, contributing to the feeling of these levels taking place in real locations, which is always useful for a story-based episode. I don’t remember playing any good float-sucker-buttstomping sequences recently, and this episode delivers a couple of them.

What I don’t quite get is why the two halves—the story and the gameplay—are mostly so separate. Multiple j2l files are devoted at the start to introducing the player to the systems for entering buildings, having conversations, and so on, but the plot is actually quite minimal and all those things disappear completely the moment you start shooting enemies. Why aren’t there NPCs to talk to in the gameplay levels too? What was the point of making something so innovative (if still a bit unpolished) at the start if it doesn’t end up being important?

I’m glad to see this is only a first episode. It’s generally perfectly enjoyable to play, even if its level design does mostly fall into familiar patterns from other custom JJ2 maps, but there’s room for it to grow as well, as it becomes more comfortable with its innovations, more willing to play around with them, and more invested in art quality. There’s still room for Faded Story to become the next Demon Invasion.

From contest feedback:

+ Fairly original and inspiring level theme
+ Original choice of weapons
+ Generally solid layout with lots of potential if some improvements were made

- The big white blinking clock in the middle of the level is quite harsh to the eye, even if visually original, it could be less distractive
- Some things like the vines blend too much with the level primary colors, makes them hard to see
- Powered up roller weapon seems a bit overpowered in this map, it’s flying around literally everywhere
- The tiles could be used better in the sprite layer, looks a bit dull visually

/ Playable only in 3v3 apparently

Copy pasted from contest feedback, note this is rated on its suitability for 2v2/3v3

+ Unique PU scheme
+ Layout actually complements roller very nicely
+ Intuitive flow

- The PUs in the top corners feel a tiny bit too isolated
- Some strange asymmetry at parts, namely missing oneways at 64,24
- Bumpy ceilings at 74, 14
- Would have preferred slightly more meaningful ammo placement, less gun9 perhaps? Could have also been cool if gun9 was easier to use to shoot the top PUs
- I don’t like the use of floatups instead of slopes

Other comments:
I have only tested this in 3v3, but assume it’s too big for 2v2s
Roller PU might seem really clowny for CTF, more a criticism on the gun than the level
Also firework gun seems quite fitting for the layout
For the record, this would have been my 4th vote

Always nice to see new Singleplayer content on J2O. It’s a pretty solid pack, and I think it deserves a full review so here it goes:

Faded Story takes place after the events of JJ2,the story is nice and innovative. Although in the first level when the book is approaching, I would have set the Warps on Fast aswell as the cycles between story related levels.

The gameplay in the levels is somewhat oldschool but fun, the enemies are placed well and the use of the hurt events make them quite challanging(played on Hard) so I like what you did there. However some enemies are placed in a way that you would most likely get hurt. But that isn’t much of an issue since it’s very minor. The bossfights are rather easy, though. But that’s just my point of view I guess.

The eyecandy used in the levels in this pack is nice, but not perfect. At certain points some of the levels the eyecandy just looks the same(Waterfalls) or is all over the place with random placed tiles(Weird steel things). In general, the eyecandy and visuals of the levels in the pack is solid, but deserves some room for improvement. The music choices are fine and fit the levels quite well. My favourite levels are Snezí and Nightmare. Speaking of Snezí, there seems to be something wrong with the music, because I can’t hear the track. But it might just be me.

Would I recommended this? Sure! The story is nicely written, the levels are well made in terms of gameplay and is sure challanging. The only downsize of the pack are the visuals at certain points in most maps, it doesn’t look ugly, but could be done better. Give it a go, and I am waiting for episode 2.