Jazz Jackrabbit 2 Online

This SP level is so Lori based… and a-maze-ing!

I’ll give 7.5/10.

Also, in my opinion, you could insert Tweedle boss from Stone Abyss instead of Rocket Turtle.

Nice atmoshpere of this level, good eyecandy and perfect for Battle matches.

I’ll give you 8.5/10.

Download recommended

Tomatoe (sic) Garden plays as a series of distinct challenges, mostly separated by warps, yet curiously without any checkpoints. There’s a gravity puzzle, a search for the hat with the right colors, some trigger sceneries to go back and forth between, and a hunt for an invisible fast warp event. The hat challenge I’m kind of sour about, because it meant that for the rest of the level, I stopped being able to trust warps as unambiguously sending me forwards. For all the level’s visual decadence, it can be hard to tell different areas apart, so I wasn’t always sure whether I’d completed the latest challenge or taken the wrong warp somehow. Checkpoints or some other good marker of success (such as NOT warping directly onto an enemy) could make a difference here.

The other challenge that bothers me is the trigger scenery one, which uses both trigger crates (okay) and invisible/unmarked trigger zones (not okay). There’s just no indication I could find that says what door has opened when or why, other than a general feeling of alternating between going left and right. But the gravity puzzle felt fine, the block pushing felt fine, other stuff felt fine, it’s just I didn’t take so well to the stuff that seemed to revolve around the player guessing.

And yeah there are some enemies, mostly hatters, but they never strike me as a main focus so much as a general feeling of “single player levels are supposed to have enemies.” (Probably a good thing, though, because, again: no checkpoints.) There’s even a caterpillar toward the end, probably just because Psych levels tend to have caterpillars. The enemies do (all?) seem to regenerate after a while, which is a clever choice in a level where the player can be expected to wander through the same areas a lot, trying to guess where to go next.

It must be said this level looks really good, both before and after the palette swap that inexplicably uses a separate .j2l. There’s something of beta psych in the blue&purple sky, but the broader green&burgundy (and later green&purple) palette feels original and also well executed, especially in combination with all the mountainy background layers, the vines, the waterfalls, and so on. This is a lush and vibrant take on Psych, which is no surprise from an author with a known talent for visuals in general and visuals in Psych in particular.

Although the speed with which this level was made doesn’t really show up in the graphics, there are some moments it’s harder to forget in the gameplay. Zone events are simply not as easy to find and touch as they should be, even in cases where it seems pretty clear that this is unintentional. Text signs can only be read while jumping, the fast warp is easy to miss, and of course trigger zones are total mysteries. There’s a hat with no layer 3. You can get stuck in spikes, or at the top of the level if you don’t guess the right way through the gravity puzzle. All these little glitches could be corrected quickly, but as Primpy says, they’re reminders that this wasn’t thoroughly tested.

I haven’t mentioned Lori at all in this review, even though this level was ostensibly made for a contest about Lori-related levels, and… well, yeah, “ostensibly” is the right word. You’re intended to guess you’re intended to play as Lori, and that’s the most connection there is here. Playing as Spaz does let you double jump straight to the end of the level, so there’s some gameplay justification there, but not in a way that would have been hard to patch out. Even without scripting it would have been easy enough to enforce playing as Lori using start positions and morph monitors, but that didn’t happen here either. Even the second level, which introduces purple to the palette, doesn’t take the opportunity to introduce yellow as well. No matter its other merits, this level’s Lori theming feels no more than an afterthought.

its kinda empty in my opinion.

xlmpeace- i think its too dark ,its hard to see floor. For ctf is inportant to see well terrain. Many mask bugs on wines, right carrot is placed too close to base, its unfair for other team. xlmwonder- eyecandy is pretty good, but there is bug at 15,25 you stuck in wall if you touch it :/ i would recommend you to start to use one way event too.

It’s an okay level. The palettes used are pleasing to the eye and the gameplay can be fun at times, but it’s very obviously unpolished and not thoroughly tested. Overall, a short, vanilla-esque experience with some scripted elements.

WOW! Nice pack! I really enjoyed your first xlm levels, even when I still remember the moments of inserting darker version of your previous level, “Diamond Cutter Factory”, without your permission.

By the way I’ll give you 8.5/10.

Pack looks awesome! Great work!

7.7/10

Also, why did you take screenshots using Single Player mode?

Well, the level and the eyecandy look pretty good. Dragusela, I’ll give you 8/10, and Download Recommended.

Also, I’m gonna make alternate version by using other recolor of the tileset. We’ll see…

EDIT: Finished Alternate Version but without permission. But how to merge it – I don’t know. Next time I will be careful, otherwise – ban hammer…

Well dragusela768943, the level isn’t so bad. The atmosphere and usage of MLLE are a pretty good cause. Also, the DiambKarstV2 tileset edited by PurpleJazz are mainly created by Pyromanus, P4ul, Violet and Epic. And to other J2O users – I recommend to download and play this level.

Anyways, I’ll give you 7.7/10.

While the tileset use is, as ever, detailed and competent, I don’t really see the reason for making almost the same layout so many different times from scratch. I suppose I encourage the gameplay experimentation—give flagholders much less room to hide in—but worry the recommended maximum of 10 players is probably much too high.

There’s something cynical about these maps, with their flat, linear, open spaces and single weapons only. They seem to leave combat up to chance without giving players opportunities to hide behind walls or otherwise position themselves strategically. The graphics (besides the pink sky) are generally detailed and lovely, but the maps are so flat…

I really like how this looks—the colors work well together, the leaves are charming and make the screen look alive without obstructing visibility/gameplay—but not how it plays. There’s definitely room to explore how to use Hurt events (and other things that hurt you) in multiplayer levels more, but I don’t think this is the answer. Right now if you want to get the carrot, you have to take a sucker tube out of the carrot room and into a bunch of Hurt events. I’m really not sure what the reasoning here is but it’s not enjoyable.

I wonder if this level was only tested in local splitscreen multiplayer, not internet/LAN multiplayer? When played in local splitscreen, the various destruct blocks respawn after a while, and even a bunch of enemies(!) appear, but neither of those things happen otherwise.

The layout is odd for a battle level. There’s only one start position, and from it you follow one of two linear paths (one of which loops back around to near the start) in search of powerups. There’s not a lot of stuff to pick up between powerups—and most of what there is to pick up is gems, which are useless in battle—so battles may end up clustering around those powerups as players who already have them defend their positions against their recently respawned opponents. The flow isn’t the smoothest around: you can bump into walls and stuff trying to progress along the linear paths, and again there are Hurt events to contend with.

I dunno. I’m reluctant to opinionate too much about the non-technical aspects of this level, as it’s clearly aiming for a very different style of gameplay than most battle levels (especially when the enemies work), so how reasonable is it to judge this by the standards of a more traditional style that it’s uninterested in emulating? Maybe if I got some more people together to play this with, we’d have a good time advancing along the level’s main linear path, kind of like an assault level. Maybe not. But the graphical experiments going on here are certainly pleasant to look at in the meantime.

There are two things about the designs of these levels that really stick out to me, so let’s start there.

The first is the trigger crates. There are a lot of them here, and I think some are handled better than others. The ones in the first level are both pretty bad… you have to take a long path to find each one, then take the same path again in reverse after hitting the crate, only all the enemies are gone and you’re just running around to fill time. To get to the first crate, you got bounced by some horizontal springs, but on the way back you have to avoid them… I’m not sure whether this is an intentional challenge or confusing, but I couldn’t find any other path to take.

By contrast, there’s a trigger crate in the second level that is handled much better: hitting it takes you into a new area of the level, with new enemies and other challenges, and you have to navigate all those things before you get back to the main flow. That’s actually interesting, rather than filler.

This may be my personal preference talking, but I think it’s probably better to ensure the player sees the trigger scenery blocks first, before they go hunting for the trigger crate, so they know where they have to go back to. Otherwise you get moments like the second trigger crate in the first level, where the path branches in two directions, one with the crate at the end and one with the blocks at the end, and which direction you choose at random dictates how much time you’ll waste on backtracking.

The other main thing here is that there are points that seem to expect the player already knows how to beat the level. This is a common/easy level design mistake: the person making the level obviously knows where everything is, so why doesn’t everyone else? The less problematic cases of this include unlabeled warp events, or mandatory coins (in the secret level) hidden inside walls; the more egregious case is in the third level, where you twice need to shoot some normal-looking walls (using bouncer bullets!) or else you’ll fall into a bottomless pit. (The pit doesn’t even hurt or kill you, so you have to cheat or else quit the game.) I’m comfortable saying that this is just objectively bad design. (Some of the trigger crate hunting also feels to me like a bit of mind-reading, but I recognize that some players may be more into hunting than I am, so that’s just opinion.)

Those are the main offenses of this pack. There are a few things that are just buggy—bad masking on the ends of vines or poles, springs that don’t keep your x/y speed properly—but whatever, those are easy fixes. Giving the player a whole bunch of powered-up seekers right before facing Bilsy renders the fight meaningless, but it’s never been easy to design a compelling boss battle/arena.

Apart from those focal points, though, I think these levels are decent. There’s a good mix of enemies and pickups, with various nice features like stomp/destruct blocks, springs, vines, and poles to mark that these are distinctly JJ2 levels. Trees and lakes both make appearances in places to make different parts of the levels feel distinct from each other. Sometimes there are little platforms and sometimes there are larger walls… the walls look a bit flat at times but that may be a consequence of the tileset choice. I think in general the moment-to-moment gameplay is pretty solid here, but some more thought needs to be put into determining what moments the player encounters in what order, and how the player is supposed to figure that out.

Treasure Hunt is a multiplayer gamemode, but this level seems to be designed to be played by only one person.

The big problem is the giant pit… if someone falls in it, there’s no way to get them out. if they have any gems, those gems are lost for the rest of the game. If they have a lot of gems, that means it’ll be impossible for anyone else to get those gems from them, and nobody will be able to win.

The other problem is there’s no ammo at all. It’s certainly possible to steal gems from other people using blaster alone, but it’s not very fun. A big part of the draw of multiplayer JJ2 is using different guns for different situations, and that’s not available here.

Other than that, the level looks nice enough, if a bit cramped in places. The walls don’t always tile properly but that’s a common thing with Carrotus/Easter. The background idea is neat but doesn’t quite work right when played in 800×600. Treasure hunt levels and Easter’99 levels are both rare. It’s just a pity the pit makes the level functionally unplayable.

Thanks for the screenshots!

I decided to review this level, I like to do that by seperating the review into two parts. First I want to talk about what went right and secondly what I think could be better. That said, let’s start the review.

What did it get right?

Inside the freezer has a theme that builds upon. Using the multiple tilesets, it mixes the cold blue tint frozen feel of the level together with the steel/industrial feel of a freezer. The music works for this level and everything together makes this levelname quite believable.The colouring in this level is pretty, because it blends well together (although a small nitpick would be that the dark blue platforms are a bit too dark and the fans in the background are too bright). For the most part it has a nice offset between a brightness in sprite layer and a dark background. This creates depth in the level. Always try to think of what you want to place together and what you want to seperate, make distinct choices so the player can more easily understand the level. This makes the level look more clean and professional. I hope to see more of that in the future. So far from all Dragusela’s levels on J2O, this is his best implementation of theme and it really shows he grows as a levelmaker to make distinct areas and adds tiles within that theme.

The gameplay, for a some parts definitely looks better than your previous levels. This level feels easier to move around in, it is more open, it is more practical. It flows better than other levels. This doesn’t have uncounterable camping like before. I can remember in your first levels it used to have powerups in extremely safe spots, luckily this level doesn’t have that.

Where is room for improvement?

Although this level does some things right, it also shows a lot of room for improvement. There’s a certain randomness to a lot of the level aspects, which makes it feel chaotic and unprofessional. It’s a bit much to name, so I’m just going to start a list of things you can expect to find in Inside the freezer: Secret warps that have no visual indication (I had to look in MLLE to find it), ground tiles that also unexpectedly become foreground tiles, inconsistency with one-way floors, confusing layer speeds that move slower than the layer behind it, ceilings that randomly stop existing and turn into foreground, floors that could be just floors but instead has bridges behind foreground scenery (also had to look in MLLE to find this), the unconvincing perspective that a huge background is seperated from the sky by a mere 1 tile waterfall, inconsistency on whether steel support beams are masked or unmasked, missing masks to prevent players running in the edges of the map, missing mask edits for inferno to stop players from standing near ceilings, dead ends without any pickups, springs that don’t reach high enough or are too high or are missing completely, the copter respawning too slow, pulse lights that don’t do anything because the ambient lighting = 100, ricochets causing bullet desyncs in multiplayer. Wew, this is quite a lot… I think it can be helpful to look into these again and imagine how this is from the player perspective and what you can do differently. I think most and foremost: Try to stop combining your layer 3 with layer 4 this much. They are not interchangeable and shouldn’t be. Layer 3 should only really be mixed into the playable area to hide small areas or for small scenery, not hide entire masked layouts.

Anyway, I hope to see more levels and I hope to see you continiuing levels, because I can definitely see some improvement.

I really like design of this level, i like how you combinated mez with inferno, also that Fanolint parts in backroud.But the problem is that you didnt put Jazz 1 Fanolint.j2t (not JJ1 Fanolint) in your file (that made many tilebugs and mask bugs) so please try to reupload it with that tileset (btw you can in mlle package in zip your map). I found few tilebugs even after i added that missing tileset.
Map looks playable.I like how you added fire ball pu.
Nice map, good job

The tileset Carrot1 (2).j2t is missing from the zip (although I assume it’s very likely just a duplicate of Carrot1.j2t).

Jazz 2 shipped with three original battle levels—all titled Battle Game, so we’ve had to refer to them as Battle1, Battle2, and Battle3, to reduce confusion—and the first one is by leaps and bounds the most popular. Probably the most popular official multiplayer level of all, with Diamondus Warzone’s star somewhat reduced these days. Many people have reimagined Battle1 over the years, ranging from simple edits to Charnel Keep to Higher Fragging Rate. An important part of how Battle1 works, at least in my opinion, is its reliance on (nearly) one-way pathways and its refusal to let you go everywhere at once. This level does the same.

Tavern of War is fundamentally an oval that you travel counterclockwise. Different points along the outside of the oval have various reasons to stop and explore—powerups, carrots, warps—but that’s all local. If you want to go somewhere else, for example if there’s a player on the opposite side of the map you want to hunt, then you need to travel the oval. If there are only two of you and it seems like therefore you’ll never reach each other, then you try to trap the other player by turning around and moving backwards along the oval to intercept, at least to the extent possible. This isn’t how every custom battle level works by any means, and it probably shouldn’t be either, but it’s a great idea to encounter from time to time.

Eyecandy is generally pretty solid. I think the author is comfortable with layers that move at the same speed as layer 4 and should start experimenting more with background (and even foreground) layers that move at other speeds, to see what effects can be created that way. The chosen tileset offers a good variety of fun features like arches and curtains and stairs, and the level goes all out in scattering them around. Maybe it’s never perfect, but it’s nice to look at without ever becoming so detailed as to obscure the gameplay.

Can I say that the finer layout details are always the best they could be? No. People generally try to avoid enabling access to the far left and right sides of the level, because of the weird running physics there, but this level puts up no such barriers. The powerups have specific ways you’re supposed to access them but don’t seem to realize that they can be shot by bouncers instead. There’s a generating carrot behind layer 3, so it’s hard to find if you’re looking for a carrot but also confusing if you’re already at full health and don’t know why you went into a dead end. The top right area is all kind of empty. There’s a text sign with no text on it. But these are all surmountable issues that a bit more editing work could handle, and really, I think what’s more important here is that this is an interesting idea for a battle level, a layout that generally supports the idea, and eyecandy that keeps things enjoyable without getting in the way.

Definitely my favorite of the author’s uploads so far.