I'm behind on the thumbnails... for the past couple years all I've done are the ones for the Maps Of The Month...

But, sheesh, if I'm going to mention it in my "best 15 map sets" video...



...might as well have a specially-animated Quo Vadis one:

I'm interested, HOWEVER I feel there should be some level of "official"-ness to the maps - i.e. maps from the instruction manual would count, but I don't know about the cities that appear in published reviews of the game, as those are done by someone else, and then where is the line drawn?

Construction games can come up with nearly countless combinations, so I feel there has to be value to these maps.  I don't want to open up a can of worms and then feel obligated to put up maps of the literally millions of Super Mario Maker stages made by any of its users, for instance.

In any case, the maps would have to be named logically or perhaps have a blurb on the image itself explaining what it is, if it isn't obvious just by looking at it.

[soit]

A good discussion about the riddles:
http://www.lemon64.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=37774&sid=aae082653d84f17e743148043f854afb

1. AT LAST YOU THINK YOU ARE THERE
2. BE SWEET AND BE QUICK TO GO BACKWARD
3. TOURD'FORCE USING ONLY A KNIFE TO EAT AN A1 SOLUTION
4. BINARY INDECISIONS BETWEEN SILENT BEGINNINGS AND QUIET TERMINATIONS
5. LOSING THE DUTCH ONE, ROYALTY APPEARS BEFORE ME
6. A THOUSAND ADDED TO EVERYTHING LOSES FIFTY

And some of the solutions:

4. BINARY digits = "0" and "1" / BEGINNING (first letter) of SILENT = "S" / TERMINATION (last letter) of QUIET = "T"
= "S01T"
= "soit"

5. DUTCH of ONE = "EEN" / ROYALTY = "QUEEN" / ME = "I"
= "QUEEN - EEN + I"
= "qui"

6. roman numeral of A THOUSAND = "M" / EVERYTHING = "ALL" / roman numeral of FIFTY = "L"
= "M + ALL - L"
= "mal"

I didn't see solutions for how the first three are intended to be solved as "honi", "y" and "pense", but that all together becomes
Honi soit qui mal y pense
which is explained on Wikipedia as an Anglo-Norman maxim that means,
"May he be shamed who thinks badly of it".
This is the motto of The Order of the Garter.

Now I've regurgitated what was on that Lemon 64 page and no closer, but I'm curious as to how the first three are solved.

Ha ha, in the original post I said there would be a video about this "in a few weeks".  More like, nearly five months.  

I've been YouTubing for a year now, and yet this is my first video dedicated to VGMaps.com?  Here we go, my picks for the best 15 map sets on VGMaps!

EDIT: And apologies for those whose maps didn't make the cut, as it were, since I kept it to 15.  Hard decisions were made.  You probably never expected a video recognition in the first place though, but in any case I'm sure I will have other opportunities to talk about other maps in future videos, to further tie the VGMaps and JonLeung1@YouTube brands together.

I've been YouTubing for a year now, and yet this is my first video dedicated to VGMaps.com?  Here we go, my picks for the best 15 map sets on VGMaps!

Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins

For this month's "Maps Of The Month" featurette, I wish to draw your attention to RyuMaster's Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins (Game Boy) maps.

Super Mario takes on a variety of Zones in his last big adventure on the first Nintendo portable, Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins, in search for, well, six golden coins.  These will unlock the door to Mario's castle which has been taken over by the evil Wario. Can Mario reclaim Mario Land?

This game is a decent Game Boy adventure, if a little strange.  The setting and the enemies are definitely cartoony, but not quite like in other Mario games.  For example, the Pumpkin Zone has... hockey-masked creatures with a knife in their head?  Even if they are just Goombas dressed for Halloween in this Jack O'Lantern-styled zone, it does seem a little strange - a Mario game is the last place you'd expect to see a Friday The 13th reference.  And when has Mario ever lived in his own castle?

Mario's ownership extends past his castle, as before Wario took this over, this was all "Mario Land".  It includes the Mario Zone, which is a giant mechanical Mario (for some reason).  The other Zones include the Tree Zone, the Space Zone, the Macro Zone, the Pumpkin Zone, and the Turtle Zone, which RyuMaster, master of Game Boy maps, has dissected for us!  This portable odyssey of Super Mario's is immortalized here on VGMaps so it can't be forgotten.  This interesting take on Mario does have one lasting thing, though - it introduced the Mario's rival, the greedy Wario!

So for mapping this Super Mario oddity, RyuMaster's Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins (Game Boy) maps will be known as VGMaps.com's Maps Of The Month for October 2017.

[Kotaku - Here Are Some Isometric Ocarina Of Time Maps]

Some more love from Kotaku:
Kotaku - Here Are Some Isometric Ocarina Of Time Maps

This was posted yesterday evening - funnily enough, my next YouTube video on the "JonLeung1" channel is finally specifically about VGMaps, and the writer of that Kotaku post, Luke Plunkett, chose almost exactly the ones I initially chose to be in the video when I was editing it, also yesterday evening (though I have since changed the selections).  Look forward to that video either tonight or this weekend.

Of all the promotion I do of this web site, that fact that we have almost 40,000 maps seems to pale in comparison to the simple fact that we have Ocarina Of Time maps, which continue to bring in viewers in droves.  Thanks again, Peardian!

Is this a submission?  Do you want me to put these up?

Also, are those white spots areas you can't reach?  You should be able to patch up those areas from other parts of the image, and/or if you're using VisualBoyAdvance I recall there's a "Map Viewer" function that can help you see beyond the edges of what is normally visible when playing.

F-Zero

For this month's "Maps Of The Month" featurette, I wish to draw your attention to Rick Brun's F-Zero (Super NES) maps.

F-Zero is a futuristic racing series that began in the 16-bit era, and this first game introduces us to Captain Falcon, driver of the Blue Falcon.  (Well, he's not any more than a lump of a silhouette here, but still!)  As he says in Super Smash Bros., "Show me your moves!"  As a launch title for the Super NES, F-Zero certainly showed what it could do, as it demonstrates the console's "Mode 7" ability to scale and rotate graphics.  By taking these track graphics, which are flat planes, but angled with respect to the "camera", and rotating them as the player turns, the sort-of-3D effect is achieved, something the competition isn't capable of.  ("Super NES is what Genesisn't"?)

Thus, Rick Bruns had to grab these graphics as they actually are (as if a bird's-eye view), not as they are presented during the race.  But these are extremely handy.  When you're driving at hundreds of kilometers a second, it's good to know when the turns are coming up, especially the sharp ones!

If you didn't experience the game at the time, don't fret!  F-Zero is one of the select few games to make it onto the Super NES Classic Edition, so you can still put the pedal to the metal, assuming you are able to get a hold of one.

So for revisiting this Super NES classic, Rick Brun's F-Zero (Super NES) maps will be known as VGMaps.com's Maps Of The Month for September 2017.

Did anyone manage to preorder this?  Apparently a number of retailers started taking preorders at midnight yesterday morning...  I hope I haven't missed out (even though I've played many of these games back in the day, and still own a number of these cartridges).

It's been long enough, I'd say it's fair to do the maps.  Having submitted a few maps but not following through with more doesn't exactly retain "dibs", certainly not over a few years.

Though I think it would probably be better to redo them from scratch than to add to an existing map if you can't get their permission.

If the original mapper did perfectly (or exactly how you would have done it) with what they had already assembled, and that the end result is the same, one could argue that it would be a waste of time to do the work again just to be "above reproach".  I personally think that I would still do it though, if it were me.

(Though funnily enough, this very morning I had a brief moment where I mused about redoing all of the A Link To The Past maps (while I did the Light World, Iron Knuckle did the dungeons and Alex Foster did the Dark World), in a sense, to try to "claim" one of my favourite games of all time as mapped entirely by me, I also realized that (besides not having made a map myself in years), I probably don't have the time, and for so little gain.)

Looking forward to The Legend Of The Mystical Ninja maps.  I really like the Super NES game.  It's one of those games that may not be supremely well-known, but is still a high-quality game (comparable to the "AAA"s, even if not by popularity) and is of a decent length and lots of fun.  Could also say the same about the first N64 game (I didn't play much of the second).  A shame that Konami didn't bring more of its games over, but the Goemon series is full of Japanese quirkiness that makes it hard to sell, even though that's a big part of its charm, IMO.

A vlog this time about a local event called "Taste Of Edmonton", not sure if it would be of much appeal to most of you, but hey, here it is if you are interested; why not?

Also, please subscribe!  I have more game-related stuff in the pipeline and my personal goal is to get to 250 subscribers by the end of the year.  Thanks!

Ganbare Goemon 3: Shishijyuurokubei no Karakuri Manji Katame (J)

For this month's "Maps Of The Month" featurette, I wish to draw your attention to gocha's Ganbare Goemon 3: Shishijyuurokubei no Karakuri Manji Katame (J) (Super NES) maps.

In the third main Goemon game for the Super Famicom, The Wise Old Man creates a time machine to chase after women in other time periods.  But in the future Neo-Edo, Ebisumaru's descendent, Sister Bisumaru, captures the Wise Old Man and has him build a robot army to take over the present-day Edo.  Once again it's up to the mystical ninja Goemon, Ebisumaru, Sasuke and Yae to save the day, in their usual wacky fashion!

Each of the four main characters has unique skills, to help them traverse this action-adventure game that has a lot of variety.  There are overhead areas, there are side-scrolling areas, there are times when you run away in little mechs (with Mode 7 scaling!) and there are times that you pilot the giant mech, Impact.  Thanks to the mapper gocha, VGMaps has got you covered.  Some areas are huge, and many of the side-scrolling platforming sections have two "layers", "front" and "back".  It's quite a sizeable game!

Now, two Japanese-only games recognized for "Maps Of The Month" in a row?  And the longest title by far (longer than even May 2006's King's Quest V: Absence Makes The Heart Go Yonder)!  Though the Goemon franchise includes quite a number of video games in Japan, only four of them have been released in North America: one each for the Super NES and Game Boy, and two on the Nintendo 64.  That being said, it's nice for gocha to have given one of several Japanese exclusives some attention, and shared its maps with us!

So for bringing us another look at the underappreciated Goemon, gocha's Ganbare Goemon 3: Shishijyuurokubei no Karakuri Manji Katame (J) (Super NES) maps will be known as VGMaps.com's Maps Of The Month for August 2017.

I have received your latest bundle of maps and am excited to get home tonight to put up your Robotrek maps!  That's one of those games that I've wondered why it wasn't mapped earlier...

Some localization efforts are weird.  It's like the American branch/division of these game companies just want to do something more than just translate them or change cultural references.  Unless there really is some kind of spike in difficulty, it seems nearly pointless to shuffle puzzles around.  And adding puzzles is one thing, but removing some?  Why?