Not recommendedReview by Violet CLM

Posted:
4 Aug 2010, 08:13 (edited 4 Aug 10, 11:48)
For: JJ2 TileSet Viewer
Level rating: 3.9
Rating
3

This program is somewhat functional, but I’m not sure what use it has. First off it’s not even all that good at displaying tilesets: the window isn’t fixed width, even though the contents are, and for some reason there’s a black margin to the left of the tileset image so you can’t have nothing but the image in the window. Not that you’d want to, since the information displayed at the bottom of the window is actually wider than a tileset. The transparent color, as noted, is black, unlike the traditional purple, and this cannot be modified. It takes longer to load a tileset than JCS does, and displays only the image, not the clipping or transparency masks.

Some directions this program does not take that could make it at least slightly useful:
  • Function to create (and presumably begin editing) a new level using the selected tileset
  • Function to list all levels using that tileset
  • Grid view
  • Number of repeated tiles
  • Number of animated tiles possible using that tileset
  • Export to image
  • Clipping/transparency mask view
  • Palette extraction (and saving as .pal) and importation
  • Really any kind of editing capabilities at all
  • Any direct exportation functions (but I guess j2ff already does that)
  • Function to change version
  • 1.10o support
  • Palette-sensitive events preview (as in JPS)
  • Integrate tileset viewing algorithm into the Windows Explorer Preview Pane instead

However, not a single one of those possibilities is realized, and this program, incredibly, does just what it says on the box: it shows you the image of the tileset. It’s competently written, and the code should be a good base for actual utilities down the line, but right now, this is no more than a proof of concept uploaded to J2O instead of posted to the JCF or left on the uploader’s HD as a stepping stone towards future projects.

P.S. StarLORD: If you’re interested in finding the best utility upload of each day, I have another recent upload to point you towards…

Review by Violet CLM

Posted:
14 Jul 2010, 22:45 (edited 14 Jul 10, 22:45)
For: Territory Control
Level rating: N/A
Rating
N/A

Review by Violet CLM

Posted:
6 Jun 2010, 05:10 (edited 6 Jun 10, 05:11)
For: JailBreak In Deserto
Level rating: N/A
Rating
N/A

hi I made that conversion by the way. it’s not especially good, but it’s no more by Sal than Orbitus is by blur.

RecommendedReview by Violet CLM

Posted:
17 May 2010, 05:58
For: Mission Spaz: Foreseeable Future
Level rating: 8.8
Rating
8.5

Foreseeable Future is the first “modern” JJ1 release. Everything before this has been more or less bound within the steep limitations of JCS94 — DD was able to create a palette edit of Diamondus, and we’ve many of us edited a few events within the confines of the sprites that come with the levels we’re editing — but Newspaz has custom tilesets, custom attacks, custom sprites (mostly swapped from original JJ1 planets, but also some smaller spritifying work, like the flames in Castle and Desolatus), and even custom movement. There could be more — the flowers in Carrotus are conspicuously unanimated, and you should be able to shoot the knights’ helmets, like in Bloxonius — but overall Newspaz is pioneering and demonstrating JJ1’s true range of customization possibilities. Cooba and I are of course working on our own projects, as are perhaps others who haven’t shown any screenshots yet, but Newspaz got his out the door first.

All that, though, has nothing to do with the more important question of how good the episode actually is. Fortunately, in addition to doing stuff first, Newspaz is pretty good at it as well. He creates three distinct atmospheres that are copies neither of their JJ2 counterparts (though Desolatus, his version of BlurredD’s tileset “Desolation,” doesn’t have an exact single player counterpart anyway) nor of any particular JJ1 planet. Carrotus definitely has familiar elements from the original Carrotus levels, but it’s still distinctly Newspaz’s own, and I suspect I even noticed a piece or two inspired more by Easter. The enemies are turtles and bees, more or less straight from Diamondus, although the movement of the bees is sometimes a bit wonky, and nothing of the planet poses too much of a threat, unless you fall into the thorns a lot. Every once in a while the level feels a bit open, but for the most part NS recognizes that JJ1 necessitates eyecandy being crammed into small spaces, due to its small screen size, and his tileset conversion is flush with foliage. The turtle looks a bit weird, since its shell is the color of the Carrotus radish, but that’s not too big of a deal.

Castle is assuredly the main event. It’s the hardest and the prettiest of the three, the subdued tile colors mixing beautifully with the near-garish sprite colors. Enemies are Armor-Doofi from Stonar, recolored Red Bats from Turtemple, and the cannon tiles, which cannot be destroyed but will still fire cannonballs at you. The bats come out of nowhere, the cannons fire a lot, and there are a lot of spikes, all of which adds up to a difficult experience, with only one checkpoint per level. The level design is in no way an emulation of JJ2’s castle — it feels a lot more solid, for one — but it’s still very consistent, and does the best job of any of the three of feeling like it has a coherent, planned layout, more than a lot of areas one after another.

Desolatus is the most out there and plays around the most with JJ1, featuring moving platforms, spike-like events, weird jumping owls, tubes, bridges, and spring shoes. Its layout might be the closest to Cliffy’s, though I’m not sure… it’s pretty claustrophobic, with a pretty twisted path in each level, and, more than the other two planets, it features a number of clearly divided areas. It’s not as pretty, but that’s arguably not NS’ fault. It’s not nearly as difficult as Castle, though, to the extent that the level order becomes a little confusing, and while NS provides a skeleton plot for the episode, it’s not especially clear why one planet necessarily precedes another, so this could have been switched.

There are some distinctive features to NS’ level design which feel slightly out of place in JJ1 because they show up so rarely in the original levels. Newspaz makes much greater use of vertical space than Cliffy did — Cliffy had occasional floating platforms or floating springs, and Newspaz does use the latter once, but he also has a lot of tubes which you traverse using a single spring, or big pits for falling down, both of which are quite distinctive to him across all three planets. Secrets are usually in the same sort of place, a little off to the side in a place you’re supposed to go up or down, and they’re never hidden by foreground or destructable walls, you just need to walk over to them. Paths break occasionally, and that’s always cool — Carrotus is fairly complicated, and there’s a nice loop area in a Castle level that feels similar to Crysilis. One area near the end of Desolatus has a bunch of floating (tile-based) platforms and feels more like a CTF level than anything else, or perhaps Jill of the Jungle.

The biggest flaw in Foreseeable Future is that the difficulty, while mostly reasonable, is occasionally unfair. A side effect of Newspaz’s fondness of vertical space is that there are a lot of leaps of faith, and there’s no good way to know which ones will have spikes at the bottom and which won’t. One pit in Castle comes to mind especially which it’s really not clear that you have to jump across, and while this is subverted at one point in Desolatus — you fall down and land directly on a moving platform, which NS clearly timed carefully — it seems that working in such a small resolution is difficult, especially if you’re used to JJ2. The bats and cannons in Castle are hard to predict and the latter fire very frequently, making them possible to get by without injury if you memorize where they are in each level, but much harder to appraise at a distance and come up with a strategy for avoiding. You feel much safer there when you’re moving left, because the bats approach you more slowly and the cannons can’t hit you. I don’t object to difficulty by itself, I just object to success resulting only from memorization. The other planets are much better with this, though, a few surprising flames in Desolatus aside, and for the most part you’re just treated to pretty graphics, new and very memorable level designs, and a sense of inspiration as you realize how many things JJ1 can do if you give it a chance. Foreseeable Future isn’t perfect, but what is?

Not recommendedReview by Violet CLM

Posted:
17 May 2010, 01:35 (edited 17 May 10, 01:41)
For: Episode 1: Turtle Terror
Level rating: 7.6
Rating
7

It’s hard to know what to say about this… on the one hand, it does a good job of what it tries to do, if not a perfect one, but on the other hand, is what it tries to do a good thing?

I compared the levels in the pack, in addition to their JJ1 LEVELX.00X originals, to jj1Diamondus1.j2l, a total conversion of Diamondus 1 I found in my JJ2 folder, of unknown origin, and jjtube1.j2l, the total conversion of Tubelectric 1 that came with Newspaz’s Tubelectric conversion. In terms of tile-to-tile accuracy alone, PT32 does a better job, no doubt aided tremendously by the existence of the level viewer JCS94, which was not available when the other two levels were made. jjtube1.j2l has two tubes slightly longer than they are supposed to be, but PT32 gets both of them right. jj1Diamondus1 has a few missing tiles at the end, perhaps because they were not present in the tileset it used, but PT32 includes them. The only places I noticed where PT32 diverts radically from the actual JJ1 tiles are those which are never seen on screen, and that’s fine. Obviously a massive amount of time was put into the accuracy and it turned out well, with only occasional, minor hiccups (a layer 3 problem in Diamondus, a few background tiles overgeneralized in Medivo). In nearly all the spots where Jazz could get stuck in JJ2 from diagonally masked tiles coming together, PT32 carefully inserts invisible solid tiles to keep you safe: good job there. Even the enemies that appear only on hard difficulty are present and appropriately parametered.

Of course, JJ1 and JJ2 are different games and use different engines, and there are a few things that do not translate exactly, and thus necessarily a few decisions that must be made. I can’t however say that I agree with all that many of PT32’s. The enemy replacements are all straightforward — replacing JJ1 bees with JJ2 bees is never as accurate as we might want it to be, but I’m not sure there’s any better alternative, and rapiers are a decent swap — and I can’t say I have a better, easily implemented suggestion for shields than coins, but problems subsist. The tiny turtles are gone without a trace, although I’d have been tempted to use moths. The secret level, as PT32 admits, is barely playable, and it would have worked out much better with an airboard than an actual bird morph. This is what JelZe did for his own conversion of Turtle Terror, and it was much more functional, even if the bird morph is a better match VISUALLY. I’m not sure how I feel about using Bubba for the turtle boss.

Only occasionally does PT32 have to change the level design outright. There’s a secret in a Medivo level with four +15 Toaster boxes, which in JJ1 you reach from above and then exit through the floor. PT32 notices this doesn’t work in JJ2, because two of the boxes would fall through the floor, and replaces the exit route with one way tiles. This is decent, if confusing, but +15 boxes are not affected by gravity when you move them with belts, as JCSref mentions, and I think that would have done a much better job. Conversely, there’s another spot at the top right of Diamondus 1 where some tiles are supposed to be one way but aren’t because they’re not masked in JJ2 and I guess PT32 didn’t test it enough. The various tube secrets are all done pretty well, but the secret-to-the-left-of-the-spring in Diamondus 2 is inaccessible because PT32, unlike JelZe, was unwilling to compromise and add one more unmasked tile above the spring for Jazz to fit through. The destructable blocks in the Guardian arena are understandably replaced with destruct scenery, although I don’t understand why their debris tile is lava. On the bright side, invisible springs are handled consistently well.

Tubelectric is the biggest offender. To be sure, it’s for good reason — there simply aren’t obvious counterparts to the turrets or barriers. Newspaz leaves the barriers as unmasked eyecandy (after all, his only goal was to show off the tileset as visually complete — which it wasn’t — not to push the limits of the JJ2 engine), and puts Hurt events on the turrets. JelZe leaves the turrets out entirely and replaces the barriers with four-hit destruct blocks. PT32, though, employs the worst of both worlds and masks neither of them, leaving Tubelectric neutered. However, unlike Newspaz or JelZe, PT32 was actually working with a tileset that had masked animations for the turret fire, and apparently just chose not to use them. Bizarre. The barriers are a harder case, but I’m pretty sure a solution could have been found with Reworder. It wouldn’t have been perfect, but it would have been better than not trying.

So, PT32 does a nearly perfect job of 1:1 conversion accuracy, though the creativity comes up a bit short. What’s it worth? This episode is the natural counterpoint to JelZe’s, which itself was fairly controversial — I don’t even agree with the rating I myself gave to it back then. JelZe did better in making a JJ2 pack — his Fast Feet section and secret level are irrefutably better than PT32’s, for instance — but necessarily sacrificed a bit of accuracy, both from graphics (waterfalls, glowing blue circuits, lava, foreground bars, and so on) and from gameplay. PT32 does better in bringing over the exact contents, almost mechanically, with few problems other than those of the JJ2 engine and the conversions used, but loses the feeling of newness, creativity, and mystery.

The real problem, in short, is that PT32 should not have made this, not in 2010. I’m not saying that if no one had totally converted Turtle Terror in twelve years, then there was a good reason for it — though I’m not arguing against that, either — I’m just saying that, given our understanding of both the JJ1 and JJ2 file formats, this should never have been done by hand over a period of apparently 80 hours. A program could have done automatically just about everything PT32 does here manually, with human labor necessary only for a bit of cleanup and feature adding at the end. And that’s the tragedy of the work: all the lost time and talent toward only a questionable end.

Quick Review by Violet CLM

Posted:
14 Jan 2010, 02:54
For: Traditional Japan +
Level rating: 9.1
Rating
7.6

Trying out the Quick Review medium here. Traditional Japan does a lot of things really well, and the only part that falls flat is the coloring/shading. All the right tiles are there, anything a level builder might want to do is possible, the ideas are great, the background amazing — it’s just that it’s too bright and not very attractive. Pity.

Not recommendedReview by Violet CLM

Posted:
14 Jan 2010, 02:50 (edited 14 Jan 10, 17:59)
For: Technology
Level rating: 6.7
Rating
6.6

Gus tilesets, despite his community acclamation as “most improved,” are always rather hit or miss, and I find that a good scale for judging their quality is how much time has elapsed since his last release. In this case, it doesn’t seem to have been long enough, and Gus has largely reverted here to his old, lazier habits of tileset creation, including the incredibly thorough isometric perspective from Pyramid 3D, A Candion Day, Ancient Tiles, and so on. At least in layer 4, Technology (to which I feel it is fair to abbreviate it) is geometrically pristine and well-thought-out but offers little to nothing of any interest. I’m not sure if this is a set drawn with nothing but the sprite colors, but it definitely looks that way, especially since the sprite colors themselves are just as unsaturated.

Technology offers you three ground types (grass, rooftop, and rooftop garden) atop three soil types (dirt, light gray solid, dark gray solid) with, presumably, all the appropriate connecting tiles you could ever want. The attention to detail in this department is so thorough that there are tiles for the transition from layer 3 to no layer 3 in the bottom right corners of dirt walls. The dirt has no texture — nothing in the tileset does, apart from the big yellow blocks and a couple background bits — but its edges are curvy in contrast to the straight lines and exact, divisible angles that are most of the rest of the set. It’s competently drawn, and yet, as I’ve stated with regards to Islands of the Sapphire Sea, the graphical style does not appeal to me and it’s pulled off better there anyway.

All the nature stuff looks good. The grass is nicely wavy, the broken glass is amazingly well done, the girder bridge from the example level is very attractive (although it would be better were the angle on the isometric perspective a little less extreme.) There are some nice bush tiles and a bunch of alien plants which are inexplicably unanimated but otherwise quite nice. Apart from lamp posts, there’s really nothing comparable for the street/rooftop tiles, which don’t even offer the luxury of being sloped. Gus provides some giant 2×2 block tiles of a few different styles to vary up the technology parts of layer 4, but the isometric perspective looks its absolute worst here: the yellow block edges don’t look 3D (or look 3D in the wrong way), the beveled pyramid edges are difficult for the eye to process, and the metal block edges are obvious victims of resize and skew tools. For no ground type is there any opportunity for soil variety as you see in Carrotus or Diamondus or the like.

The tile order in Technology is atrocious. Let me see if I can figure it out. We start with the basic masked tiles for the main ground types, well and good. The main parts for the rooftop, though, are at 1,2 and 1,8, separated by a lamppost and not connected to the tiles that are their more obvious cousins. This slows things down immensely. Immediately below this are some tiles for layer 7, and then the alternate rooftop garden floor tiles, along with some missing tiles (such as corners) from the themes already introduced. Some stuff I don’t recognize (more lampposts?), more tiles from layer 7, and then layer 8. Next are some miscellaneous eyecandy tiles for layer 4 — fences, layer 3 tricks, and another lamppost — and then an alternate layer 8 and a bunch of tiles for layer 6, followed by more layer 7 and more layer 4 eyecandy, followed by a whole new layer 4 theme that goes on for many rows of tiles (the 2×2 blocks). Also, slopes. Then more layer 4 eyecandy (bushes) and all of a sudden layer 5 appears, along with more layer 6, and then the tileset finishes itself off with more layer 8, event tiles, and a cave for the grass walls. In short: it’s absolute chaos. Layer 5 is the only one whose tiles are in any way kept in only one part of the set. Basically they’re in the order Gus probably drew them and no effort was made to help the user find anything.

I’ve brought up the background some times now, but I didn’t want to mention it while discussing layer 4, because they’re really different, even though they use the same colors. Layer 4 is a passable, uninteresting tileset with limited eyecandy and an over-reliance on isometric walls. Layers 5-8 make a gorgeous background — which long seems to be Gus’ speciality — that can be manufactured in many different ways and is all very innovative and complex. The tile order gets in the way, of course, but if you can figure out what goes where you end up with something very pretty for which the limited palette really does work. Layer 8 is untextured and is an effect Gus has played with before, where there are several layers of buildings (previously mountains) in front of one another with different single colors. It looks cute and trippy. The rest is rooftop gardens, highways, aliens, buildings, and so on, and it’s all really good. If anything, the mistake the rest of the set makes is that it doesn’t realize that backgrounds are an inherently different graphical style and tries to be a zoomed-in version of the background.

In sum, the set looks gorgeous, but the less time you can spend looking at layer 4, probably the better, because there’s little there to distinguish it from any other tileset and it’s just too angled. The isometric perspective can look great when it’s more subtle — see Medivo, HH98, maybe Colon but your mileage may vary — but this is too extreme. What this tileset would work really well for is a cutscene or an intro level or something similarly nonplayable. Let a camera move around through this futuristic city, put on some appropriate music, add a lot of text events, and then throw the player into a gameplay level. That’d be gorgeous. But don’t attempt to do anything else because the tileset will only frustrate you in your attempts.

RecommendedReview by Violet CLM

Posted:
3 Jan 2010, 21:02
For: Mines of Diamondus
Level rating: 8.3
Rating
7.5

My favorite part about this level is how unapologetically ridiculous it is. There is no storyline, as we learn at the very beginning when even a text sign tile fails to produce any text. There’s a boss at the end, but no explanation is given then either. The level exists entirely within itself, and is nothing more than a darkened, linear, sadistic romp through the emptier caves of Diamondus. It is the most basic part of JJ2 single player distilled: enemies are in your way, as are spikes, and over time you pick up food and ammo to help you. There are two moments when trigger crates became involved, but at that point I didn’t trust the level enough not to perceive them as a threat to avoid stomping until I had made sure there really was an impenetrable obstacle later on in my path.

From the very first screen, you know you’re in trouble. It’s dark, a few enemies are circulating around, and there are spikes you don’t want to fall on. A quick check reveals that ceiling spikes hurt you as well. And that’s what you need to know. There are a lot of spikes, and a lot of enemies, and they’re never really going to let up. There’s not enough ammo to use it constantly, but there’s enough so that whenever you get in a situation warranting it you shouldn’t be defenseless. Toaster and RFs won the day for me as enhanced melee weapons to take out a group of enemies quickly with more firepower than the blaster. I didn’t especially notice any moments when TNT or Electroblaster would have come in handy (outside of a trigger crate for the former), but ice had its moments against the tougher baddies, and bouncers were absent for most of the level and then presented as a lifesaving boon near the end. Seekers were, in keeping with the amount this level wants you to die horribly, nowhere to be found.

Mine of Diamondus is a good example of how to use a lot of different enemies right, in that it staggers them rather than introducing them all at the very start of the level. The more thematically specific ones, such as skeletons and ghosts, are restricted to limited areas which you may assume are more haunted than the rest of the mine. Float lizards only appear at the top of the level — which gives you the prospect of escaping the mine but in fact reveals the far background to be no more than more cave but a little farther away — and fencers and witches at the bottom near the end. (I don’t think the fencers really worked, due to their costumes, and I think they really only do appear in one spot so they would not have been missed.) The level uses two witches and incorporates them into its design philosophy perfectly in that they are presented with no show or preamble at all, are gone with as little fanfare as they appeared, and are not involved with any complicated find-Eva-type level design. Rather, you morph back almost immediately after meeting them: they’re just threats. It’s kind of amazing.

There are several secrets to break up the level, some of which are obvious and some not. The author favors layer 3 secrets that you have to shoot your way into over the ones that you don’t, so eventually I realized that it just made sense to have the blaster firing all the time, and switch to other weapons when the occasion warranted it. Secrets get bigger as the level goes on, giving you carrots and large caches of ammo instead of a measly two red gems, and were all fairly well executed. There were some I saw but never found a way into, and I wouldn’t be too surprised if they weren’t actually accessible and the level was just being sadistic, because that is so much the feeling I got from this level. It was enjoying my pain and looking for subtle, non-flashy ways to increase it. Bats would come out of the floor, secrets would not be where I expected, witches would attack without any warning at all, the top of the level didn’t offer any sight of the sky, and so on. Even the end of the level pits you against a boss in the deepest point of the cave, and there’s no suggestion that beating it will make any progress in getting you out of there, because it’s a dead end at the bottom of a long pit. Even by beating the level you are no less doomed than you were at the start. Yet determination wins out!

I’m not sure how I feel about the eyecandy… it was very basic, letting the level design speak for itself, but still I think at least a little bit more could have been done. The level was, as I’ve said, extremely linear — most of the trigger crates were even before the blocks they removed — and I don’t know whether that’s good or bad, because it certainly made the level all the more inevitable to give me no choice at any time what I would be doing next, outside of finding secrets. And there could have been more creativity in some of the obstacles. I think swinging platforms would have worked well here, and in general some enemies placed more tactfully, since at least most of them only involved getting in the right place to hit with two or three or four bullets. The important thing is to maintain the feeling that the level is deeply, deeply angry at you for something that you did — even if you have no idea what it could possibly have been and would probably apologize if the level would only provide you a text sign — and I don’t think that’s in much danger of going away. The only false note on the obstacle side was an inescapable pit of spikes near the end. Not cool.

Not recommendedReview by Violet CLM

Posted:
26 Dec 2009, 22:15
For: the escape from the castle
Level rating: 1.7
Rating
1.7

These levels show strong technical proficiency — you know how to use bridges, trigger crates, destruct/stomp blocks, animations, swinging platform, layer properties, and so on — but little else. The first level (I managed to guess the level order based on your plot description, but in general it is better to indicate clearly in the filenames which level people are supposed to start on) presents no challenge at all because all the enemies can be jumped or coptered over, and the same goes for the second level up to the boss, which is totally uninteresting. We’ve all fought all the bosses in empty arenas before — to make them interesting, at the very least there should be some interesting eyecandy around them, and better off there should be something to make the fight different than usual. I think it was Shellion’s Xtreme Revenge, for instance, that had you shoot through a number of destruct blocks while avoiding the Tuf boss’s flamerang. Not hard to make in JCS, and not itself the most interesting boss, but still better than this. Basically, you need to spend a lot more time thinking about your levels. You obviously know what you’re doing in JCS so far as using events goes, but the execution falls flat if there’s nothing new in the level design for people to be interested by. Also, perhaps as a secondary concern, spend more time on your eyecandy. You’ve got layer 8 down, but the other layers are pretty rudimentary so far, and could be a lot prettier. As long as you’re sticking to the official tilesets, even looking at the official levels should give you ideas for how to make yours more appealing to look at, although eventually you may want to start handling things more creatively there too. Keep at it, and be thoughtful.

Review by Violet CLM

Posted:
26 Dec 2009, 22:06
For: The Forest
Level rating: 2.4
Rating
2.8

I kind of like this. There is obviously a whole lot of work to be done, but the author demonstrates some creativity, if not perhaps technical proficiency. A number of common new-JCS-user traps are fallen into, such as using a large number of enemies (it’s generally seen as more professional to restrict each level to about three or four enemy types, unless it’s a very big level which gradually progresses, e.g. adding in harder enemies and dropping easier ones, as you go on), not using layer properties (the icon next to zoom in/out in the upper right, or just right click-“Properties…”), and having a very flat level design which Jazz and Lori can copter over large portions of, but at the same time it’s obvious that thought was put in here. The author attempts to set up two sections of logs floating on top of water, and while the second one in particular is a little buggy, this could have been eliminated by having someone test the level before uploading it to J2O, and it shows careful work. The author knows how to use trigger scenery and warps, setting up an elaborate red and blue structure with the latter, and while the level design is mostly flat and straightforward, there are a few interesting moments and ammo is neither spammed nor absent. This is by no means a great level, but the author has his/her head in the right place and is learning from the mistakes of previous uploads. Some more reading up at JCSRef and other JCS sites is advised, but there is potential here.

Review by Violet CLM

Posted:
19 Sep 2009, 00:56
For: Level Packer v1.4.3
Level rating: 9.5
Rating
N/A

I am puzzled. Under what circumstances would someone want to use this instead of PackPacker?

Review by Violet CLM

Posted:
13 Jun 2009, 21:36
For: Arctic War
Level rating: 7.7
Rating
N/A

This file is uploaded as a Battle level, not a tileset. Thus there is no reason anyone should rate the tileset. Mike has provided a link to the source if anyone is curious, but Dodges already wrote “composed.. [didn’t draw]” so we knew it was a conversion, and there is no dishonesty involved. No problem, go forth, rate the level.

Not recommendedReview by Violet CLM

Posted:
25 May 2009, 22:29
For: Castle v2
Level rating: 2.4
Rating
2.4

Tileset conversions, or whatever we’re calling these things, are a tricky field to jump into, and you’re being gutsy, but this needs more work. The best recommendation I can give you is to download some successful examples of the practice — Castle 2, Psych 3, Carrotus Fix, for instance — The main thing this tileset has to offer is a different tile order, but as sonicnathan1 says, Castle’s probably not the biggest candidate for that. It makes sense to overhaul the tile order in the less used sets — Inferno, Colon, Psych, etc. — part of the reason that they’re not used so much is that people find them confusing. Castle, though, is mostly simple, and the few improvements you may end up making are offset by the learning curve someone would have to take on to figure out the rest of the set.

Beyond that, just at a first glance, your reordering isn’t actually all that good. The community is more or less agreed on the order Disguise proposes at DTR. I don’t think there’s a fixed place for animations yet, but other than that the above link is pretty solid. You’re pretty close to that, but you’ve got event tiles all over the place, which is a no-no, and there are definitely times where you fail to break tiles into sections and have the basics come before the eyecandy. Bringing the big sections of blocks that Nick added late in the game up to join the rest of the walls makes sense, but you’re not done by any means, and the tile order just doesn’t look pretty right now.

The other main point of tileset conversions is what you add to the set, why someone should download and use it over the original in the first place, and you’re really lacking here. I’m slightly hesitant about your decision to kill the slides but I imagine most people wouldn’t really care. More importantly, you add next to nothing. You expand the background stuff so it can have borders, but your colors are off, and the textured background is so traditionally colored it’s obvious you didn’t think about it for ten seconds, although you did make it work, so kudos. If you’re going to convert a tileset that JJ2 already has, you need a vision, you need to have an image of what that tileset means to you which you’re then trying to give to us to use in our levels. Right now your vision is that Castle probably has a sky outside, and that’s not good enough.

Again, look at other conversions, see that they add stuff, and maybe even go past that. Right now, this set is all well-intentioned, and you begin at all the right things, but you stop too soon for this to be useful. Study Disguise’s order, study how it’s implemented in other sets, study how tilesets can look “pretty” in JCS, and think long and hard about what tiles you want available for us before you upload. Castle is a small set, and there’s a lot of room to add stuff. I’ve never seen anyone acknowledge, for example, that the tileset as it stands is actually supposed to represent the Carrotus Castle Dungeons, not the stuff up on top. What if you looked at some JJ3 screenshots and incorporated more of that? There’s a world of possibilities out there when you’re messing with other people’s stuff.

Not recommendedReview by Violet CLM

Posted:
25 May 2009, 22:08
For: 3 battle pack one
Level rating: 4
Rating
4

Ah, this takes me back. These levels are what you’d see in 1998 or 1999 or so, a time when the distinction between battle and hotel levels could still be pretty loose and JCS was notable not because it let you make battle zones perfectly in tune with specific theories of gameplay but because it let you build your own worlds and populate them with distinct features and environments. That is, incidentally, the only respect in which the music chosen really makes any sense. It kind of works in the Top Secret level, but for the other two levels the music is totally wrong, and can only be saved if you consider that it came from a Castlevania game, and these levels are much closer to that in design then they are to ordinary battle levels.

Probably the best-known comparison for these maps is Hotel Orion (and to a lesser extent many of its cousins): the eyecandy is minimal and individual tiles are blocky, chosen to convey specific ideas about what’s going on around them rather than to create a beautiful, unified image for the entire level. This is eyecandy as one might find it in Cracco Land of Coins, but even more broken down than in that. In the Top Secret map in particular — my favorite, and the best example here of what I’m talking about — the author uses letter blocks to tell you what the place you’re in is. “3 Way Arena” is all you need to understand that you’re in an arena where you fight with powered-up RF Missiles, because that’s the only thing around. The maps are segregated — sometimes by elaborate warp systems, sometimes by empty space — into very specific areas for very specific ideas. You’ll never find speed dating (or even a chatroom) in a level of today.

It isn’t that the author doesn’t know how to use JCS, and so doesn’t produce what we’re used to. There are plenty of destructable scenery, springs, floats, trigger crates, and warps, all working flawlessly. The other layers are populated and have had their settings changed — they’re not remotely attractive, particularly in Bloxonius, but they’re technically proficient. One particularly intelligent area features animated tiles that remain solid for a while, then change to smiley-face blocks to indicate that they’re about to disappear, then go unsolid for a bit so you can fall through. Next to them are countdown animated tiles so you’ll know how much longer you have left before escape is possible. This is the kind of thinking you’ll see in these maps but would never see anywhere else, at least not so primitively.

Right now, these maps are mostly unplayable for anyone but the author and whoever lives in real life proximity. None of us have the right endearment or can actually understand the importance of the place in the Space Warbase level where you fall through collapse scenery and collect ammo, and the moving columns make no sense to us. But this author has everything it takes to improve later on. The author needs to decide what is most important in level design, fast-paced gameplay or worldbuilding — clearly right now the latter, but things may change — and separate the two out. The vast quantities of ammo right now are torn between being actually used for battle games and for invoking specific sentiments, and that’s not right. But it is from levels like this that a new Craccoboy or Miracle of Sun might eventually evolve, although a little more time spent on eyecandy might help, at least to sell concepts to casual players. And making the levels smaller would be a good step too, so that the author can actually focus on places for more than a minute or two before having to move on to fill the rest of the enormous layer 4.

If you’re looking for battle levels, absolutely do not download these. But they’re wonderful reminders that there’s a lot we could be doing with JCS that we’re not right now. This author doesn’t yet have the skill to make it palatable to a wider audience, but maybe some of us do. Or maybe it’ll take another couple years. If you do download these, maybe skip the Bloxonius map (battle4s) entirely, as it’s more of a battle level than the other two but a throwback to a school of design we absolutely do not need. But try to keep an open mind, and ask yourself if what you see is necessarily worse than what we do in JCS today, or just (a very primitive, experimental version of) something different.

Review by Violet CLM

Posted:
25 May 2009, 20:18
For: Razz
Level rating: N/A
Rating
N/A

This is Spaz’ head on Jazz’ body with some awkward recoloring and few of Razz’ gadgets. More importantly, I’d say it’s really more appropriate material for the JCF or Rabbitjournal.

Review by Violet CLM

Posted:
13 Mar 2009, 19:51
For: Jungle 1.00g
Level rating: N/A
Rating
N/A

Oh, awesome. I’ve been wanting to do this for a really long time but I never put enough time into plumbing the .lev files. Thank you!

RecommendedQuick Review by Violet CLM

Posted:
30 Mar 2008, 16:14 (edited 30 Mar 08, 16:15)
For: Balltyville Sewers
Level rating: 6.3
Rating
6.4

A good hour, though for some parts more than others. The blue walls, bricks and green pipes highlighted in the screenshot look amazing, but this comes at the expense of the rest of the tileset, none of which is attractive. I’d love to see an expansion of the sewer with more soil tile variety that nixes the rest. Masking fine, layout imperfect.

RecommendedQuick Review by Violet CLM

Posted:
30 Mar 2008, 16:08
For: Diamond Rainbow
Level rating: 7.8
Rating
7.1

“It will overwrite your default files, so back them up first.” Use JSwapper! :D

DD takes the rainbow background from the Xion is Wrong edit and runs with it, brightening up other aspects of the tileset, changing colors, etc. It looks pretty, if could use maybe a few more caves. The design is complex, if nothing revolutionary. Support JJ1!

Review by Violet CLM

Posted:
4 Feb 2008, 03:32 (edited 4 Feb 08, 07:31)
For: Ursus C-360 - History of polish tractors
Level rating: 4.5
Rating
N/A

.bmp files are about as big as images can possibly get. There is no possible way it would not be simpler to build the tileset yourself and upload it with the .zip, rather than forcing people to download .bmp’s.

RecommendedReview by Violet CLM

Posted:
16 Jan 2008, 01:09
For: Tomb Rabbit 2 Unfinished
Level rating: 9.4
Rating
9.8

I have gone through several possible introductions to this review, and none seem to properly encompass how much I am blown away by this release. That it was released at ALL is of course unexpected, but that Kejero should have evolved so far beyond his work in Tomb Rabbit 1, although the same style is still at times visible, and that despite all the work visible in this pack being (as I understand it) many years old it blows all modern work completely out of the water… that is nigh-impossible to describe. I have thought through many authors and packs hailed as great examples of the single player genre – Moonblaze’s demon invasions, the ramblings of Spaztic and Agama and Blade, Mike’s sprawling classic narrative, the first venture into a world of tombs (which as you may already know are not present in this pack), the cinematic joy of the Lost World episode, or the antiquated inspiration of Another Story, and while TR2 is not able to beat every one of them in every field, it comes amazingly close.
TR2 is a pack that draws on all the atmosphere of the Lost World – aside from, regrettably, the 3D cutscenes – and then doubles it, throwing you into one new world after another without ever losing consistency. The story is largely absent – there are brief references to the player’s brother, and after apparently finding that brother you gain the ability to morph, which makes perfect sense – but this is because the parts of the pack that would tell the story are themselves absent. Still, it seems standard fare – you travel through a jungle, find a base, the base blows up, you go somewhere else… and then the pack abruptly ends, all too soon, despite the length of each individual level.
You start off in a training level, which is a relatively old concept from the days when packs would propose to be games, rather than just series of levels, and thus you would need to be taught how to play. And indeed a lot of what you learn in the training level is basic stuff, special moves, etc. But you also get introduced to some of the innovations of the pack, which I will describe in more detail later, including one feature people may remember from the end of TR1: tile enemies. Here they are done much better, quite amusingly, and had the pack been finished they might even have appeared in more than just this training level. The Island tileset has remnants of what appears to have been a planned Pacman obstacle, though it does not appear ingame. Anyway, the training level guides you through most things you’ll need to know, and is absolutely gorgeous – possibly my favorite of the many tilesets TR2 brings to play, though the elevator set definitely has its charms. The training set is chess-themed, is done in a style much more common in TSF tilesets than 1.23, and works flawlessly, pulling you into the TR2 experience without a backward glance at the rest of JJ2.
After that it would be senseless to try to focus on individual levels or even tilesets, because despite the different art style present in each set (sometimes even among the tiles of a single set), and the different level designs that come with each, TR2 functions as a whole. The only clues to its being unfinished are the choppiness of the level order, missing the story and other things to hold it together, and an occasional tile bug, uninteresting section, or spot where it’s not quite clear where you are supposed to go next (there are, sadly, a fair number of these, which is the only real con of the pack). For the most part, everything is brilliant, presentable, and, again, surpasses all else.
Kejero takes full advantage of the fact that every tileset used in the pack is made FOR the pack, and he may thus do absolutely whatever he wants for the level design. In the first jungle level, slot-machinesque levers trigger the disappearance of giant numbered wooden platforms. In the second and third, colorful staircases switch direction at the flick of one of the delightful multi-state blocks that fill TR2 and work flawlessly, while other blocks point spikes out of them and conceal or display new passages each time they are switched, making for a huge variety of possible environments, seemingly all of which Kejero happily inserts. Your main challenge in the first base level is to traverse a number of giant tubes that connect different sections of the level, and the second answers a question that I actually have asked many times before – how would Kejero design a level where you escape from a base that’s being destroyed? – and answers it incredibly well. The elevator sequences are pretty enough to sit and watch for many long seconds before bothering to figure out how to progress (although the third is a bit boring), and except for the wonky star block segment, everything about the level is beautiful. Finally you return to the trigger-friendly, kiddy-colored design of the training level for a journey through some caves and island huts, also featuring the introduction of the morph mechanism, which adds another enjoyable dimension to gameplay, though it wasn’t used too often or in any great detail.
I’m not sure if Kejero made the music himself – though I suspect he did – but it is all very good and works perfectly with the levels. An unused track for an unmade train level is also included, which only serves to make me wonder how Kejero would have tackled the moving vehicle design, a type of level which has long struggled to be finally “gotten right.” Anyway, the music contributes to the atmosphere, as do the various trigger innovations, and so does the familiar foreground border effect from TR1 or Agent Jackrabbit. This time around there are no pieces of artifact to collect and store in the border, so it serves a purely ornamental purpose, but adds beautifully to the pack, taking you away from everything else you’ve ever played. I definitely recommend playing this in fullscreen, particularly during the second base level, at which point you could easily be in a completely modern FPS were it not a 2D game.
There is really very little to say about TR2 that is not praise. The main problem is, of course, that it is not done, but while the levels fail to be held together plotwise, everything else is cohesive. A boss would have been interesting to see, though none appears. Again, there are no tile enemies after the training level. The classic rock puzzles from TR1 make two reappearances, but both badly need testing, as I was able to bypass them both without ever pushing a single rock. And there are a few moments when the level design is not quite perfect and it’s not clear where you should go – mostly the first base level, really, although the unfamiliarity of the underlying gameplay mechanic probably contributed to that, and a few in the later jungle. There exist minor tile bugs, the checkpoints need some work, and the perspective is at times insane. But most of these are minor ills. More important is the very real delight felt when the walls open up to reveal gorgeous hidden passages in the island level, which is just another reminder of just what’s so special about this pack: it WORKS. There is absolutely no reason not to download it; the only thing to worry about is the sadness felt at the end of level 7 when you realize that you may never in your lifetime see the other 13.

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