Jazz Jackrabbit 2 Online

Huh. What we have here is a very nice single player pack, and it’s only part one. The levels all have their own individual style, and feel more or less like they belong in that tileset. Lagunicus has a lot of caves, Dreempipes is more trigger based, Diamondus is simple and flattish, etc. However, none of the levels are really all that remarkable, and there’s no apparent story, so this is not too much more than a collection of decent single player levels, all using JJ1 tilesets.
What the author lacks in level design ingenuity, he tries to make up for in flashy special effects. Strange sucker tube arrangements, fun secrets, dropping bombs, and even bonus levels add to the replay value of this pack, which alternates between normal gameplay and interesting diversions.
Unfortunately, the levels are not perfect. The eyecandy is not bad, but a lot more could have been done with the tilesets, causing some parts of the levels to look rather bland. There were also a number of tile bugs that I spotted – for examples, the slopes aren’t masked correctly in Lagunicus, and everything looks wrong underwater in Dreempipes. The last level incorrectly links to JJ16.j2l, instead of the boss level included. So there are a few problems.
Still, this is fun enough to play at least once, and how many good single player levels have you seen uploaded lately? This should help the wait for TDI2, or TR2, or FSP, or whatever sequel you happen to be waiting for.

Interesting, but blinding. “The Deadly Light” undoubtedly refers to the background, which looks almost pure white, and is very rarely obscured. The level has so much open space that you are always forced to stare into the pain that is layer 8. Bad move.
So, the level has a lot of open space. This is because it’s composed of a lot of squarish platforms placed so they’re reachable, but not easily. This is not all the author’s fault, as slopes in this tileset are kind of missing, but it’s still annoying. If you climb up all the tiny platforms and make your way through the obstacles, you reach a 100 coin warp which can take you to a room filled with ammo of all sorts. However, why would you want to? The ammo respawning speed is so incredibly fast, so you should have an ample supply of that, and all the good stuff is at the bottom anyway. At the bottom right of the level lies four carrots, an RF powerup, some seekr ammo, and an unguarded Plasma shield. Simply put, there is nothing else in the level worthy of looking at compared to this tiny spot. Why should anyone leave it? What’s the point of the rest of the level?
Eyecandy is pretty dismal. The bottom of the level actually doesn’t look that bad, with wooden platforms coming out of the water, but the rest of layer 4 is minimal, layer 8 is blinding, and there’s no background eyecandy at all. The author did try in some spaces, and that’s good, but it often didn’t work out.
The level is also extremely buggy. First, there’s the awful lack of balance I mentioned earlier where everything of value is in the bottom right corner. Second, there’s the open level borders, with springs and stuff right next to them. Third, there is both a gem ring and lots and lots of freeze ammo. The first person to not like this level will shoot the gem ring, and the server will crash. Not a good combination. Last, the thing showing the position of the coin warp is actually a bonus warp, which will try to take you to the secret level if you shoot it. Was this level tested at all? I can only suggest that you don’t download it.

Late review time. “Mystic Isle” by Moonblaze is an average tileset which attempts to look classic game style, but doesn’t really make it happen. Let’s take a look.

GRAPHIC QUALITY: Moonblaze uses an 8-bit drawing style, which I approve of, but which only works so well in cases like this. Some things look good – the vines and gems especially – but the main part of the tileset, the ground itself, suffers a little. Simply put, the ground is ugly. The grass isn’t too bad, though kind of dull, but the soil is a single shade of unknown-color, and that doesn’t work. It kind of looks like a resized version of Swamps, but not as good. I really wanted to see some sort of soil texture here, as a single color rarely works. Ironically, the next level setting lead to Colonius, which uses the technique much better.
Meanwhile, as I said, a lot of things look good. All the brown vine stuff is very nice to look at, and if the rest of the tileset looked like that, it would be great. The green wood, though, poles and sucker tubes, ends up looking like a simple gradient with no variety, and it’s all flat surfaces. Not too appealing to look at. Rocks are a mixed bag, and the wooden platforms look pretty good, though again a little too small.
Pros: Very nice vine stuff, wooden platforms not too bad, gems are cool.
Cons: Soil is pretty ugly, too many straight lined gradients.
Rating: 6.6

MASKING: High marks here. Everything is masked perfectly, and the author even was nice enough to create some cool rock-leaning-against-wall structures which the player can walk up and down upon. There are really only two masking parts I’m not thrilled with. The giant glowing white gem tiles are automasked, which could cause stucking troubles in some levels, and the big mask message messes up a lot of the background eyecandy tiles which could otherwise be used for fun stuff. I’m also concerned that the wooden platform tiles may be masked a little thin, but that’s not a big issue.
Pros: Mostly good, the leaning rock stuff is fun.
Cons: A few automask issues, and the wooden platforms may be too thin.
Rating: 7.8

ORIGINALITY/VARIETY: There is very little to set this tileset apart from any other nature tileset, and especially from others that Moonblaze has made. The gem stuff is kind of cool, but there’s little reason other than that to use this, as almost everything in Mystic Isle is available in Swamps, only bigger and better. Isle is designed for a certain level (or set of levels… whatever) in TDI2, but other than that, it’s not too interesting.
As for variety… well, the tileset does offer a number of things. Basic ground, tiny wooden platforms, cave eyecandy (with no tile support at ALL – you have to use layer 5), event tiles, and fun gem stuff. I am, however, missing slopes. The basic ground has no slopes, unless you count the tilted rocks, which would become really old after seeing even two of them in a row. Levels made with this tileset will feel squared off, which is really pretty annoying.
Pros: Decent environment, lots of cool eyecandy things, well-made background eyecandy, etc.
Cons: Bad slope situation, and little that is new or different.
Rating: 7.5

TILE PLACEMENT: Pretty much everything in the tileset is placed logically, though there are a few random eyecandy tiles which should probably be placed closer to their base. Having the hook inserted horizontally is also kind of weird.
Rating: 8.0

OVERALL: This is not a bad tileset, but it’s hideously overrated, and kind of boring. If you want to have fun with single player and weird triggers and in-depth storylines, this tileset might be good, but for most levels there are better options out there. Still, it’s well put together and has a lot of features. A mixed bag.
Pros: Cool stuff, not badly drawn for the most part, especially as it was done in Paint.
Cons: No normal slopes, some tiles look kind of ugly, particularly the soil itself.
Rating: 7.2

(Edit: Hi, Moonblaze. If you check my review you’ll see that I noticed your tilted rocks, and said that they would look really boring if you had several in a row. I’ll admit that I didn’t mention the bridge things, but you’ll also notice that I said “the BASIC GROUND”, not “NO SLOPES AT ALL”.)

No. I mean, no. This shows very little effort. The entire tileset uses maybe eight colors, seven of which are shades of gray. There is no real attempt at shading, and if you look at the example level, you’ll notice that several of the background layers use the exact same colors without even having outlines. The main problem is that there is only one tile for ground. There are also slope tiles, which are a different color, and don’t work with the ground. Most of the tileset is devoted to random eyecandy effects, like painfully flashing pumpkin faces (without even rounded edges), graves, and things I can’t really identify but would qualify as wells in some strange alternate universe. The best parts are probably the gate tiles, which use one color and are somewhat undetailed, but get away with it anyway. Masking is fine.
In essence, this tileset isn’t all that good. It needs more colors, more shading, and I think it would be good if the scale was upped to about 150%. The gates and stuff would look better and scarier if they were bigger than Jazz. (Jazz seems to do quite well in environments that are bigger than him – see Nature’s Ruins for example) It would also be nice if the tileset had more colors than gray. Gray gets really boring really quickly, and in all honesty, isn’t very scary. Take a look at Darkened Landscape for a better example of a Halloween color scheme.
Finally, this tileset is inferior to anything Disguise has ever made. Go figure.

This unusually engrish celebratory level is unquestionably intended to announce some sort of “Ten V’th Birthday” for Jazz, but precisely what numeral Ten.V is designed to represent is left unfortunately unclear. Jazz’s main birthday transpired several months previous to the present day, and the 10(.v?)th anniversary of HH94 and Jazz CD is not due for another twenty-four days. Thus, what possible meaning can be derived from the unappealing birthday known as 10.v? Perhaps that my language in this paragraph has been really annoying?

Anyway, in summary, I have no idea what this is the 10th birthday of. Maybe the author started playing Jazz ten years ago? That would be kind of cool. Let’s review the level.
Based on the level description and the end boss, this is a Single Player level, but it’s kind of hard to tell as there are no enemies of any kind. There are, in fact, only two real dangers. There’s a single three-tile-wide-pit-of-spikes which can be avoided with ease, and a drop to the bottom of the level which you are quite likely to fall into. You see, you are running along a small platform, and must fall off onto another small platform right below. If you miss the platform, you hit the bottom of the level. This is really poor planning, as there’s no indication that the author meant for this to happen.
Of course, now that I’ve said that, I find myself wondering exactly what the author did mean to happen. The level seems to be a simple romp through a brightly colored tribute to Jazz. The tileset choice is pretty good for that intention – “Jazz Paradise”, featuring fireworks, palm trees, pictures of Jazz, and various party stuff – but it would have been even cooler to see a tileset featuring pictures of Jazz’s more memorable adventures, plus really cool pictures of everyone. “Jazz’s greatest hits”, if you will. Unfortunately, I have no right to expect that from some as new to J2O as Cloud is, and I am left with a hop-skip-jump through Jazz Paradise. Which isn’t a bad thing, but isn’t perfect, either.
The main reason I’m not sure I like this non-difficult level is that without obstacles of any sort, the level becomes boring. I was unable to come up with any reason I was there. Devan appears at the end, controlling a Jazz clone (nice touch… pity they don’t work very well), which seems to give the impression of a plot. Where is the plot in the rest of the level? Actually, where was anything? There were no goodies, no cool stuff like springs or vines, pretty much no anything except for pinball events and warps. The warps don’t even work all that well – they all have the same WarpID.
Pretty much all that’s left to talk about for this level is the eyecandy. It’s not bad. More could probably have been done with the tileset – I’m not entirely sure who this “J A Z S” is, though we all seem to love him – but the author uses a large number of the available tiles, and most of the time there are no real errors. Some places look downright ugly – the area right after the belts, for example – while others manage to look quite nice. I still am not totally enthralled with the tileset, but it’s used fairly well. (Are the background layers stolen? They look like they might be.)
So, in summary…

PROS: Level is kind of fun if you have the right sort of brain, and the eyecandy’s not all that bad. It is also a good level for someone who seems new in the field.
CONS: Kind of boring, and the lack of plot confuses me. A few too many event use errors.
RATING: 3.9 should work. I may come back and change it later, as this level is something of a mixed bag. Add enemies, goodies and random objects and this level should be much better.

(It came to my attention on my second play through that the bottomless pit area I mentioned actually involves belts. You are supposed to stand still and let the belts carry you around safely. Still, the belts are way too slow, don’t work quite right, and you can fall off easily. Too bad.)

“Hangmen Rush”, in addition to being a weird name, is a weird CTF level. The author boasts that it is strategic, but this seems to be more the “I’ll-call-it-strategic-because-it’s-unusual” syndrome than actual strategicism, as there is really only one path between the bases. This path is made up out of warps. I think this level has been done before.

EYECANDY:
Eyecandy is a mixed bag. Everything in the background is zooming towards the right, which is presumably intended to make it feel like layer 4 goes to the left, but fails (don’t worry, few levels accurately achieve the perspective effect). The stuff flying by consists of, basically, whatever tiles Cooba saw in the tileset and liked. This means the sucker tubes, the giant scaffolding things, and of course those girders which show up in every 7th Lava Fall level. Layer 4 is about the same, with random wall tiles thrown here and there, in an effect which sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t. The most notable flaw in the eyecandy is the lava animation next to the blue base, which does not even pretend to be done well. Fortunately, you can only see a small portion of it.
PROS: Good variety of tile use, multiple layers.
CONS: No foreground, some tiles feel random, that lava is really ugly.
RATING: 6.0

DESIGN/GAMEPLAY/ORIGINALITY/SUPER-MERGED-FUN SECTION:
As the author’s description graciously informs you, this level is split up into several small rooms, connected by the spinning pink warps which you know if you’ve ever seen the tileset before. There are, unless I’m mistaken, five different rooms – the blue base, the red base, and three inbetween, each with a +1 carrot. The designs of these rooms vary – some have slopes, some do not, some have annoying combinations of slopes/non-slopes. Possibly my favorite is the tetris style room, which is a rotated L with warps and no ammo. Anyway, these rooms are all held up with chains, but that doesn’t effect the gameplay at all.
To get from one base to another, you must travel through all three rooms, meaning there is only one path between the bases. Not one best path, but one path. Just one. I’m not sure how much this would add up to strategy, as there’s going to be 97% camping and 10% bad math. Fortunately?, the setup of the warps is mostly symmetrical, with the possible exception of the blue base, which has warps in two different places, both leading to the same room. The left side of the level is just annoying period, because it has a red fog one way area beneath the blue base, and a really long sucker tube to reach the middle room. I have now talked enough about the design of this level that my brain is complaining. Let’s move on.
PROS: Well… the author tried.
CONS: Camping, camping, camping, I hate that sucker tube.
RATING: 3.2

CARROT/BASE/WEAPON/PANCAKE PLACEMENT:
I didn’t pay too much attention to the weapons, but there aren’t enough of them, and I see no need for the RF’s when the whole level is made up of tiny rooms. There are also a whopping three powerups in this level, each accessible by Electro Blasters (or, in the case of the Toaster, Jazz’s uppercut), which is an all right choice but might be a little much for such a small level. Carrots are kind of annoying, as there’s little challenge in getting them, especially when warps are right above them, and this just leads to base-biasedness with the SUCKER TUBE that I mentioned earlier. Bases are boring and logically placed. Pancakes.
PROS: Bases are thankfully in opposite sides of the level, powerups generally need EB’s, and there are no seekers.
CONS: Not much use for a Blaster powerup without fastfire, so why is it the most hidden?
RATING: 5.5

MUSIC:
The music doesn’t fit well.
PROS: N/A
CONS: N/A
RATING: -0.1

SUMMARY:
This CTF is somewhat… rushed? It’s not too bad, but it’s not particularly interesting, and the sucker tube is really rather annoying. The idea behind this level could probably have been expanded to create something more fun, but I don’t feel like figuring out how. Next time, have more than one route between bases, and make sure the placement and design aren’t biased. A bigger level might also be nice. Depends.
PROS: It does have a concept behind it, and the eyecandy’s not too bad.
CONS: There are a lot of things about this level which rub me the wrong way.
RATING: 5.7

I have gone through and removed all the spam posts. Please move the discussion somewhere private. Reviews are not meant for such things, and if this happens again, I may be forced to use the warning button. Yes, you are scared now.
Edit: I should have been more clear. Don’t post reviews complaining about the discussion, either.

Bah, I was going to do this. Oh well. By the looks of this it doesn’t have all that many features, anyway. I’ll review a bit later when I’m more familiar with the program.

Ok, look. We’ve been through this before, Lab. You send a file to the beta testers. They report bugs. Then you send it to them AGAIN. You do NOT upload it RIGHT AFTER the FIRST REPORT. This. is. just. not. finished.

CONVERSION ACCURACY: At first glance, this looks like a complete Jungrock. It’s not. There are several rock combinations missing, for example non-45 degree slopes not on a rock background. Other than that, it seems all right, though when the rocks are pretty much the entire tileset, you should try to get them right. Other stuff is all there – the bounce plants, the green vine stuff, the waterfalls, signs, etc.
Pros: Mostly there.
Cons: Only mostly. I miss the 22(?) degree slopes.
Rating: 8.5

COLORS: This is where the tileset really shines. Everything looks perfect, I can’t spot any color flaws but one. And that one is that the textured background doesn’t work in 8-bit. I wish you’d stop breaking the textured background, Lab. It’s got these little light purple things in weird places, and it’s not even a properly fading background. See what I mean about testing before uploading? Anyway, pretty much everything else works – besides Carrotus Pole, but there are enough poles anyway, and Snow, because Jungrock isn’t a very snowy place. Still, the TEXTURED BACKGROUND.
Pros: Most things look great. Whoever did the color was a genius.
Cons: YOU BROKE THE TEXTURED BACKGROUND WHICH IS GOING TO BE VISIBLE ALMOST FULL TIME! Why…
Rating: 8.2

MASKING: Masking is pretty good – mostly straight lines and such. The only questionable bit is that the floor for grass and pure!rock have different heights. Why? Does this serve any purpose other than possibly messing up levels using this tileset? There are also some handy invisible tiles, including support masking for the sucker tube – good job.
Pros: Mostly logical, sucker tube stuff.
Cons: Different heights? Just… weird.
Rating: 8.7

ADDED TILES: This is what can make or break a tileset. Let’s run through the list:
Sucker Tubes: Yes, but ugly.
Blocks: Yes, but ripped.
Poles: Yes, but ripped.
Spikes: Already there.
Hooks: Already there.
Vines: Yes.
Water Blocks: No.
Background Eyecandy: No.
Foreground Eyecandy: No.
It’s not bad, but… Jungrock is a really pretty tileset in 320×200. I’m sure it would look better in levels other than just the example level, but the screen of 640×480 is so big that this tileset really needed some sort of background eyecandy. The sucker tubes are still ugly and until I looked in JCS, I had no idea they had special tiles for the ends. They also only support corners, no T’s or crossroads. The blocks and poles are still ripped, and some of the blocks get repeated. There is little or no support for things like poles, vines or already existing tiles going back and forth between cave and notcave. In fact, there is almost no support for cave edges whatsoever. There are some single tile trigger scenery walls, but they look shrunken and bad. The rain is, for all intents and purposes, invisible against the already purple background. And there are a few other things I’m missing, like connections between leafy brown sticks, support so that signs can go ino the ground, and some added functionality for the red flower vine stuff.
Pros: Most of the absolute requirements are there.
Cons: Not all, lots of missing tiles, way too much stuff (read: more than 0 tiles) ripped from JJ2 tilesets.
Rating: 7.2

TILE PLACEMENT: It’s… not bad. Most stuff is placed logically, though I’m at a loss why the splashing waterfall tiles are so far below the rest of the waterfall. There are also a very large number of duplicate tiles, which could possibly have been avoided, as the tile placement doesn’t look incredibly strategic. Event tiles are scattered all over the tileset, from top to bottom, instead of being all in one place as they belong. This tileset also suffers from “Beta Tester’s Syndrome”, where there are large amounts of tiles to be found underneath the textured background, where nothing should be at all. Especially since some of the tiles down there are quite useful, like sucker tubes, or stuff inside the caves.
Pros: Mostly good.
Cons: Kind of illogical.
Rating: 7.5

OVERALL (not an average): It’s not a bad conversion, but it suffers too much from not quite being ready yet. There are a few too many bugs and missing tiles, even ignoring the fact there should be none period. Still, it’s Jungrock, and it’s far better than CelL’s, so with a little luck, you might be able to make something nice looking. Just don’t have the walls be too large, as there’s only so much to decorate them with. The original Jungrock thrived more on open air than anything else, something the example level does not show very well.
Pros: A good looking conversion, quite usable.
Cons: Somewhat lacking when it comes to things beyond copying tiles and putting them into an image.
Rating: 8.2

Alas! I was going to give this the rating it deserved, but then I saw the beautiful entreaty of “I am a female” and my heart was lost. Now I must give this a 10 so that she will go out with me! Because that’s what females do on J2O!
..er. Sorry. Please don’t incite sexism. I’m sexist enough already, and I’m sure other people don’t need the provocation either.

GRAPHIC QUALITY: This is one of those levels which tries to completely sail through the eyecandy category on the strength of a nice looking tileset. Sadly, you have to actually be able to use the tileset, and that factor is not readily apparent. There is very little deviation in the walls or background (layer 8 isn’t textured – this tileset supports textured mode, right? Mirrow, have you been making bad tilesets again?), and there’s not much else to speak of. No ground – the whole thing takes place in what I assume is supposed to be a castle. No background eyecandy. Essentially no layer 4 eyecandy except for Disguise’s head. Disguise is a great guy, but his head is not proper eyecandy for a level.
Pros: No glaring tile bugs.
Cons: Nothing beyond the basics, too much Disguise, a few layer 3 problems.
Rating: 3.7

LEVEL DESIGN: “Run to the right” is a good description of the design fo this level. It is not as bad as that Diamondus race level where you never have to press any keys besides run and right, but it’s pretty bad. I timed myself and beat the entire level (including the boss – been a while since I saw someone make Bilsy difficult… come on, people!) in less than thirty seconds, and I count too fast. This would automatically get a low mark, but it’s somewhat saved by the fact that the main time spent playing this level is spent finding the secrets. Admittedly the secrets are mostly layer 3 hidden holes in the floor, but there are still secrets, which is kind of interesting. I didn’t have nearly enough coins, for example, though I’m not positive there are actually so many coins in the level.
Pros: The secrets are a nice touch – keep that in mind for your next levels and they should become quite enjoyable.
Cons: Still too much of a straight line. Add some curves, corners, whatever strikes your fancy. Fun tricks like moving platforms. Spikes (the one place where there were spikes was cool, I’ll grant).
Rating: 5.0

GAMEPLAY/FUN FACTOR/REPLAY VALUE: It occurs to me a great deal of “Level Design” was actually spent describing the gameplay. Oh well. As I sort of said, the gameplay of this level in itself is not very enjoyable, it’s the many detours that make up the prime interest value. Obviously this is not done so well as it is in levels such as Tomb Rabbit – Central Cave, but that’s a very high standard in the first place. Sadly, despite the secrets, this level doesn’t really become a level you’d have any particular desire to play more than once, unless you’re an insane overrating J2O reviewer (naming NO names).
Pros: Did I mention the secrets? Yes, I did. Oops.
Cons: Just not very interesting.
Rating: 5.0

ORIGINALITY: I liked the part with the spikes. It’s not quite original, but it does look fairly professional (aside from the graphics, but that’s another story). Besides that, this level is pretty much dullsville. The only bit that interested me was the float ups – a few more spikes and a little more room and that could become somewhat interesting.
Pros: N/A
Cons: N/A
Rating: 3.5

EVENT PLACEMENT: There are way too many goodies. Coins, shields, ammo – you name it. There’s a secret at the start of the level containing some ammo which never shows up again in the level and you have no reason to use. There aren’t enough enemies to deserve the ammo, but I suppose that’s a good thing. Too many enemies can be a crippling point for a level. I saw no real event bugs – no destruct scenery on un-animated tiles or stuff like that.
Pros: Decent enemy placement.
Cons: Way too many goodies. Advice: study other levels, particularly the Formerly a Prince episode and anything by Chandie. Avoid anything by Blade or Willie in this regard.
Rating: 3.7

OVERALL (not an average): This is not a bad level, but it is below average. There appears to have been some sort of story to this level, in combination with another level(s?) that was not included in the .zip. Huh. Warn us next time.
Pros: Eyecandy’s not BAD, nor is most anything else.
Cons: Somewhat dull, over too soon.
Rating: 4.2

On a side note, I completely forgot you were a female while reviewing this. ANGST!

How is this different from the various other places you can download JJ1’s complete music collection?

Bjarni, when setting a music file for a level, you need to include the file extension if it’s not a .j2b. Thus…

Peaceful.j2b = Peaceful
CRAZYDANCE.MOD = CRAZYDANCE.MOD

Hopefully, that should let you listen to some other music files with JJ2.

…I kind of miss having beta tested this, but it sounds like you didn’t bother to fix anything I pointed out anyway.

GRAPHICS: Awful/poor
USABILITY: Poor/medium
MASKING: Automasked
ORIGINALITY: Poor/medium
OVERALL: Poor

…honestly, what more is there to say about this tileset? All it is is a bunch of red blocks with numbers or letters on them, an awful space background, and some sucker tubes. Oh, and I guess there’s a semi normal “pipish” wall. As I said, it’s automasked.
Would I use this tileset? Even if it weren’t TSF, I wouldn’t see too much point to it. That tileset by CelL has the same color scheme, but looks infinitely better. And there are other tilesets with letters.
Ok, so it’s user friendly. This is because there is so little to use! And it all looks almost exactly the same. This tileset has no variation whatsoever. One of the few saving graces is the example levels – if you can stand so few colors being used.

I just went through and deleted several reviews. Please, this is not a discussion board, this is where you review the quality of the upload. Go argue the merits of hotels in general somewhere else. LIKE THE JCF.

I have no clue what this “game” is for. A bunch of hand drawn carrots are bouncing around the screen. A non-animated Spaz is controlled (however poorly) with the mouse, and if the carrots hit Spaz, they bounce off. Unless they get stuck inside of Spaz, at which point they start spinning around until you move away. If the carrots hit the bottom of the screen, they disappear. Nothing else happens. If all the carrots disappear, Spaz disappears, and you can’t try again. There is no way to win. There is no point to having more than one carrot on the screen. There is no point to playing this game at all.
Graphics, except for the carrot, are all ripped – Spaz from JJ2 and everything else from the graphics libraries.

CONTROL: 2/10 It uses the mouse, and carrots can get stuck inside of you.
PRESENTATION: 1/10 There are no menu, instructions, or anything else.
GAMEPLAY: 2/10 I don’t think I need to say anything more than I already have.
GRAPHICS 3/10 Spaz isn’t animated, the other graphics don’t go too well with him, and the carrot looks bad.
OVERALL 2/10 It’s just not a very good game. Rabbit Wars was better.

Well, well, well. Here we have the last level of the old year, being reviewed by my first review of the new year.

EYECANDY: There is no background eyecandy (to the point of Layer 8 not being textured), but the author makes a gallant try in layer 4. And fails. The ground is a flat surface which alternates between grass and ground with no apparent reason – oh, right, forgot to mention. This level uses one of LRK’s tilesets, but I can’t say which as they all look the same. Regardless, it’s not included in the .zip. Anyway, a few extremely fast animations and some odd signs are presumably intended as eyecandy, but they don’t really do the best job.
Pros: The author tries, and a number of eyecandy tiles are used.
Cons: Animation too fast, just not enough stuff.
Rating: 2.5

DESIGN: It is at this point that I sincerely hope this level is a joke. The level is a small hollow box (straight lines and all) with six one tile platforms scattered around. There are a few hooks on the ceiling for some unknown reason. I can think of nothing else to say about the design.
Pros: None.
Cons: I liked the design of Zappoman’s Egypt better than this, I think. Couldn’t the platforms at least be situated so an easy jump will get you to the bottom ones?
Rating: 1.2

GAMEPLAY/FUN FACTOR: Playing in this level will consist of jumping on those platforms. And all you have is blaster. And the platforms are small. And you get the idea.
Pros: And there are no pros.
Cons: And I could go on like this. And the level is really the type of level which would let me.
Rating: And I give this a 1.0 thingy.

ORIGINALITY: Two signs are connected by a V-pole.
Rating: 1.2

OVERALL (not an average): No. Just, no. Don’t download this. It has one or two good points, but the author not knowing how to place a start position and being undecided on the level name just sealed the deal for me.
Pros: The eyecandy is actually kind of ok.
Cons: Nothing else is.
Rating: 2.0

NOKA, second rule of beta testing: don’t only show it to your testers once. Chances are quite high your bug fixes will create new bugs, or there might be problems that weren’t noticed the first time around. I mean, really. This is just about as buggy as Tubelectric, which is saying something.

TILES INCLUDED: At first glance, this is a perfect conversion. It’s not unless you actually like Turtemple that things start to get really annoying, as this is missing way too much stuff. The sand is barely usable (you’ll have to stick it on the bottom of the level or something), half the flowing red stuff is missing, and the “what are you doing up here” is a hastily thrown together rip by NOKA (instead of actually converting the real one). Instead of taking the time and tiles to add things, NOKA wastes space with random things taken from J1CS which don’t seem to have much to do with the tileset, added tiles which don’t always work, and an enormous “now approaching Turtemple” sign which I think we could all do without.
On closer observation, you may notice that several of the original tiles are actually fakes created by NOKA out of various other tiles. This almost works, but not quite, as they use the background. Inside the unmasked bricks area, you see the orange rocky ground – on top of brick background. This is wrong. It’s supposed to be on top of the double block tiles (interestingly, there Are other tiles on top of double blocks, despite there not being a blank double block anywhere in the tileset). I’m not really sure what to make of the pipe background from JJ1, as it doesn’t actually seem to be from JJ1 (the original was Much longer).
While there are way too many problems (fortunately some have been fixed since the beta testing stage), for the most part, Turtemple is available in this (series of, plural) .j2t file. Unless you’re a purist and/or perfectionist, in which case this is severely flawed.
Pros: Almost everything exists.
Cons: Missing tiles, poorly reconstructed tiles.
Rating: 7.7

COLOR: NOKA has not yet gotten the hang of making a proper palette. Everything from Turtemple looks fine (at least in the normal version…), but there is not a single working palette event in the entire tileset (…except water). This is particularly brought to light by the fact the author tries to give you the jungle pole to use… ouch. One or two palette events missing is quite understandable, but please, at least the 500 bumper (appropiate, as Turtemple seems to be a tileset best suited for races). As for the palette change versions, I’ll talk about them later.
Pros: Most things work.
Cons: Nothing else works. Oh, and the “now approaching” fails to look good. Again.
Rating: 8.5

ADDED TILES: In place of getting all the real stuff, NOKA has thrown out small pieces in order to add lots of new stuff. And the new stuff is really rather cool. The vine and sucker tube look great, the trees are all believable (some of them were even sort of in the original tileset), the blocks fit in well, etc. This is one of the best parts of this tileset, as the new stuff really help Turtemple be Turtemple, if that’s possible.
Pros: Everything looks great. Especially the sucker tubes.
Cons: …oh right, the complaints. Well, the trees have some serious anti-aliasing difficulties, and the included jungle pole tiles don’t work (color wise). The sucker tubes might be better with something behind you as well, so it looks more like a tube.
Rating: 8.7

ANIMATION: Turtemple is an extremely unanimated tileset. About the only animation is the red flowing stuff. Admittedly half of that was left out, but the half that got included was carried out very well, with lots of stuff being able to go atop it. No complaints here.
Rating: 9.5

MASKING: Masking is also mostly good. Everything is smooth (with the exception of part of the sand slopes, but they manage to work just fine anyway), and I see no little dot bugs. There are one or two problems, though.
Pros: Masking mostly logical.
Cons: Masking the balls as balls might be able to get you stuck, transition from some platforms to others doesn’t work too well, masking for the sand too low down.
Rating: 8.5

(OTHER VERSIONS): NOKA has rather firmly latched onto the idea of “add other versions”, but they rarely seem to work very well. The sprite palette ends up getting changed in such a way that it looks more accidental than intentional, the background bricks display color bugs, the signs end up changing color, the jungle pole works even less, and there’s way too much green in the Wild version. Also, they’re all (except Wild) way too similar to the original, so much so that it’s unlikely they’d actually be used for anything.
Rating adjustment: -0.6

OVERALL: Before this finishes, I want to say (again?) that this is actually a very good conversion, and it just doesn’t seem fair there are so many, Many bugs in it. For all ordinary purposes, this is a perfect Turtemple conversion (probably better than CelL’s… not sure). I won’t be surprised if I see levels using this (Deserto is fairly popular, and this is similar to Deserto).
Pros: Mostly great.
Cons: A few too many bugs.
Rating: 8.5

You know something really horrible? I don’t care how easy this program was to make, it’s simply incredible. Ultra-simple layout, full functionality… what more could you ask? This program does what it advertises.
…ok, actually, there are one or two bugs. However, the only ones I can find is that it works in SP (making it usable as a cheating program) and that the Coins-to-health conversion takes away all your coins.

PROS: Incredible program, very useful.
CONS: A few bugs. Reupload this with them fixed, please please please. Also, instead of the set multiplications, it would be nice if you could choose what each commodity was multipled by.
Rating: 8.7

On a side note… Yay! There is a coin limit, after all! …which causes the program to crash, but oh well.

This would really be nice if it worked better, but sadly it relies way too heavily on an admin, and it fails to consider things like lag. Essentially, ignoring the larger part of the readme, this is how the upload works:

Client sits in WaitTime SuckerTube until a Seeker SCE shoots them, presumably causing them to lose some gems.
Admin sees the gems fall. Accurately. Without any lag or count difference. Honest.
Using the IceBank system (did I get credit? Is that one of the few things I didn’t get credit for?), Admin brings them down into the proper warp.
This gives them a number from 1-5 coins. Hopefully, the admin is trustworthy and will give the client the same amount of coins as gems.

This also takes way too long to be of much use. Can you imagine trying to turn 1000 gems into coins with this thing? Assuming it worked, that is.

This is completely unrelated, but I want to know how your copy of RabbitHotel.j2t is from 2009.

Response: Hotels are hosted in Battle. Also viewing gem counts doesn’t work very well at all.[This review has been edited by Violet CLM]