Jazz Jackrabbit 2 Online

First review, yay!

Bay of Pigs is a 120×60 large CTF lvl using the new Diamondus B tileset by Pyronamus. I’m not going to dive into one of my occasional super-sized reviews nor into one of the tiny midget-reviews I write when I’m in a ‘review-spree’ mood. :-)

Bay of Diamonds, also not known as Bay of Pigs, doesn’t look as great as it could have done when considering the tileset used. The eyecandy…well, shrugs, it’s all right, I guess, but absolutely nothing amazing. ChippieBW has not taken heed of my “warning” and the lvl lacks a lot when it comes to foregrond tiles as well as variety. Not all tiles in the tileset are used, which is a shame and given the size of the caves/spaces that exist in-between all of the platforms, it’s a real disappointment to see the spaces unexploited. Bay of Diamonds is not ugly, no way, it’s anything but ugly, although most areas are quite plain and normal-looking. What I do like is actually just good tileset usage. The watery background with the calm, rolling hills and the lush trees look perfect and completely justifies the name of the lvl.

The gameplay of Bay of Diamonds is much better and so is the general flow of the lvl. What’s new or original about the gameplay is that you can easily choose whether to take a spring or not. Two springs are placed in a two-tile wide hole so whenever ppl want to soar into the air, all they have to do is slow down a little. If they don’t want to take a spring up, then all they need to do is to keep running/walking…if anybody still walks in MP, that is. No annoying jumping or positioning poor Jazz/Spaz above a one-tile wide opening before being blown up by your opponent’s 50x seekers here. The springs are well-placed, the platforms, one ways and float ups are also thoughtfully positioned and there are no dead ends. The water in the lvl slows ppl down a bit and ppl just below the surface of the water are quite vulnerable to attack. But since when did submarines fight aeroplanes? :-P

Weapons placement is a bit dodgy. Most of the ammo is floating in air, making it hard to collect them without jumping. The ammo follows the countours of the lvl, but they always stay tantalizingly above your head. :-( It can be hard to collect ammo under pressure. Also, the bouncer and seeker PUs are outrageously close to the red base while blue team has a medium-length trip to the RF PU. Not only that, the red base is under water and there’s only one entrance to it, the thinnest point of the underwater cave leading to the red base is defendable by just one crazy guy with 50x powered-up RFs. Gah! The full energy carrot is well-placed, however, and it’s not too hard or too easy to camp there. ;-P

I haven’t really played a game in this lvl in MP (all I did was shoot Urbs with powered up RFs in the red base underwater cave :-P) but Bay of Diamonds seems to be a very fun lvl with no major faults. A bit more eyecandy, more easy-to-reach ammo and less imbalance between the two bases would push Bay of Diamonds up to 8.0. For now, here’s a 7.5 and a download recommendation. If not for the lvl, do it for the awful, awful music. :-P

I’d like to point first that the snow event only works in sp. In mp, only the host can see the snow.

The gameplay is kind of random. The bridges do not properly connect to the platforms so you gotta run really fast or you’ll get stuck (either use float ups are make sure you place the bridge correctly). There are many 1-tile wide openings, which also slows down gameplay. The springs are well-placed, however, and so are many of the platforms. The problem is just that the whole lvl seems a bit crammed, which limits the use of most weapons except for seekers because they can head in any direction as long as they have a target.

The eyecandy is fine but the lvl actually looks better without snow and ambient lightning. :-P The whole lvl is a bit too bright and it seems that it’s a Carrotus heatwave, hehe. Most tiles in the tileset have been used and there are not many tilebugs (tilebugs seem unavoidable in Carrotus – it’s the way the tileset was drawn). Not many foreground layes are used but enough to satisfy so you won’t be confused. The snow should melt any time now…

The weapons placement is pretty average and there is nothing there that hasn’t been done before although each team has a pu RIGHT at their base. A RF for blue team and a bouncer for red team. I’m not quite sure which weapon is more powerful in this lvl so I guess that the team’s arsenals are quite balanced although the seeker pu is in the middle and red team can access it faster.

This lvl is nothing special, really, and it feels slightly old when it comes to lvl design and gameplay. There are better CTF lvls out there. Despite a 7, a download recommendation would be too much because this lvl has hardly got anything that is worth looking at, it’s just well-made, without originality.

EDIT: And don’t bother pointing out to me that I previously wrote ‘I give download recommendations to all levels rated 7 or above’. :-P

‘You can either get out on the way down or fall all the way to the bottom and warp to the top. The problem is, if you’re jumping in from the top, you’ll need to shoot the block before you get out (if you didn’t do that earlier) or you’ll end up in the same place. And your enemy may be prepared for such an occasion.’

Use copter ears if you’re Jazz. Double jump if you’re Spaz. :-P

This lvl is overrated. eats the overraters and runs away

It rocks, it rocks, it rocks!

You really must make more single player lvls if your first ones are so gobsmackingly good, Agama! Now I understand why those example lvls following your tilesets are also so amazing! You have it all Agama! Lvl designing skills, tileset designing superhuman skills, etc. The only thing left to do is to do some jazzing online and kick mortal butt! :-D

The lvls are nice and long and you will have lots of fun with them because there are 10 in total, giving you about 2 hours of exciting playtime (depending on just how much effort you put in looking for the various secrets). The Epic-style gameplay is great and perfectly imitated. Though Epic-style lvls tend to be easy I don’t really care because there are not many lvl packs except for a select few that can beat Epic’s original lvls in terms of sheer fun and playability. Night World deserves to be classified as an Epic lvl. Your lvls are like Epic’s, your tilesets are like Epic’s…do you work for Epic??? :-D

Eyecandy is also Epic-ishy but it exists in a higher concentration. No complaints here but Epic lvls were kind of empty of eyecandy compared to some home-cooked lvls so it wouldn’t hurt if you put more stuff into all layers.

Weapons and baddie placement. Ahh… fighting 3 fencers at the same time… it’s fun playing Zorro with JJ2. :-) The baddie placement COULD NOT BE BETTER. Some are ingeniously placed while others are just waiting to ambush you. You often never know what to expect and when they come, the only way out is to react fast and shoot fast. The baddies die all too easily but if they didn’t, Night World would make a formidable challenge. Weapons placement is not that brilliant, but all right. There tend to be a unique weapon for every lvl/tileset theme but in the end you go overboard with ammo, Agama. There is so much of it and since I usually only use the blaster all my ammo is wasted at x99. Even the bosses can be defeated easily using the standard blaster (go blaster! :-D).

My big complaints about Night World is that some bonus areas can be accessed by copter ears/double jumping, there are a couple of places to get stuck (near the bridges in the Medivo lvl), the whole thing is too easy and you can finish it in a flash and there is an unfinished area near the end of the Carrotus lvl, which looks ugly. BUT DON’T LET THIS DETER YOU FROM DOWNLOADING, PLAYING AND ENJOYING NIGHT WORLD OR I SHALL HAVE NO CHOICE BUT TO EAT YOU!!!!!

I know my review is almost 4 years old but after I discovered this wonderful little lvl pack I couldn’t help but to play and review it. Extra bonus because these are your first lvls. Agama, you are brilliant.

Wadledee, if you’re running Win 95, 98, Me there should be no problems. If you’re running Win 2000 or XP then try changing the compatibility settings to Win 95/98 and that should work. I hope.

Cell and I will have our revenge one day, Violet. MUWHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH, etc.

No rating given, Jelze.

I won’t review this myself since Jelze convinced me that this lvl is ‘junk’.

Good news first, bad news second. :-(

I think that this lvl only deserves an 8.2, 10 per cent lower than Urbs’ rating. Contrary to what Urbs has written I think that Garden Brawl is, at best, a medium-sized lvl. The size is just 94×71 and the playable area is a lot less, making Garden Brawl more like a small lvl. Small lvls are not necessarily bad but it’s generally agreed that the less space you have the less stuff you can put in your lvl.

FS has crammed as much eyecandy as possible into this lvl and you will be surrounded by it all the time. Sometimes, if there are too many seekers, bouncers and other players in the screen, the animated gems and the floating leaves will confuse you but once you’ve played in the lvl for a while you will get used to it. Nothing wrong here.

The gameplay of Garden Brawl is generally quite good and the flow in the lvl is as smooth as the soup we get in school. Except for the fact that sometimes the soup has large, protruding bumps in it. Eww… I’m talking mostly about the two dead ends in the lvl, one, which is quite small and easily avoided and one, at pos 26, 16, which is just too big to be acceptable. Sure, players will learn to avoid going there once they get to know the lvl but it still ruins the flow. Why not put an extra passage there, a warp, a suckertube, anything that will prevent the player from stopping the player walking into a deathtrap? The very, very tight passageway at pos 69, 41 was also quite annoying and players will only learn how to navigate it in the shortest amount of time, with practice. There is also a lot of jumping and vine climbing to do as well as destruct blocks, which slow down gameplay because most of the time the player has no choice but to destroy the blocks ASAP or get destroyed themselves. If a player gets chased to a destruct block then he is in trouble unless he can get past them fast enough. There are simply too many ‘fixed’ passages in this lvl, where players have only one place to go, which disrupts the flow. It seems to me that this lvl was designed like this because of its small size. There doesn’t appear to be much room for any other alternative routes.

If the gameplay has such serious faults then everything MUST be absolutely perfect so I’m gonna be biased here and say that weapons placement is fine (although 3 carrots for such a small lvl is too much for a 1v1 duel, IMO).

8.2 is a long way away from 9.2. I may be completely wrong in my review, which should be proved/disproved in the next person’s review. Still, an 8.2 is a very respectable rating.

DL recommendation.

I didn’t reduce the rating because of the vine, but I still wanted to mention it, so I put it under Cons.

Rating changed to 6.7.

I’m going to keep this review short and to the point.

Pros:
1. Good eyecandy, but there is a lot of empty spaces. Fortunately, that’s not much of a problem thanks to Moonblaze’s tileset.
2. Nice, big area to copter around in, for jazz users. :-)
3. The lvl has many secrets and surprises. When I was shooting pepperspray in front of me a turtle shell suddenly fell down. There are lots of other neat things althouh most are useless (fast-feet, shield clocks, 1ups, a silver coin).
4. LRK is Ted.

In the middle we have the gameplay. Sometimes it flows beautifully, sometimes you hit a wall when you least expect it. There are springs when you need them and vines when you don’t. The bottom part of the lvl is as flat as the horizon, which will not lead to good strategy or tactics.

Cons:
1. Despite the large, open areas, Jazz is at a huge disadvantage on the ground. There are many, many places he cannot reach without stopping and uppercutting. The full nrg warp is especially hard to get into without double jumping.
2. Suckertubes lack direction. Ppl don’t know where the suckertubes will take them until they attempt to enter it. Put arrows at the exit and entry points so ppl know if they can enter the suckertube from their direction or not. The tube at 129, 13 is also Jazz-unfriendly.
3. Sparse ammo. This is quite a big lvl, and therefore suited to lots of players. Lots of players, however, means that ammo will be used up rapidly. There is not enough ammo to go around, not even for a 2v2.
4. Some eyecandy bugs. Pos 107, 46 is one example.
5. The red spring at pos 185, 25 is useless unless you are on the red team. It would be better if you just placed a suckertube accesible only by the red team instead of a spring, so blue players won’t get confused and run into a dead-end.
6. Pos 22, 38. The suckertubes there needs to be fixed. One is set to Y speed -8, which should be changed to +8.
7. The next lvl setting is not set to arealang but to actf, which I don’t have.
8. The swinging vine, or any swinging vines in JJ2, does not work in MP.

I’m giving this a 6.7 because there are many bugs and flaws in this lvl that could have been fixed easily if you had betatested it (if you did betatested your lvl, then you should definitely switch to someone else… :-P).

I wouldn’t recommend downloading Arealang until the bugs have been fixed. After that, it’s an ok lvl, not great, but fully playable and enjoyable.

EDIT: Changed rating to 6.7. I give DL recommendations to all lvls at 7 or above but big fans of CTF may want to have a look at this.

Jarno vos, that’s the way Spotty talks. There are no accidental typos in Spotty’s speech! ;-P

Very fun lvl and very long too! :D Good eyecandy and originiality(because there are no library lvls apart from this one, AFAIK). There are no cool effects, but the lvl is filled with secrets. It’s also pretty easy no matter the difficulty, but its length will make up for that. Great lvl. I want to give it something higher than an 8 but it’s just one lvl. :-(

Download recommendation and ++the library tileset, which should be expanded! :-D

IMO this lvl pack is underrated and overrated at the same time. I was thinking of giving this a rating of 8.5 – 9.2 at a first glance, but apparently it has a rating of 7.7 and 10 at the same time, which is ridiculous.

FSP: Rent Collection features 9 lvls, 8 of which are playable. They are mostly very long and their difficulties range from medium to the kind of stuff Jazz Jackrabbit himself (if he existed for real) would have problems dealing with. Nevertheless the pack is worth completing, even if you end up throwing your PC into a river nearby (I used the Thames – it’s already pretty polluted so I don’t think anyone would mind having a PC on the riverbed).

There are lots and lots of puzzles in almost all lvls and there is an abundance of varied eyecandy although it seems to me that Violet has concentrated more on the actual puzzles and gameplay. Still, nobody should feel disappointed with Rent Collection’s eyecandy. It implements heaps of animation together with enough foreground and background tiles to simulate a JJ2 kaleidoscope. The triggers and destruct scenery are beautifully made. Unlike those of other lvls, any tile you trigger or shoot will fade in or out, fragment into shards of multicoloured, er, shards or “magically” appear. You just have to see it for yourself to understand me fully because I’ve never seen this kind of animated trigger scenery before. It would have been nice, however, if the diagonal blocks weren’t disguised as square blocks on the floor. I don’t see why you can’t just put in real diagonal tiles instead of hiding them? I think that it may be because the game Hocus Pocus didn’t have any diagonal tiles and therefore any Hocus Pocus tileset shouldn’t have them either. This may be conforming to Hocus Pocus standards but it sure is annoying, especially when you lose a heart or a life because you run straight through a tile into a baddie.

This lvl pack is very short, which is its biggest Achilles’ heel because practically anyone can complete this in under 3 hours (provided that you are able to survive on the harder lvls). Rent Collection has one little intro lvl, 7 fully playable lvls and 1, which is a cutscene, ending and super-boss lvl all rolled into one annoyingly-hard-to-complete lvl. The first lvls are quite easy compared to the later ones and also slightly shorter. Violet has really concentrated on triggers, puzzles and making the player jump like they’ve never jumped before. When I played I jumped so many times I ended up being grateful that my rabbit’s tendons couldn’t snap. The jumping can be very challenging because Violet has nicely asked cough*forced*cough us to not run and not to do special moves. I don’t mind playing according to Violet’s rules and the lvls are fully playable without running or coptering, etc, etc, but I wish that Violet didn’t stick to the Hocus Pocus-style gameplay like an obsessed puritan and not put any springs, float-ups, vines at all in the lvls. Yes, there are floating cats but they don’t tend to be reusable. Despite the frenzied jumping you have to do the gameplay is still marvellous and Violet has made all lvls suitable for walking, not running, rabbits. Like in his previous Hocus Pocus SP lvl pack, there are suckertubes to prevent players from reaching places by uppercutting or double jumping.

Puzzles? What puzzles? Oh, you mean those 100000000 million puzzles in front of me? Yes, Rent Collection is filled to the brink with puzzles. There are so many that I can’t even begin to list or describe them. Some are tried-and-tested ideas while others are on the cutting-edge of JJ2 puzzle development. Some will add to the fun by surprising the player while others will add to the fun by infuriating him. Puzzles make Rent Collection tick.

Unfortunately, there are numerous bugs and some confusion in the lvls (as always). You can’t save in some lvls (‘Black Ninja’s castle’ is one example) because you get an Out of Memory access violation message. ‘Black Ninja’s castle’ isn’t exactly huge so I wonder why I had that error. Another irritating thing is that sometimes there are not enough signs or hints to direct the player. In ‘A Cold day in Foomania’ I had problems finding the coins, finding the right passages and finding the keys. I ended up looking in JCS but found nothing. At last I realized that the Cheshire Cat could only be used once and I messed up when I was on it so I couldn’t get back up… I had to type jjfly and jjnowall for that because I didn’t want to restart the whole lvl. Rent Collection is actually not a bug-filled lvl pack, thank goodness, so ppl shouldn’t be worried too much about the things I mentioned.

There are other stuff included in this great pack that I haven’t mentioned, simply because it would take another 20 minutes of writing. Rent Collection is disappointingly short but what it lacks in…guess what I’m going to write next…quantity, it makes up for in quality.

A short but intense and consuming lvl pack, Rent Collection is a must-have for all jazzers, especially those that are bold enough to face the Fooruman, which, by the way, I could not defeat. eats Violet

Download recommendation and a 9.2.

Whoa, man! Why did I betatest Celestial Wargrounds and then forget it and not review it? A thousand apologies. eats Enigma

Celestial Wargrounds is a small, fast-paced CTF lvl. A nice, smooth game of CTF between two friends can quickly turn into a frantic slugging match if more than 4 additional players join in. This is lvl is so tiny that you won’t stay alone for long. :-)

For those that have a quick trigger-finger and like speedy games and CTF, this is a must download. MUST MUST MUST!

The eyecandy is average. There doesn’t seem to be much stuff in the lvl… just air. It’s ok, I suppose, but it could’ve been much better. I mean, come on! Enigma, you’ve failed to create good eyecandy using an Agama tileset!

The gameplay and weapons placement is by far the best part of the lvl. There are “only” two dead-ends, but they’re so obvious only idiots go there while being chased. Springs, float-ups and suckertubes are nicely placed and you will always be able to not smack yourself into a wall at 180mph. The suckertubes, however, are slightly hard to get into, especially the one leading into the blue base. I would also like the lvl to be more Jazz-friendly (make even larger, open spaces! :-D).

All in all, Celestial Wargrounds is a great, although small and plain, CTF lvl by Enigma. eats Enigma

8.2. Download recommendation.

I can imagine FireSword hacking away at his keyboard in this lvl with his trigger-finger…!

Well, I’m not sure how to reach the super secret, but I don’t mind.

I’ll post a more detailed review later. For now, enjoy the short version:

Good use of tileset. Lots of tiles in the sprite layer, which means low detail users will enjoy the fantastic eyecandy too. Maybe a bit more colour, and more spikes?

Gameplay is the best part, definitely. You can run through the lvl very easily, it’s jazz-friendly (thanks to the betetesters) and there are many paths to the bases.

Weapons placement is great, there is always ammo for you and they are easily accesible.

The blue base is easier to defend than the red base, however.

8.2 fow now, but maybe an 8.5(!) if I manage to find the super secret and test the lvl more extensively.

Well, it’s official. LRK’s Myriadus has more reviews than my battle lvl Frowning Statues. :-((((((((((((((

Ppl just don’t seem to like me, heh.

I’m not included…and neither are any TF members hahah. I tried to do this, but the whole thing was too huge for me and I never enjoyed big word searches.

Hahah Jamo, you shouldn’t rate the music and the name of the lvl.. it’s not really fair.

LRK: Nope, check in JCS. The RF power-ups (both of them) have 20 seconds respawn time. Just re-upload the lvl, and I may even raise my rating (don’t forget to fix all of those other stuff I mentioned :-)). Maybe you think the RFs have a one second respawn time because you tested the lvl in single player mode. All regenerating things will generate INSTANTLY if you go more than 20 tiles away and since the warps are such a long distance from each other, the RFs instantly respawn when you reach the warp target of the bonus room warp.

I think that Myriadus is a good medium-sized CTF lvl that could’ve been much better if some gameplay issues and eyecandy issues was were fixed.

The gameplay at the moment is really great and you can easily move in the lvl and not have any jumping difficulties/obstacles, etc. There are 4 nasty dead ends. One at blue base, 1 at (85, 128), 1 at (157, 122) and 1 at (70, 113). Apart from that, the gameplay is excellent and as good as it can be. You even have float-ups that give you that extra push so you don’t have to jump over obstacles. :-)

The eyecandy is pretty boring, honestly, and the only original thing about it is foreground rain AND background, which I think would’ve been much better if it was only in the background (it doesn’t rain indoors, LRK ;-)). The lvl uses most of the Beach tileset’s tiles but there are many tiles, most notable S.S. Epic, the background tiles (ships and rocks) and of course the good old life-belt. USE ALL OF THE TILESET’S TILES OR YOU ARE WASTING GOOD EYECANDY OPPORTUNITIES AS WELL AS RATINGS!

The weapons placement is just as good as the gameplay. Everything is available on the ground so you have almost no jumping to do (although TNT is quite useless, even in CTF). The bonus warp is very useful because the powered up RF is lethal in this lvl. The RF power-up respawns in 1 second, so if somebody enters the bonus warp immediately afterwards, the later player will still get his RF power-up

Myriadus could’ve been much better without all those dead ends and boring eyecandy, but it’s still a good lvl. I’ll give it a 7.7 and a download recommendation, but maybe not if you’d rather play battle or desperately need circular, none-dead-end gameplay.

EDIT: You’ve fixed two bugs in Myriadus v2, LRK, so I can hardly call that a major change. The dead-ends are still there, just as annoying as before (but if Myriadus becomes the CTF version battle1 ppl will get used to the dead-ends and simply avoid them). I would like to raise my rating because of the bug-fixes, but the raised rating would not be 8 or above so my rating, unfortunately, stays the same. It would’ve been an 8 if not even higher if there had been a real major change such as more eyecandy and no dead-ends. Just pretend that you have a 7.9 from me, LRK. :-P

P.S. My name is White Rabbit, with a space.

A lot of my would-be first lvls are single player, but then I realised it was too hard and I quit lvl making and only restarted 2 years later. :D

I deleted all of my old, unfinished SP lvls, but they were mostly worse than yours, LBK. ;P No background (it was all black, making the screen go blurry) and I assumed that poles, vines and spikes worked by themselves without any events on top of them, lol. :D

My unofficial rating of this lvl would be 3.5 or something. :D