Mega Man ZX Advent

For this month's "Maps Of The Month" featurette, I wish to draw your attention to X GOD's Mega Man ZX Advent (DS) maps.

A girl named Ashe is searching for treasure.  A Reploid named Grey awakens with no memory.  Whoever's story you choose to follow, they will both find themselves aligned with the Hunters, and soon find that they are able to "Megamerge" with the sought-after Biometals, which means transforming into a "Mega Man".  Will they be able to fend off the Raiders, defeat the Mavericks and Pseudodroids, and stop Master Albert from accumulating the pieces of the Model W Biometal which he hopes to use to become the ultimate "Mega Man" and "reset" the world (by destroying everyone)?

A hundred years after the Mega Man series is the Mega Man X series.  A few hundred years after the Mega Man X series is the Mega Man Zero series.  Another hundred years later is the Mega Man ZX series.  I bet you didn't think the Mega Man series would lead up to all this way back when Mega Man first decided to take on Bomb Man back in 200X...  (Though Mega Man Legends/64 supposedly takes place thousands of years after this...)

As vast as the timeline may be, at least you won't get lost in this underrated DS game, thanks to maps by X GOD.

So for mapping the relatively-obscure almost-end of the Mega Man continuity, X GOD's Mega Man ZX Advent (DS) maps will be known as VGMaps.com's Maps Of The Month for December 2017.

Another game book review, this time of the Nintendo 64 Anthology, which SHOULD be of interest to people here, I would imagine.

(I posted this last night, turns out yesterday was one year and one day after getting the book...  I will make more effort to be sure these reviews are more timely, though in this case I believe the Special Collector's Edition is still available.)

As mentioned in the first post, the NES Game Atlas is simply a book I really like; it was the first Nintendo Power Player's Guide, which featured full maps of many of the most popular NES franchises.

This topic encouraged mappers to essentially make that book obsolete, which we did, by not only mapping the same games covered, but the sequels that were not out at the time of the original book's release.

We extended the idea to create a topic/request for a hypothetical "Super NES Game Atlas" - while the book doesn't exist, it was simply to map the same series' continuation in 16-bits, which was also completed.

The idea was also brought to the Game Boy in a topic/request for a hypothetical "Game Boy Game Atlas", but after five years and a month, it's still missing one game - Super Mario Bros. Deluxe still isn't complete.  Ironically, you'd think it would be the most popular game to be mapped, since it's a remake of the most popular game in its day.  Even Nintendo hasn't forgotten about it, as it made an appearance towards the end of the Nintendo World Championships 2017.  Strange, eh?

So, just like any other maps, these aren't to "play", but to view.

I wonder - after all this time - have people been misreading "recreation" in this topic header as in "recreational" instead of as in "re-creation"?  I intended the latter, as we are recreating something, not necessarily having any more fun (as in recreational) than any other mapping project.  I leave out the hyphen here because that doesn't seem consistent - after all, we say "redo", "react" and "refund", not "re-do", "re-act" or "re-fund", so why not "recreate" instead of "re-create"?  At work the other day, I used the word "reask" in an email which I wonder if it caused confusion...

I recall Peardian saying somewhere or somewhen about the nostalgia behind this game being the reason for it being mapped.  Not every game featured for the Maps Of The Month have to be the best-looking game ever made.  And in my research it seems this game did have a fair following, it isn't just Peardian who likes it.

Personally, I'm a fan of a game from Everett Kaser Software called Hero's Heart, which is a very similar type of top-down puzzle game.  There is an enhanced version called Hero's Heart Gold (sounds like Pokémon) though I may be remembering incorrectly and it may just be called Hero Gold.  (Just did some Googling (quite limiting at work, especially looking up anything about games) and it seems there was a 1998 sequel to Hero's Heart called Hero Defiant.  Hmmm.)

Chip's Challenge

For this month's "Maps Of The Month" featurette, I wish to draw your attention to Peardian's Chip's Challenge (PC) maps.

The nerdy Chip McCallahan wants to gain membership into the exclusive Bit Buster Club, led by Melinda The Mental Marvel.  To do so, he must pass through 149 levels of Melinda's "Clubhouse", full of hazards, creatures and puzzlish scenarios.  Do you have the brains to help Chip survive this virtual nightmare and take Melinda to the E-Prom?

Mario game mapper Peardian actually gives us maps for a non-Mario game (and last month featured a Mario game not mapped by Peardian)!  There may have been a number of top-down view puzzle games on the PC at the time, but Chip's Challenge had some renown.  It was originally developed for the Atari Lynx, and despite (or maybe because of) the Lynx's unpopularity, it was ported to a few other platforms.  It found some popularity on Windows 3.1 by being featured on Microsoft Entertainment Pack 4 and Best Of Microsoft Entertainment Pack.  But it would take 26 years for a sequel, also made by the original creator, Chuck Sommerville.

What makes Chip's Challenge particularly challenging is its limited view.  Peardian's maps show you each whole level, giving Chip a better chance to clear these challenges and meet up with Melinda.  Thanks, Peardian!

So for mapping a real Windows classic (that's not Solitaire or Minesweeper), Peardian's Chip's Challenge (PC) maps will be known as VGMaps.com's Maps Of The Month for November 2017.

Funny, I expected some response from the 15th best map sets.  Ah well, it's a month old, but here's my vlog of the recent Edmonton Expo.

The maps have been up since yesterday evening.  They look great.

If only more of the Goemon games had left Japan...

According to the apparently critical Famitsū magazine, only 28 games have gotten a perfect score of 40/40 (10/10 from four different reviewers).  How many of these have you played?


(Click for full size.)

This image shows up briefly in my recent YouTube video about the 15 best map sets, but I thought more use could be made out of that very brief shot of this image.  Discuss!

Ripped from Wikipedia, the games are:

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (1998, Nintendo, for Nintendo 64)
Soulcalibur (1999, Namco, for Dreamcast)
Vagrant Story (2000, Square Co., for PlayStation)
The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker (2003, Nintendo, for Nintendo GameCube)
Nintendogs (2005, Nintendo, for Nintendo DS)
Final Fantasy XII (2006, Square Enix, for PlayStation 2)
Super Smash Bros. Brawl (2008, Nintendo, for Wii)
Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots (2008, Konami, for PlayStation 3)
428: Fūsa Sareta Shibuya de (2008, Sega, for Wii)
Dragon Quest IX (2009, Square Enix, for Nintendo DS)
Monster Hunter Tri (2009, Capcom, for Wii)
Bayonetta (2009, Sega, PlatinumGames, for Xbox 360)
New Super Mario Bros. Wii (2009, Nintendo, for Wii)
Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker (2010, Konami, for PlayStation Portable)
Pokémon Black and White (2010, Nintendo, for Nintendo DS)
The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword (2011, Nintendo, for Wii)
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (2011, Bethesda Softworks, for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3)
Final Fantasy XIII-2 (2011, Square Enix, for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3)
Kid Icarus: Uprising (2012, Nintendo, for Nintendo 3DS)
Yakuza 5 (2012, Sega, for PlayStation 3)
JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: All Star Battle (2013, Namco-Bandai, for PlayStation 3)
Grand Theft Auto V (2013, Rockstar Games, for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3)
Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain (2015, Konami, for Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, Xbox One)
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (2017, Nintendo, for Wii U, Nintendo Switch)
Dragon Quest XI (2017, Square Enix, for Playstation 4, Nintendo 3DS)

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!