Jazz Jackrabbit 2 Online

One of the most normal of Lark's 2024 levels, without any strange weapon replacements. The pink sands look delicious, or rather lovely, and the background effects set up a nice little underground cave. You'd think pink on red might be hard to distinguish, but the brighter walls and darker skies contrast each other nicely. It's only a shame that the stalagmites rising out of the water don't have reflections of their own, you'd have to use vertically flipped tiles and some non-opaque sprite mode for that. Do the fuel tanks make sense thematically? I don't know, I haven't played Doom 1. But they work for platforming and maybe that's the important thing. Important items (two powerups, two carrots) are distributed at reasonable distances from each other, and there's no superfluous ammo types, though there's maybe room in the level for a few more pickups. I worry, though, that the level is a bit large and doesn't fully know what to do with its space, though the bottom right area with the big fuel tanks is a nice contrast to the rest. Otherwise the layout feels too generic. I like the bottom carrot, though, where you have to jump over the spring a little in order to grab it.

Without having played World of Warcraft, I have no idea how similar this level is to any canonical Raz'goth.

It must be said that the background looks fantastic. The yellow/pink from The Crackdown return, yet perhaps even more extreme. I think you could lean into the curve of the sky a bit by having the trees go higher up at the sides of the background, and lower down in the center, but that's hard to achieve with Diamondus. Layer 4 mostly works with the background colors, including the altered sprite palette—though the carrots are rather hard to see, despite the lighting—but I do dislike the background foliage in layer 5. There's too much contrast in every tile with the constant interplays of black leaves and bright yellow/pink background. The walls are decent but a little too close to the same single wall tile filled in everywhere.

I'm not quite sure what I make of the tar pits. They're fine, they don't get in the way, they just don't feel useful either. There's nowhere you have to use the tar pits to get to, you could always go by land if you wanted. There are no obvious goodies lurking down there. Further inspection reveals there's a coin warp, but it's invisible, and the carrot it takes you to is also invisible, so there's no way for players to know what they're getting. Isla de Meurta is a better example of how to use water like this, I think.

Above the tar pits, there's not much to say about the layout… it's big platforms that don't really suggest to me that much thought was put into them, similar to Lemondrop Labyrinth. There could be more ammo pickups in general. The replaced blaster animation is cool, the bouncer animation makes less sense.

Apart from the black leaves, this level looks great and is fun to vibe in, especially with the wacky music. But it doesn't have the gameplay to back it up. I would hang out here but I would not fight here. I'd be interested to see someone else take a crack at the tar pit idea, though…

I would love to love this—it's so cute and colorful! it's so earnest in its ideas!—but I also get caught up in how it plays and how it looks, and it needs some more time in the, uh… what is candy made in?

It must be said, the textured background looks fantastic, managing to look different at the top, middle, and bottom of the screen. Trying to place the candy cane posts in front of it makes some sense as an alternative to mountain layers, to show off more of the textured background, but they're just too high contrast. They clash with the sky and they clash with layer 4. The translucent autoscroll elements are fine though, silly but fine. Maybe as a middle ground, some cave-like background elements could be put here with colors similar to the sky, with layer speeds somewhere around 0.8/0.8? The actual caves are a bit too bright and repetitive, and most importantly, the walls are full of the classic Carrotus Tile Bugs. Yes, it takes more time to make a Carrotus wall that tiles properly, but it really looks ugly if you don't, especially when the brightness contrast is high like it is here. I'd take a look at other video games with candy themed levels and see how they construct their color palettes… short of like, Math Rescue, I suspect there's more leaning on softer colors in general. All the incidental Candion things on the grass and ceilings, the candy bars and lollipops and such, look fine though, it's hard to go wrong with a good little eyecandy thing standing around. It would be nice to have some of the lollipops be offset by 16 pixels vertically, though, for smoother slopes.

The weapons are not going to win many friends. The blaster is replacing with stationary exploding candy, which, well, I have a few questions:

- why does the candy explode?
- how is this supposed to hurt other players?
- why do you get bumped slightly to the right even when you fire the candy without moving sideways, preventing you from using it for TNT-climbing purposes?

I don't hugely mind the sprite replacements for seekers, there's a long history of pointless Commander Keen references. The increased RF speed throws people off a lot, it messes up all the RF tricks people are used to. But oddly it's the bouncers that offend me: you can't have a bunch of lemon pickups that are food, and then also use the same sprite for a weapon, and not have the pickups increase your ammo for that weapon. Either lemon use is fine, but not both.

The layout mostly feels random, like a slightly thicker South African Style battle with all its wide platforms, open spaces, and flat walls on either side of the map. The bottom is the most interesting part with its caves and its food supplies.

Thematically I like what this is doing, I do! It just needs to make some more compromises to be a playable multiplayer level at the same time.

Really fun duel level with good focused use of custom weapons. I like the background, but the foreground is underdecorated – there's nothing to see in the big blocky walls except the same tile repeated over and over.

This is a nice showcase of the new texture related features JJ2+ has to offer.
And yes, it looks like something that came out of Doom.

nice

[Not sure if you understand the rating system — 1.5 is a bad number, not a good number]

I think the pairing of the big vertical areas and the vertical weapons works well here, though it may feel even more random than usual whether you hit people—Minimap might be in order. Bogs aren't the commonest theme but this hits it well, though fewer straight lines would help. Seems like a fine little level to me!

ETA with later thoughts: I'd raise the ceiling in the top left so your newly powered-up mortars can actually hit people. The colors are very clean, making it very easy to tell what's solid and what's not, but it does mean the walls are on the boring side. I don't really know what's going on in the background, but I like it. The level is big enough that it doesn't end up being Spaz-biased. Very pure experience.

Judging MP gameplay is hard but this is roughly symmetrical, has cute tubes to go directly to the bases, and has great caves and plants to keep everything looking properly naturey. I see what the gems are doing but I think they're a little too distracting, likewise the fast water. Generally good at making a JJ1 set look good at big resolutions.

Over the years JJ2 has seen an explosion of multiplayer gamemodes. Sch wizards as BlurredD and EvilMike wove together arcane contraptions of sucker tubes and trigger scenery to create levels that, even when played in vanilla JJ2, still followed the scoring rules of Team Battle or Last Rabbit Standing or the like. JJ2+ canonized these, and others with more complicated rulesets, from Pestilence to Headhunters. Mutators expanded the playing field still further. But somewhat lost in all this was the idea of single player gamemodes.

In general there have only ever been two goals in single player levels: either get to the exit (which may involve a boss battle), or collect all items (usually coins). Within collecting levels there are two subtypes, one where collecting everything makes you win immediately and one where you have to go to a specific place afterwards, but they’re largely the same thing.

But there’s a third mode that’s lurked around the edges, only making an appearance every once in a while: horde mode. The level design stays constant, but enemies keep appearing, and either they die or you do. A major example is TDI_07.j2l from Moonblaze’s “The Demon Invasion,” where a regenerating coin and an invisible coin warp serve as a countdown timer. hgfDiamondusColosseum.j2l from happygreenfrog’s “Operation Cleanup: Turtle Terror Revisited” uses scripting to implement an enemy quota, so the level will not end until you’ve killed enough (regenerating) enemies. Both make the assumption there must be some sort of measurable goal that the game itself keeps track of for you, or else why would you bother?

The Lapidarian Chaparral says screw that noise.

The Lapidarian Chaparral decides that you, the player, are in charge of keeping track of how well you’ve done and whether you’ve accomplished whatever goal you might choose to set for yourself. It demands you make up your own emergent gameplay. It puts itself in your hands as clay to be molded into whatever experience you prefer. It is single player by way of sandbox. It is, in a way, a metaphor for JJ2 and JCS as a whole.

Sure, with some work Lark could probably piece together a complicated system of a generating coin, an electro-blaster SCE, and various belts, animated tiles, bridges, and so on, that periodically dropped a coin into a pseudo-random spot in the level, so that you have to keep moving around to find the next coin. It would be pretty cool. But there’s a boldness to giving up on that altogether as irrelevant.

Sure, the concept still has some limitations as implemented. In the current version of JJ2+, regenerating enemies and pickups don’t give points, but pickups spawned from regenerating barrels do, so if score is your goal, you should focus there. Sure, certain areas are purely safe, so if your goal is actually to set a stopwatch and see how long you can last, you’re just gonna hang out next to a carrot and walk away from your computer. But does Lark really want you to do that? More importantly, do you really want to do that? Or do you want to blast turtles?

Anyway. Cool to see Jungrock. Level looks nice. Didn’t notice any bugs.

Gosh. Lark. Long time, kid. Thanks for dropping by. Happy new year.

Well, other than the fact that the approach of this level is not my cup of tea, I think it’s overall a good level. I think the layout and the eyecandy is really cool. The open ended nature of the level actually appeals to me (though this most likely came due to the fact that it was designed as a battle level originally). Music is pretty good, though I don’t know why there’s that noise at the beginning of it that sounds like background chatter in a bar.

Things I didn’t enjoy are basically the fact that the level can’t be ended in a traditional way, since there’s no level end trigger, basically you just run around the map until you find everything. Which brings my second issue, everything respawns. Obviously it’s not a flaw, since it’s an endless loop level anyway, but still, navigating through the level gets a bit frustrating when enemies you’ve already dealt with spawn back on top of you. Also, it’s supposed to be a single player level, but pickups all still have the “battle level” mindset, so you only pick up ammo and health (and a secret water shield).

Rather than making it an endless loop, I think it would have been more fun if there was a coin warp that teleported you to the end, once you collected all the coins after exploring the map.

Still, the level itself is really good, just the overall fundamental design to it isn’t really for me.

Over all the font looks pretty neat, thou I question the dissension of making only an outline font.

Especially since most modern programs have an outline function so it would be more useful to have the inside filled and one can just apply there own outline with what ever colors they wish.

but it does look exactly like the in-game font.

Poor drawing quality with no flexibility whatsoever and an assortment of ripped tiles. This is hideously overrated.

I love it ;-;

Sounds pretty good. But that lower-pitched guitar riff that’s going on every now and then in the background is really ruining it IMO. Song would’ve been better without it…IMO.

I downloaded this and played the levels, and all I can say is that it reminds me of those times when jj2 was actually good. When there no addons like carrotade or plus and no zeal servers. That feeling is something what is really hard to find these days.

Thanks for the feedback!! Fun fact: phylaxia used to have sucker tubes on each edge, but my better testers said it made the level too similar to EvilMike’s infamous Distopia.

thank you This is what I needed to help me in making tilesets

[Then you probably didn’t mean to rate it a 2? ~Violet]

Wow is all that i can say. The tileset is AWESOME man. Especially the trees. I played the map and it is GOOD. Nothing more to say except that i like it.

Regards from RC Duke

[Review changed to quick review.]

Great mix man. The two tunes simply collide making this song one of the best. NICE JOB.

[Review changed to quick review, see the review rules.

Great attempt, seeing as it is the only JJ2 font that I have heard about. Try it, you might find it to your taste.