Jazz Jackrabbit 2 Online

I had the opportunity to play this level online yesterday and come with a few suggestions. It pleases me to see that Battlespaz actually listened to me :)

Introduction: A medium-sized or so battle level using the Corrupted Sanctuary tileset by Disguise. As the author says, it’s well suited for 4-8 players, and it’s not far too large for a duel.

Eyecandy: The eyecandy in the level was decent. There are no stunning views, nor are there any major flaws. It mostly looks good; flicker light is used to create a certain kind of “feeling”, which it does, together with the “holes” in the wall (layer 4 background). The eyecandy tiles included in the tileset are all used properly, and in my opinion the level doesn’t get boring to look at too fast. A bit right of the top carrot there’s an empty space with no real eyecandy, which looks somewhat empty if you look at it (won’t be noticed while playing, though). Oddly, the layer 8 background isn’t textured. This doesn’t really bother too much, with the lightning effect, rain, and clouds (or whatever it is.. mist? smoke?) giving a decent enough look to the background, but a textured BG might still look better.
8.5
Item Placement: Items are generally placed quite well. There are 3 powerups in the level. The bouncy PU, which is placed in a 1 tile wide deadend path which can be VERY risky, is placed well in my opinion, since the sloped nature of the level makes bouncers very powerful here. The blaster powerup is in a less risky spot, and is in fact quite easy to get to and get away from, which speeds up the gameplay some. The seeker PU is in a bonus warp; there are, as the author mentioned, two bonus warps in here (GJ Battlespaz, definately an improvement) and just enough coins for them to be somewhat hard, but not impossible, to reach. The other coinwarp leads to an area with fastfires, carrots, and food. Yes. There is food in the level. It is placed in similar places as the ammo, often around and in between ammo pickups, and neither adds nor removes much of the fun of playing. It’s not that hard to get sugar rushes here; I’m not sure wether that is good or bad, but the food, just as the ammo, is generally placed well, as in it looks good. Coins are also placed well. There are 2 carrots exluding the ones in the coinwarp; the top one is well placed, while the one near the hooks seems to be put there just because the level needed a carrot (actually it’s useful at times, but its position seems rushed). The seeker/food pickup area around 36,42 looks overcrowded, and the bouncer PU is maybe a slight bit too close to the carrot, but those are the only real complaints I have in this section.
8.2
Gameplay: The gameplay of this level seemed good in online play. It’s usually easy to get around, with springs where they are needed, but not so much that the player feels like he/she is getting pushed around. Hooks are used extensively in the level, but they are placed well enough not to hinder the gameplay (although they might add a very, very sligth Spaz bias to the left part of the level). Around the middle bottom of the level there’s kind of a spike pit, which will take 5 coins from you if you have that when you fall. The sloped platform area above the spikes thus become a place where you are careful with your jumping. Sometimes, the spikes can be used as an escape route, but someone might be camping the exit, so it’s not wise to use it without reason. There is some kind of a dead end at the bottom right of the level, if you enter from the spike area, but it’s hard to reach from that direction (you need to fall down on a small platform and then jump over a short gap) and easy to defend. In addition, if you have coins, you just might be fast enough to get in the warp, get out, and have your enemy trapped in there.
There are a few camping spots around the level; the aforementioned dead end is one of them. The top area, with the carrot and bouncer PU, is another; the third, and best, is the are left of the spikes, where you get warped both from the coin warps and if you fall onto the spikes. Most of the fighting seems to happen around the hook area on the left, where some coins and one carrot are placed – it’s also a place from which it’s hard to escape fast – and around the bouncer PU/carrot; that area is open with multiple escape routes. The other parts of the level, aside from the spike area, are mainly diagonal, semi-narrow corridors, which are well suited for escaping in, or swift assaults. There are holes in the ground (not just tiles left out; the holes look good) that you can use to duck from enemy fire; this works somewhat well agaisnt the powered up blaster if you have seekers you can fire out of the holes, which makes the blaster PU slightly weaker in the level, another reason for it to be easy to reach. Overall, the gameplay is quite good, although the springs in the bonus warps are useless.
8.5

Music/Tileset choice (no rating): Both were, in my opinion, well chosen; the music fits both the level and tileset well.

Bugs: BattleSpaz seems to have fixed any major bugs this level had. At 12,24 you CAN get stuck with Spaz, but only if you actually try. This won’t subtract any points as you won’t get stuck in it unless you actually try; it’s only slightly easier to get stuck in than any normal narrow area.

Comments: I liked the spike area. It changed the gameplay in a positive way.
I also liked the general feeling of the level. It’s good to see you changed anything that needed to be changed (read: that I thought needed to be changed).

Overall: A solid battle level which is very good for a second upload. D/L recommendion, definately.
8.5

Basically, this is a color edit of Inferno.
It doesn’t actually look too bad at all. It has a metallic yellow shade on the tiles, which looks pretty good. It also has a nice textured BG. Snow doesn’t look good, however, neither do poles or pinball events. Also, just as in normal Inferno, the masking isn’t that smooth.
And I’d like the yellow to be a bit more towards orange, even if gold generally doesn’t. Not much, but just a tiny bit.
Overall I think this is a pretty decent edit, and worth a download if you ever use tilesets like Inferno and want some originality in it. The colors aren’t bad, and they blend pretty well.
I won’t rate this for now.
D/L recommendation; Well, I guess so. This isn’t anywhere near a must-have, but it’s good enough. One more color version is never wrong ;)

A solid paintish tileset with a realistic halloween-theme.

Main Tiles: Most ground tiles are there. Not all combinations of ground types are possible (I mostly miss the 1*X tile platforms). There’s a textured BG; it looks good on 16 bit and only very slightly buggy on 8 bit mode. There is also a “layer 4 background”, although you’ll have to use layer 5 for it and it doesnt look that good. Vine, hook, and hurt events are there; the V-pole is missing, and so are the sucker tubes. Text and exit signs are here, and so are the arrows, in two shades of red which allows for animation.
Uh, and there are also some destruct blocks (or something), although these look pretty ugly.
->You can make levels with this tileset, although you can’t be too innovative with the tile placement.
6.2

Eyecandy: This tileset has a decent amount of eyecandy. While the tileset itself is city-themed, the halloween theme comes in here. There are pumkins, animated glowing carved pumpkins, gravestones, bones, weird shape monsters.. a neat layer 6 or 7 house background and a neat layer 6 or 7 weird-shaped-monster background. There’s also a house for layer 4. There’s rain, and colored tiles that allow for lightning.
-> A good amount of eyecandy for such a small set. Well done.
8.7

Extras: There are blocks with letters, which can be useful sometimes. There’s also a nice trigger door, but this has a major downside: there’s no part for it in layer 3, causing you to go in front of the whole door when you’ve finally unlocked it, looking pretty stupid.
There’s also a “happy halloween!” tile, which cheered me up somehow.
-Not that much, but at least some.
+0.2

About the different versions: I probably liked the evening version best, it was the most Halloween-ish in my opinion. The night versions were a tiny bit too dark for my liking. Purplejazz7 has been smart enough to darken sprite colors too for them (actually the midnight version looks pretty neat if you make the texture BG fade into a bright color)

Overall: A good, slightly above average tileset. If this really is your third, you sure have potential. Keep up the good work. It could be improved on alot, but it still is nice (and probably better than anything I could manage)

(6.0+8.7+0.2)/2=7.55. +0.2 for the “feeling” in the set->7.75 rounded down to 7.7
D/L recommendation: Yes.

A very useful program!
For people like me, who have over 1000 levels in their Jazz2 directory, this is a must-have. It’s pretty easy to use, too.
Pros: Simple layout, easy to use, etc. Good that it shows wether they are passworded or not, and wether they show in HC levels or not.
Cons: Only mode available is Single Player (well yea. but still); the levels are in a seemingly random order which apparently can’t be seen. It always jumps to the same file if you type a single letter, so you need to type multiple to find what you’re looking for.
Overall: One of the most useful programs around. A must-have. Some features are still missing (mainly the order thing), which prevent this from being a 10.
A solid 9 from me.

First impression: Wow.
The song begins with quite original drum beats, which switch quite fast. Then the real tune starts. At first, I wasn’t really sure what the remix was, really. But then the familiar tubelectric theme came in, but very well redone. It fit well into the intro (which remotely reminded me of the saw in Chrysilis, somehow, though they are very different). These two then interchanged for a long time. At about 3:25 the sound got a tad worse, but this quickly ended, and in came a slightly square pad-ish part (which came from the intro bass in Tubelectric). This then continued back into the part that came before the bad part, but with minor differences. The song ended in the same style as the Tubelectric theme was introduced.
Pros: Much remixed, and original (+0.5). I like the trance-ish style of the Tubelectric (+0.2), which slightly reminds me of the Deckstar remix by Luigi Elettrico.
Cons: I didn’t really like the part at 3:25. Just didn’t fit in with the rest, IMO. (-0.2)
Overall: A very good tubelectric remix; one of the best out there.
A whopping 9 points.

For no apparent reason, a long review coming up. If I don’t notice everything, whine at me and I’ll add it to the review.

Palette changes reviewed as if they were changes in themselves from the original, not just palette changes from the edited version of the tileset.

Edited versions of 3 Epic tilesets.
First impression: Hmm.

Noka – Labrat:
New stuff: Textured BG (Ok), Destruct Scenery (very nice), Tubelectric Float Up things (Ok, but the blue doesn’t fit the tileset), three signs (Ok, but too bright), “Warp Target” (well whatever) for the “warp poles” (good). Tiles are rearranged, some to the better, some to the worse. Can’t really tell without
making a level.
Palette Change: apparently not much
Overall: Pretty good. Normal labrat with added stuff. Better than original (more tiles = better, if they are usable at all), but not very original.
7.9

Noka – Labrat 2
Basically the Labrat Night version of the tileset.

Noka – Labrat 3
Basically the Labrat 3 version of the tileset.

Noka – Labrat 4
A palette change with generally brighter
colors, red spikes, somewhat less blue in the tubes, turquoise “walk-ground” for the metal ground and turquoise background.
Overall: A bit too bright. Turqoise was odd.
7.2

Noka – Labrat 5
A palette change with generally brighter colors, red spikes, green “walking ground and brownish ground”, green metal ground with silver “walk-ground”, more blue in the tubes, green belts, and greenish eyecandy. The silver foreground pipes are very bright.
Overall: A bit too bright, especially the foreground pipes. The silver on the metal part would be very good in a generally different color scheme (read: without the green)
7.5

Noka – Labrat 6
Ugh. VERY green ground, with blue “walking-ground”. Most other stuff made
bluish-grey, too. Spikes are still red.
Overall: Hmm. The blue looks cool in some part.. BUT, the green doesn’t.
6.7

Noka – Tubelec
First impression: wow, nice.
New stuff: LOTS. Nice H- and V-poles with good wall attaching (I honestly never noticed Tubelectric didn’t have that), a damn lot of eyecandy (some of it ripped and edited from Agama’s Sirius/Dimensions), belt tiles (wow), signs, textured BG (doesn’t really fit the tileset though), destruct scenery (very nice), signs, blue flasing background from Sirius/Dimensions (very similar to that of JJ1) with tiles to match, warps and stuff, new animated spikes..
and lots more.
Palette Changes: apparently not much.
Overall: Wootage. VERY good.
9.3

Noka – Tubelec 2
Tube Electric Night version of the tileset. The flashing background looks bad in turqoise, so do the destruct scenery blocks and the arrows. Textured BG is weird, but actually not that bad.
Overall: Not as good as the previous
7.9

Noka – Tubelec 3
Bluish version of the tileset. Bricks are blue, a bit too blue for my opinion. The yellow blocks and some of the metal looks pale, somehow. The “digital ground” is a lighter blue, which is kinda nice (a bit too happy for the theme but I like it). Strangely, the textured BG isn’t blue at all. The destruct scenery blocks look OK as green.
Overall: Hm, decent.
8.l

Noka – Tubelec 4
Ugh. Grey, pink, turqoise.. eh, what?
The flashing stuff is a decent dark orange.. which doesn’t blend in.
The radio thing background is “dark pink”.
Overall: Ow, my eyes.
6.7

Noka – Tubelec 5
Gray bricks, strange yellow metal. Background stuff is greenish. The sparkly animated things look very bad.
Overall: The grey bricks are pretty nice, but the yellow is just ugly
7.1

Noka – Tubelec 6
Pink bricks, green “digital ground”. The flashy stuff looks nice. Textured BG is red, the radio stuff is red and has too high contrast somehow. Belt looks quite nice in this shade of blue.
Overall: The pink isn’t too bad actually. The green “digital ground” is.
7.1

Noka – Letni
First Impression: K.
New Stuff: Mostly everything. Hurting stuff (WOW), textured BG (not too nice), ripped tiles from tubelectric and labrat (well why not.. but ugly colors mostly), gray ground (very nice), signs, magnet things (the animation is leet)..
The layer 4 BG is nice.
Alot of tiles ripped from Noka’s other two conversions – they don’t look that good all of the time – and alot of NEW tiles that own.
Overall: If it weren’t for the ugly colors, this would be really good. The leetness of the new tiles brings up the rating.
7.9

Noka – Letni 2
The “digital ground” looks better but the stuff that was orange and now is brown is ugly. The grey ground looks pretty good like this, too, but the hurt things are kinda pixelated.
Overall: A bit worse than the other, except for the main ground.
7.5

Noka – Letni 3
Main ground is pale brown and pale turqoise, doesn’t look good. The layer 4
BG is too bright, doesn’t look good. The grey ground looks ok like this. Hurting stuff doesn’t look as good. Magnet animation is acceptable. The flashing Sirius tiles are far too pale.
Overall: Sorry, I hate this tileset.
6.2

Noka – Letni 4
Main ground is blue and purple, looks nearly decent. The layer 4 BG doesn’t blend in with it. The originally grey ground probably looks the worst so far, but still is neat. Hurt stuff is worse than in any of the others. The sparkly things actually look better than in the other versions. Colors of most things just don’t mix.
Overall: Not good, but not the worst one.
6.5

Noka – Letni Monochrome
Much the same as Noka – Letni, except the main Jazz palette has been changed. Some of the tiles actually look better than in Noka – Letni, some look abit worse.

***************************************

LABRAT, SUMMARY
Not too bad. You added some tiles, and rearranged the tiles. Ratings could’ve been higher if you’d rearranged the color changes too, so the contrasts between colors wouldn’t be as big inside one edit.
7.2

TUBELECTRIC, SUMMARY
Very good. If you’d only been a bit careful with the color changes, this could’ve been a very worthwile download.
The added tiles fit well in most of the time.
Big, fat 8 because the first version rocked.

LETNI, SUMMARY
Aww. This could’ve been very good, too, but somehow, you never made the main ground look that good (you seemingly attempted at the colors of the original Letni, but they didn’t fit well in with the Tubelectric tiles). The custom tiles were great.
6.9

OVERALL
With a little more consideration about the colors, this could’ve been a great upload. It wasn’t the worst ever, but the colors kinda messed it up.
7.2 – Not an average. The weird colors pulled down the rating.
D/L Recommendation: Yes, if only because of the Tubelec version, which is great.

Pointless post: Helsinki is the capital of FINLAND, not Iceland. And it wouldn’t be that snow-covered anyway :)

Hmm.

Ratboy, are you rating the level?

Anyway.

Graphics: 10/10

Beautiful. It looks good, jazz-2-ish, and has alot of eyecandy. IMO, the background is better than a textured one. Nothing wrong here. Textures are near perfect (256 colors??!?) and the hieroglyphs look real. The light and dark tile parts allow for sunray-style looks which look really good. Both the inside and outside tiles are great.

TILES INCLUDED: 9.5/10

Though it lacks some tiles, like sucker tubes, the tiles it has make up for it. There is enough eyecandy to make anyone happy, there are retracting spikes, hooks (or something similar), fire (for those who like lightning), layer 4 background..

USER FRIENDLY: 7/10

This is where this tileset fails. It is, IMO,extremely hard to use. Of course, it is possible, but you have to search for nearly every tile. The layer 8 background is also hard to create. Fortunately, this doesn’t pull down the rating much since it is near impossible to create a good and user friendly tileset.

OVERALL RATING (not an average): 9.7/10

As you may guess, the graphics add alot. This is, simply, one of the most beautiful tilesets ever made. Download reccommendation; even if you will only play the example levels, it is worth it.

First time i review music…

The song begins military and goes on in the same style. I cant here Tubelectric anywhere. This continues for (my guess) about a minute. Then, there comes another “pattern”, which is not tubelectric but sounds good. Finally, a very fast tubelectric theme appears. Overall, sounds good. But i don’t know what kind of level i would use this for.
________________________________________

It takes too long before you can hear the tubelectric part of the music. Before that, everything sounds good but is repeated too many times.
After a very long time the “beginning theme” comes again and mixes with the tubelectric music, which actually sounds very good and bring some point to the long build up time.

Starting with: 8.2
Too long time to build up: —
Good remix (when we come that far) +
Tubelectric combined with build-up part:+
Repetitive -

Final rating: 8.1, rounded up to 8.2 for no apparent reason except i liked the tubelectric part. Download recommendation.

Bjarni doesn’t seem to listen to the reviewers….add “”.s3m” works in jj2 if you add .s3m after the filename in jcs” in your explanations…maybe he will understand then.

The password is NOT incorrect. It only fits for the first extra level, and it is case sensitive.
:(

YAY it uses my tileset i must d/l it immediately…
Review coming later
Happened to me: jj2 messed up :(

here’s the review:

BATTLESHIP EPSILON
My tilese! yay! 10 for this level! (joke)
This level has great eyecandy – maybe a bit too much – and is quite hard. Here i also noticed a specific warp system, the warps all looked the same. That was actually a good idea.
While the eyecandy is good, the level because of it sometimes was too confusing (i had to search for the path for quite long). The level is however very good, and the author has clearly put a lot of effort into the eyecandy.
Who said my tileset is bad? It isn’t, only the example level sucked. Here’s a proof of it: this level makes very good use of the tileset.
The boss was interesting, but not too hard, good for a hard level as this as you probably are damage when you come to the boss.
A 8 for this level.

HE** (as the author calls it)
This one also has good eyecandy, but much less than the previous (phew). It looks really hellish, and i particularily liked the caves. Here i also noticed the warps which were quite similar to those in the previous level.
In the beginning of the level it seemed very easy, but as i played more it became harder. Here i also found many trigger crates, which often forced me to think where i saw trigger blocks, which actually was quite good.
The boss was a single bilsy, with a well-fitting end text.
A 8 for this too.

Overall: a above-average levelpack with enough eyecandy for even the fussiest players.
Both levels have very few savepoints.
I recommend adding more in the next levelpack, so you won’t have to restart the level if your rabbit just starts jumping by itself (can happen on my pc).

Very worth a download.

A good level, particularily if you like pinballs. It is long and hard, and the author seems to have worked at least a bit more than most race makers. But for a race, this is very long and hard, might even be too long, as finishing all five laps might literally take half an hour.
+ pros:
Original.
Pinballish.
Hard.

- cons:
Too long for a race.
Maybe a bit too much pinball.
You advance very slowly at some points.

Final rating: 7,7 and a big download recommendation.

grytolle, you have almost exactly copied alexander’s review

Jarno vos, you call this “Really Good”
and seem to like everything, you tell nothing about any bad points, and you give a thumb up. Still, you rate it 6.0.
Why?

I’ll make a quite short review.
Although Craccoboy’s uploads almost never are the kind I like (Ballon races, for example, were far too hard) I really liked this levelpack. I didn’t see any enemies or pickups (but I didn’t really finish level 5)and there were no bosses, but somehow the levels managed to be funny anyways. The point was always to find five hidden things.
I didn’t really like the last level, but it doesn’t drop the rating because I still managed to complete all tests i tried, except the choose-your-warp-thingie which I thought was boring.
Download if you want to play something new or just do it anyway.
D/L: Yes

Hi, it’s me again. You haven’t gotten rid of me yet!
I think this tileset is quite the Disguise style, meaning: the ground, the rain and the sandstorms (if you mix in a bit of his older sets in the rain and sandstorm). Sadly, the BG is really not that good. Well it looks really nice in the example level, but it doesn’t leave too much room for improvisation with the background eyecandy (that’s my opinion). But still, the set is nice and the theme (desert/beach evening) is not too overused. In my opinion one of Violet’s best non-conversion tilesets.

Eh… Bjarni Cool, this is a race. There is not supposed to be any hurt events or enemies in race levels…

A very large level if you don’t know where to go. And a very easy level if you notice it’s got no password. But, anyway. The level uses one of the creator’s own tilesets, and so of course the tileset use is good. I don’t understand why you get all that ammo in the start. U don’t need it really. Maybe that’s why…
The level is hard mostlu because of the d*mn warps which lead you back to the place near the beginning where certain death waits. And, of course, because of the trigger zones you don’t know where they are, and because of those animated blocks behind layer three. They REALLY made me angry, because you got no hint where they were and they turned unmasked about once a hour (I know, I am a liar). This level is not really that hard if you save often, but it will anyway take a couple of months to finish. And it can’t be completed by Jazz in SP. Anyway, a good level that follows QoB’s design (triggers+warps=death)

Hello! I decided to start reviewing!
This battle pack is really good. There were some things I didn’t like, but they weren’t too important.

PIPE DREAMS:
A good level using Agama’s Sirius tileset. The level uses the tileset really well, and the level has a tunnel-like appearance which makes it hard to use RF-missiles too well. Some people would consider that a bad point, but I don’t. Rating: 9

EVIL CHEMISTRY:
A level using the official labrat tileset. Is it just me, or is this tileset boring? Well, anyway, this was a quite good level but not as good as the others. It had a bit confusing eye-candy. Rating: 8.5

RADIOACTIVE WARFARE:
This level wasn’t my favourite, I thought it was cind of weird, but gameplay was good and that’s the thing that matters. Rating: 8.7

SCRAP METAL:
The level was good and the idea with the waterfalls was good too. The mountains in the foreground made a good add-on to the eyecandy. I didn’t understand the triggers, though. Rating:9

TUBULAR VORTEX:
I didn’t play this level really, I just stood there and stared on the eyecandy. Must be the best tubelectric level I’ve seen. Rating: 9.2

TOXIC METAL:
Somehow, this level felt very dark and weird. I don’t know what gave me that feeling. But there was enough space to move around and no disturbing places, so the level is still very good.

OVERALL:
This is not an average rating.
One of the best battle packs ever if not the best. Even those who never battle shoud download this, even if only to stare on the eyecandy. RATING:9