Jazz Jackrabbit 2 Online

Sounds like a christmas remix. If someone ever made a Crysilis Xmas version, this would be the perfect soundtrack.

Doesn’t sound bad at all, but then again, it’s hard to go wrong with Crysilis’ instantly recognizable theme melody. The drums sound kind of lo-fi, apart from that it’s a pretty decent song.

Note: This uses the Hotel Dream tileset, but for whatever reason the author renamed it to “HotelD Rhotel.j2t”. You can get the file under that name at http://www.jazz2online.com/downloads/5700/hotel-bypretty-in-pink/

Okay, this level is horrible. It doesn’t have a background, which is only a big problem in single player, but looks bad regardless of game mode. Thanks to the mystifying decision to upload this as “Multiple” I can’t even tell whether this is supposed to be a multi- or singleplayer level. My guess is multiplayer, as it doesn’t have any enemies or an end boss. In fact, it doesn’t really have any events at all, save for a few warps.

You start in a room which loudly shouts WELCOME GEST (I’m assuming “guest” here) at you and then warps you to the rightmost part of the level. There isn’t a whole lot to do there. You can run to the left side of the level, passing what’s supposedly meant to be a swimming pool, to reach the “hose” (house). The house is equally disappointing, with a few basic constructions, a room at the upper level and a warp to the roof. But why would you want to go to the roof? There’s nothing to do there. All in all this is no fun to play. There’s no weapons or other pickups, there’s nothing that allows for tactical duels, and there’s only a few platforms.

Of course the level doesn’t look good either. As said, there’s no background, but there’s no other eyecandy to speak of either. Even levels such as these, which I suppose fall in the broad “hotel” category, should be nice to look at; it improves the experience a lot. There’s no music either; makes it even more boring. There’s plenty of music on Jazz2Online and included with the game itself, so you really have no excuse for forgetting it.

Alex, I’m disabling uploading new levels for you until you show me you’ve improved. Not a single level by you has gotten a positive review, and you’re not doing anything with the feedback people give you. When you have made a level that is not just fun for you to play, but also for others, feel free to contact me and I’ll make it possible for you to put it on the site again. Until then, please try to practice a bit. Look at other levels, see what makes them good, and try to use this knowledge in your own works. Good luck!

I wrote a review for this a long time ago, but having played the episode again recently I must say my opinion significantly changed. Therefore, I’m writing a new one.

I should start with this – Episode One is ambitious. From the way the story is interwoven with the gameplay to the size of the levels to the variety of puzzles, it’s obvious that in this episode EvilMike attempted to push the boundaries of JJ2’s singleplayer game mode. And in a lot of ways, he succeeded; I think this is the first time I’ve seen an episode with so much attention for the story that didn’t compromise the gameplay because of it. Another Story, for example, had a very well-presented story but as a result mostly consisted of (sometimes interactive) cutscenes, resulting in disappointing gameplay. Here both get equal attention and the episode really shines in this regard.

Already in the download description, on top of this page, the player is warned that this is a very difficult episode. And indeed it is; I often died and when I did manage to complete a level, I rarely had more than one heart left. Apart from the usual enemies you’ll see a lot of death pits and spike balls in the levels, which certainly keeps you on your toes all the time. Even if you’ve got a blaster powerup and lots of fast-fire you can’t simply go running around holding space, as you’ll inevitably run into some spikes or a bottomless pit sooner or later.

In fact, even when you don’t run around like a madman you’ll get hurt sooner or later. The problem with the episode and its difficulty is that there are far too many obstacles you simply can’t avoid. Or, you can avoid them, but you’d have to know they are there first. Now that wouldn’t be a problem if you had an endless supply of lives and could start over at a save point without punishment, but lives will often be in short supply. You can’t save manually either, as most levels are too big for this and will crash if you attempt to do so.

Take, for example, the following situation (from the “The Castle” level):

Those blocks I’m about to land on are collapsing blocks. So basically, unless I somehow have superhuman reflexes and manage to switch to TNT the microsecond before the bats noticed me, I’m guaranteed to lose a heart here. This isn’t the only occurence of such problems. I’m all for challenging enemies, but this is simply frustrating. And difficulty is good; frustration isn’t.

It’s a pity that levels are spoiled by places like this, where EvilMike tried to push it just a little bit too far with regards to making things challenging. Mostly, enemies are genuinely well-placed and used in such ways that in spite of their very rudimentary AI they are hard to kill. For example, often a bat will be hiding in a small alcove, making it impossible to stay a safe distance away while shooting. In such cases however the player gets the chance to assess the situation beforehand and has a fair chance.

There’s also a few occasions where I simply didn’t know what to do. The final battle against the Rocket Turtle is an example; the previous level was a chase, where the Rocket Turtle flew away while you had to get to the exit. Assuming the next level would be the same, since again the Rocket Turtle quickly flew out of sight, I tried to make it to the end of the level as fast as possible, only to be warped to a death pit. Some more instruction wouldn’t have hurt. I have to applaud using the Rocket Turtle at all though, as its a rarely used and erratic enemy and was used well in this case (when you figured out what you were supposed to do).

Another problem of mine with regards to the difficulty might be a matter of taste; the overabundance of spike balls. EvilMike made a lot of jumping challenges involving spike balls. As a result, those often require very precise timing to cross them without getting hurt or even dying (the recoil of getting hurt often making you fall into a pit full of spikes). In my opinion those were often way too hard though, requiring such perfect timing that I often gave up altogether and resorted to giving myself invisibility with cheats. As said, this might be a matter of taste; I did enjoy the parts involving ordinary enemies, where I just got to shoot stuff.

During the parts where the episode isn’t plagued by frustratingly impossible challenges, however, it’s pretty good. Depending on the tileset, levels look gorgeous. Strangely, while they use the same tileset, the “Deserto City” levels look a lot better than the “Temple” levels. Whereas the City looks like a proper desert settlement the temple gives the impression of boring, repetitive brown blocks without much decoration. It gets better once you go underground, but the “daylight” temple parts simply don’t look that good. Having created the tileset himself, I imagine the Temple tileset was an obvious choice for EvilMike, but it might’ve been a better choice to go for a tileset like Persian Paradise here, or at least an updated version of Temple (which was years old already when this episode was made).

Like the graphics, the music was generally well-chosen. The soundtrack mostly consists of techno tracks, which might seem a bit strange given the fact that this episode mostly plays in the desert, but the music fits well and helps establishing an “alien invasion” theme.

It is hard to rate this episode. It’s got a moderately interesting story that is tightly interwoven with the gameplay in a way that we haven’t seen before. It looks excellent and sounds great too. Yet, at times it’s so frustratingly (and unfairly) difficult that I found it hard to genuinely enjoy playing it. Perhaps you’re a better player, or one that doesn’t particularly mind insane difficulty. Even if you aren’t, this is an episode you should certainly get, if only to appreciate the beautiful levels and well-told story. Expect to smash your keyboard a few times while playing, though.

fonky

This level shows a black-and-white rabbit falling down from high in the sky to earth, which is made believable through clever layer speeds and some texts.

It’s a nice showcase of what you can do with layer speeds, but far from as inspiring or innovative as the other “experiments” Gus uploaded. Also, shouldn’t the ground come closer REALLY fast in the end?

More of a proof-of-concept than an actual level it seems. It’s an interesting effect and the tileset’s graphics look nice, but the tileset is so limited that it’s not really usable beyond what’s done with it in this level. The effect shown in the level (hard to describe, just play the level) is nice and may be used by other authors, though it requires a lot of layers.

Seeing this as a proof-of-concept I don’t think giving a rating would be appropriate. I’ll give a download recommendation though, as it’s a nice effect that might inspire some other levelmakers.

(it’s kind of freaky how your mind is apparently full of children and drugs though)

Protip: make it possible for players to actually see your level

damn, if this only were longer!

I don’t really know how to rate this, but I can’t really understand what the benefit of being able to stream music in JJ2 is. The streaming server is not always online apparently, and the result is that whether a level using this will actually have music is mostly a gamble. This is not what you’d want when creating one. You also need a permanent internet connection and the tool needs to run alongside JJ2. I think spending 10 minutes on browsing modarchive for a suitable song, or downloading the MP3 you want to use, is a better idea.

The level screenshot is pretty misleading since when seeing it you might conclude that this level is symmetrical. But it isn’t! Which is good since symmetrical levels are only half as cool (hehe) as those that aren’t.

Anyway, this is a nice level. Nothing special really, but overall it plays nicely (save for a few hijinks here and there). There’s a balancing issue where it is really easy to get from blue to red (take the path at the top of the level and drop down straight onto the base at the right) but less easy and certainly more time-consuming to go the other way around. This of course makes things unfair. Likewise the placement of the seeker/bouncer powerup relative to both bases might be a bit biased towards blue but it’s a small difference only and won’t be much of a problem in casual play.

Apart from that I was bugged by the blue spring at (30,20) which breaks the flow when running up or down that slope. I’d have placed the spring somewhere else so that it doesn’t obstruct the path. I wasn’t quite sure about the water either as it slows you down a lot but it’s only a small part of the level so it’s not much of a problem and can be covered with 2 or 3 jumps. There’s also a warp in the bottom right corner which I think is a very poor way to cover up a dead end.

Eyecandy is pretty scarce, there’s no glaring tilebugs or anything but that’s about it. The background looks nice, but you’ve got to give the tileset palette credit for that, not the level author. There’s a few waterfalls there, which go together nicely with the bit of water at the bottom and the rain, but all in all it’s nothing spectacular and could certainly use some more spicing up. Again, it isn’t exactly bad and there’s a thing to say for minimalism, but I expected a bit more.

Download this? I don’t know, if you like CTF then it really can’t hurt and for public servers this might be fun to play a few times, though there are a lot more spectacular levels out there. For more serious matches however I think it’s not well-balanced enough.

This is yet another Diamondus edit with yet another set of new palettes and yet another rearrangement. Basically it contains most tiles the IC edits of Diamondus add and then some, but in another tile configuration, making it impossible to use these sets to “upgrade levels” using that – practically standard – edit.

The new tiles are put throughout the tileset randomly at places that used to be empty. I’d have preferred to see either a total rearrangement (as this breaks backward compatibility anyway) or at least the new tiles in a logical order and arrangement. The new tiles are basically a pitch black layer 4 background tile and corresponding stuff-with-black-background tiles and some versions of the vegetation tiles with a blue background. There’s some waterfalls too but those are also in other Diamondus edits and are ripped anyway so I don’t really see that as something to recommend this set for.

Then there’s the palette edits. One is obviously based on a Diamondus ß palette (or maybe it has been used before, it looks awfully familiar at least); the other one is dark with red sky and water. There’s no example levels so I can’t really judge but as far as I can see the combination isn’t that pretty and a more subtle contrast (or also adding red tones to the other tiles) would’ve worked better.

In summary this tileset edit is minor at best and does not offer any advantages over already existing Diamondus edits. The palette edits are not that interesting and the tile arrangement doesn’t work that well either. You’re better off using one of the other Diamondus-based sets out there.

edit: in response to those who apparently can’t take it if I write a well-argumented review that doesn’t happen to give a high rating: how about actually reading my review before wrecking the helpful index :)

Oha, the episode manager sounds pretty useful, and will hopefully encourage people to start including J2E files for their packs since the “but it might crash jj2!” excuse doesn’t really apply if you include a warning to use this.

I don’t actually have JJ2 installed at the moment so I can’t really give a proper review, but I can imagine the use of these apps.

Heh, fun to see how much these look like your tileset. Surely a consistent style.

You might want to post other artwork you make here:

http://www.jazz2online.com/jcf/forumdisplay.php?f=26

This is actually a pretty good pack, that does have some weaker points which fortunately don’t distract from the things that make it fun.

The story in a nutshell: Devan kidnaps Eva, you travel to Devan’s castle, meanwhile Devan conquers Carrotus Castle, you return there to save the day. There’s an interesting plot twist at the end I won’t reveal here, but all in all it was a nice variation on the generic “Devan attacks world you save it”.

The pack starts with an introduction level, using still frames from the JJ2 cutscenes to introduce the story. It’s a nice idea and works well enough, but sadly the pictures suffer from colour reduction and rather MSPaint-like fuzzy edges, so it doesn’t look all that great.

The other levels all use the same tileset, presumable made by Troglobite himself. While serving its purpose of creating a world of castles and gardens, the tileset is mediocre at best and doesn’t allow for much interesting eyecandy. Still, I’m reviewing the levels here, not the tilesets, so that’s not really relevant. A disadvantage of using this one set though is that the whole pack looks rather dark and plain, and that every level looks the same. Some variety would be an improvement here.

As for the gameplay, this is obviously influenced by EvilMike’s episodes, even copying one of the puzzles (the spike bolls in Devan’s Castle) almost tile-for-tile. Most elements however are either standard stock-puzzles (exploding trigger crates with TNT, for example) or self-invented. I was particularly surprised by the “timed shot” in the Saving the Day level, which I found really clever and fun. There are a couple more such puzzles and constructs that make the levels fun to play, though sometimes they can be a bit too hard. Luckily there are plenty of carrots and extra lives, so this balances out quite well.

The level design is usually fine, though I think it is a bit “platformy” at times. Lots of small platforms just floating in the air, without much sense of an overall structure. It would be a good idea to try to design the level as a whole, and to make it really look like a castle structure-wise, instead of bit by bit.

I don’t want to spoil too much, since a great deal of the fun factor in this pack is in the surprise of yet another fun gameplay element’s introduction.

All in all this is a fairly good pack, with mediocre eyecandy and average to great leveldesign, that will certainly be enjoyable to play through. Though the levels may get boring after a while, there’s enough fun stuff in here to warrant a download recommendation.

The program works nicely. It wasn’t entirely clear to me how exactly it was supposed to be used, but the big question mark button quickly guided me to the “How to use?” explanation, which explained it.

Essentially, though, this is a more difficult way of editing the files than with the old-fashioned notepad or any other text editor. For files such as these being able to move or delete large blocks of text at once, instead of line-for-line, is just more convenient, and notepad excels at just that. This would only really be useful if it did more than just text file editing; for example, importing IPs from JJ2+ logs or something.

As it is now, this is a useless tool that, though easy to use, is worse than the pre-existing tools. Therefore I can not recommend downloading this.

By the way, please make the window bigger by default, and allow me to make it full-screen. There’s no reason not to do so.

I don’t really understand how to use this. Don’t I need at least one .jlt file as a template to work with?

First impression: Cyberspaz Tileset 2 version 1.5

Really, it reminded me a lot of that set, and with reason; a lot of tile structures can also be found in that set (the tubes look very similar to those in Dethman’s set, and so does the water). Of course, this is not a bad thing, as Cyberspaz2v may have looked fine but never was very usable or complete, while this tileset definitely is. It’s logically organized with tiles grouped by purpose, and seems complete; most tiles which need one have a counterpart with layer 4 background, platforms are easy to complete since all tiles are there, et cetera. Definitely a very good tileset in that aspect.

The tiles look a lot more polished than in Dethman’s set too, and reminded me of Disguise’s Spacey Universe. Everything looks polished and all, though I’m not too fond of the combination of the rock texture and the rest of the tiles. The contrast between the light rocks and somewhat darker “techish” parts is just a bit too high.
What I especially liked were the “block” tiles; the square (and triangular) tiles with the rusty metal look. They are shaded very nicely and the dents in them show convincing depth. The goo dripping from the top in a few variations bugs me though. I don’t know why exactly, but something just seems wrong, like it’s just been pasted on top of the tiles instead of really blended well.

Apart from that it’ll be hard for anyone to find graphical flaws in this set. Everything looks fairly monotone, but the advantage of this is that the palette can contain a lot of different hues of the same colour, allowing for increased detail and amazing textured backgrounds such as the two (!) included in this set. Which brings me to the background scenery, another strong point of this set. The aforementioned textured backgrounds are awesome, and so are the moon and clouds. Then there are some tiles which can be used to add skyscrapers. Though those could have used a bit more variation in my opinion they offer yet more possibilities for background and level theming.

Finally there’s the waste itself, without which this tileset wouldn’t be much of a waste treatment facility. To be honest I was a bit disappointed in this, I would have expected more waste and less generic space-industrial-whatever tiles. There’s the obligatory waterfalls and some layer 3 water tiles, but no barrels of waste, no real processing machinery, just waste waterfalls. Which brings me to my main problem with the set, its complete lack of originality. As said before it really looks awesome but come on, if there’s any theme which has been used to death in tilesets it’s the nondescript industrial-urban-dark-facility one. Apart from looking better than most of its predecessors this set does not really add anything to the pool of sets to choose from.

If you disregard that, however, what’s left is a tilesets that looks really good and is easy to use, and one I would certainly recommend to download. What withholds me from giving a 9+ is the lack of originality, but if you don’t care much about that I’d say go ahead and make some levels with this; they’ll probably look awesome nonetheless.

This tileset greatly reminds me of Mega Megatropolis and to some extent Disguise’s other sets. Gus’s tilesets are in a colourful style that heavily depends on Paint Shop Pro’s effects, and while his level isn’t quite the same as Disguise’s yet his tilesets certainly do have some quality.

Roger Lake comes with 4 different versions, each with its own palette. Apart from the palette nothing is changed though. The theme seems to be a park-like environment with giant trees and all sorts of plants and bushes, which is not terribly original but not really overused either. Some tiles are really nice, and I especially liked the big tree tiles and the animations, which are well done. There’s plenty of tiles for background eyecandy with mountains and water tiles in which these mountains are mirrored, lots of leaves, clouds and a nice flying bird.

The masking is a little awkward though. Some leaves are solid, while others aren’t; the general convention in JJ2 sets is that leaves can be walked through, so doing it different here can lead to confusing situations. Furthermore, the set lacks tiles for use in the “caves” (parts with layer 4 background eyecandy); there are no slopes with this background, for example, so you’ll have to resort to layer 5 for this. Another complaint of mine is that the rain is far too dense. Especially when used in the foreground, such as in the example level, this can become annoying rather than eye-pleasing.

All in all this is a nice, though not overly original, tileset, with a few drawbacks such as the masking and lack of some tile varieties. Downloading recommended though; it looks nice and it’s apparent that Gus is improving quickly.

What EvilMike said.

I wanted to pity White Rabbit for his review in #[TF] but as he had abandoned our lovely channel for mysterious and unexplained reasons I have no other choice than doing so in a review of my own…

As the Dutch say, “stilstand is achteruitgang” (stagnation is decline). I thought Tomb Rabbit 1 was nice, but it was way too hard, had a lot of bugs (knives!), and the theme worked only for so many levels. Tomb Rabbit 2, on the other hand, offers diverse environments, interesting puzzles and a difficulty level that is Just Right©.

As Violet said so well, reviewing each level individually is no use because Tomb Rabbit 2 works as a whole. Whether it is the beautifully retro training level, the Deus Ex-like elevator level, the amazing jungle levels, all are equally well-designed and equally fun to play. I must admit that. being the tileset freak that I am, I checked every tileset in JCS before playing, and not being too impressed. I started JJ2 with not too high expectations, only to be completely blown away by the levels, which have some of the best eyecandy till date… you play in a mario-esque world full of bright objects, a jungle with giant hollow snake-infested trees, a tribal temple environment of sorts, and finally in two different 7th-lava-fall-but-way-better-styled buildings. And all look completely wicked.

TR1 boasted a “completely new enemy”, which was nice but not that interesting and only seen in the very last level. TR2 is quite the opposite, with an awesome jumping Bishop that looked like it jumped right out of Alice in Wonderland in the very first level, and literally made me gape at it for a few seconds. There are no “new enemies” to be seen in later levels, though. I assume that was because the episode is unfinished.

Another sign of the unfinished state may be the lack of pickups (other than coins), but I hope that was intended, because unlike some other episodes with artificially limited pickups (BlurredD’s comes to mind) here I didn’t mind at all. The coins are fun to collect and the system which gives you one extra live per 100 makes up for JJ2’s non-functioning “1 live per 100 gems” system. One issue was that whenever you die you keep the coins you already collected, so you might end up with literally hundreds of coins, making getting all 400 coins a little easier than intended.

The puzzles were just as awesome as the visuals. I often dislike puzzles in levels because they seem artificial or are just not fun; why would I need to push boxes in the midst of a desert? TR2 however has puzzles that either make complete sense, such as in the elevator level, or somehow just fit into the level, such as most trigger block-puzzles. As White Rabbit pointed out, sometimes the blocks do not fit in the rest of the environment, but I didn’t really mind. It made clear what you were supposed to do (find the matching switch) and added a certain continuity between the otherwise seemingly non-connected levels.

I could go on for a while and pinpoint every individual aspect but in the end they are all equally well-done and as perfect as they probably can be. While playing I got reminded of games ranging from Commander Keen to Deus Ex to Mario, and what all those games have in common is that even though they may have tiny glitches, those do not matter at all because the whole game is just so damn fun to play. Rather than being disappointed because it is not exactly the same as TR1, you should be happy that Kejero chose to innovate, and download this right now ;)