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[zagato blackfist]

zagato blackfist plows through another NES request, this time for G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero - The Atlantis Factor!

It's the day after The Fourth Of July, but I'm sure my American friends still wouldn't mind the appearance of some kind of American hero any day of the year.

(Though this one is published by Capcom, the first was published by Taxan.  The developer for both is KID, who also made the very similar-styled NES platformers, Low G Man and Kick Master.)

G.I. Joe's the team that defends the world from the evil Cobra... so zagato included maps for three other "Cobra"-titled NES games.  And Cobra Triangle was mapped by zagato earlier as my most recent NES request.  That's a lot of "CobraNESs"!

Plok!

For this month's "Maps Of The Month" featurette, I wish to draw your attention to Jackster's Plok! (Super NES) maps.

On the island of Akrillic, our hero, Plok, finds that his flag on top of his house has gone missing! It's a ploy by the evil Bobbin Bros. to lure Plok away to Cotton Island, allowing the Fleas to run amok.  Will Plok be able to find Grandpappy Plok's amulet and make his way to the Fleapit to defeat The Flea Queen, and restore peace to Akrillic?

In this 16-bit platformer, Plok, with his detached limbs (a couple of years before Rayman debuted), hops and bops his way across the mulitchromatic lands of Cotton Island and Akrillic, the monochromatic Legacy Island (in a flashback featuring Grandpappy Plok), and the gloomy Fleapit.  Many stages, especially the early ones, have secret Warp Levels that, if Plok finds and can complete the challenge within, can skip ahead in his adventure.  The stages and their various secrets are all mapped here, thanks to Jackster!

So to recognize the effort put into mapping this cute and colourful cult classic, Jackster's Plok! (Super NES) maps will be known as VGMaps.com's Maps Of The Month for July 2026.

[George s]

George s has mapped the thirteenth arcade game that I've requested - and it's Battletoads!

It's quite different from any of the console/handheld versions. Probably not as remembered, though it is bundled with some other Battletoads and Killer Instinct games in the Killer Instinct Arcade1Up, since they're all by Rare.

Great for this game to be preserved in these maps, too.  Thanks again, as always, George s!

[zagato blackfist]

zagato blackfist has mapped out Cobra Triangle!

There's something charming about this game. For some reason I never really played much of R.C. Pro-Am, but I think this is sort of like that, but on the water... maybe?

But besides my memories of playing Cobra Triangle, the significance of having this mapped is that we now have maps of all 72 NES games that were published by Nintendo Of America!

zagato blackfist seems intent on ensuring that every NES game will be mapped, but along the way, I think it's neat to see certain subsets get completed.  Maybe I should see if any other publisher's games are close to all being mapped... but this is an important one, it's Nintendo (Of America) themselves on the Nintendo Entertainment System, of course!

Thanks, and keep up the good work, zagato... as you are very well aware in your own topic about unmapped NES games, there's still a ways to go yet... but it looks like, for the North American list especially, you've certainly made progress since you first made that topic!

And of course, anyone else can map NES games, zagato blackfist isn't calling dibs on them all just because he made the list...

[George s]

George s has mapped the twelfth arcade game that I've requested - and it's Spider-Man: The Videogame!

It's a fun four-player beat-em-up that I don't hear many people talking about.

When I worked at Playdium at West Edmonton Mall, there was a cleaning checklist for the arcade machines. Whoever made it listed Spider-Man: The Videogame as "Spider-Man: The Best Game Of All Time" or something, I always thought that was funny.  It's a specific memory that probably not many people have, but, there we go, some of my requests are indeed personal.  But Spider-Man is popular... right?

Thanks again, George s!  You're the best!  Especially when it comes to mapping arcade games!

Might as well also point out that until June 14, Gravity Circuit is free to claim on Steam, so if you're a PC gamer, why not go for it?  It's an indie game that's 8-bit in style but plays much like Mega Man X.  It's free because the sequel was recently announced, so they want to build excitement for it by giving out the original for nothing.  Of course I bring it up because it's one of the games on my requests list, in the (long) PC section.

I wonder if one day I should split up the PC section into "retro-style indies" (usually platformers) and "point-and-click adventures" since most games there are one or the other... any thoughts about that?

Magic Knight Rayearth

For this month's "Maps Of The Month" featurette, I wish to draw your attention to zagato blackfist's Magic Knight Rayearth (Saturn) maps.

Three eighth-grade girls - Hikaru, Umi, and Fuu - on a field trip to Tokyo Tower in modern-day Japan are transported to a magical world called "Cephiro".  The three girls are warriors, "Magic Knights" foretold by legend, whose innate magical powers will awaken, allowing them to save Cephiro from destruction while rescuing Princess Emeraude from the evil Zagato.

Speaking of Zagato, it is zagato blackfist, better known for his NES mapping efforts here on VGMaps.com, who travelled to the world of the Sega Saturn to map this colourful action-RPG.  Though similar to the first story arc of Magic Knight Rayearth's manga and anime, this game adds new characters and locations, which are all mapped here by zagato, so you will have no trouble making it from Tokyo Tower all the way to Zagato's Castle.

So to recognize the effort put into mapping one of the best Saturn games - also the last one officially released in North America - zagato blackfist's Magic Knight Rayearth (Saturn) maps will be known as VGMaps.com's Maps Of The Month for June 2026.

With Bubsy 4D coming out this week, I thought I'd revisit the Bubsy cartoon pilot.
Here are all the times that Bubsy says, "What could possibly go wrong?"

[GamesComputersPlay]

It's been said that you can put Doom on anything... well, now we've (finally) got Doom on VGMaps.com!

GamesComputersPlay created Wad2Pic, which created the maps for Doom!
This also includes the fourth episode from The Ultimate Doom, and though it wasn't specifically requested, we've also got maps for Doom II as well!

And thanks for VGCartography for directing me to these maps.  Yes, I got GamesComputersPlay's blessing on these Doom maps.  If you could really say that anything related to Doom could be blessed...

What's there to say about Doom?  Everyone knows it. Quite the monumental game. Before FPSes (first-person shooters) were commonly known as such, the term "Doom-like" was used to describe these... first-person shooters.  It hasn't stuck around like "Roguelike", but it certainly was a thing.  How many other games can achieve genre-naming status?  (I suppose Metroid and Castlevania have...)

Along with yesterday's ET, we've now got the most lower-right and the most upper-right of my 24th anniversary requests image knocked out already!  Wow!  Will the other corners be next?

[zagato blackfist]

Call today's update "From Zero (Wing) To H.E.R.O."...
Or, "Lots Of Periods"...

zagato blackfist has taken on four of my requests: E.T. and H.E.R.O. for the Atari 2600, Mario Bros. (Classic Serie) (E) for the NES, and Zero Wing (E) for the Genesis (technically, Mega Drive).  What a haul!  (Sorry that I didn't get these up yesterday...)

E.T. is infamous for being one of the worst games ever, often cited as THE example of the low-quality games that led to the video game crash of the early '80s. So I figure its infamy means that we should have maps of it! 

H.E.R.O., also just capital letters and periods, is one of the better games on the Atari 2600, nice to have it here at the same time, to balance it out, ha!

Mario Bros. (Classic Serie) is a European (perhaps even just German) rerelease, with graphics that resemble the arcade version better.  Makes you wonder why they just didn't do that in the first place... anyway, there's more confidence that we've got all of Mario on the NES now... right? About time... (but to be fair, despite Mario's name, this is a little obscure.)

Zero Wing (E) is infamous for being the impetus of the "All Your Base Are Belong To Us" meme, so it's super surprising (to me) that we haven't gotten it mapped yet.  When I requested it, I insisted that the intro cutscene be included, which zagato obliged, by splitting it up over the eight stage maps.

Thanks, zagato!
Nice of you to have quickly knocked out one of the 24 requests that I mentioned the day after VGMaps.com's 24th birthday!

[(1)]

I don't recall tracking that, so if it was never discussed at the time, then it was never counted.

I still have my folder of when we got to 50,000 maps exactly, so sorting them by "Date Modified", I looked for the 25,000th one, but before I get to that, there's at least a couple problems with that.

(1) The biggest one is that maps are remade now and then.  A mapper might find an error, or even entirely redo a map.  There are a few cases when I do deem a map replaceable with one from another mapper (thankfully that isn't too often, as I hate tough calls).  So any maps made before the 25,000 mark but remade/replaced after we passed it would mean that what looks like the 25,000th is actually a later one, and whatever is the true 25,000th must be an earlier one, but I'd have no idea which, because it's not like I was counting how many times maps have been replaced.

(2) Because I use PNGGauntlet to compress the maps (since they're usually .PNG files), but I sometimes have to run it multiple times to ensure the filesize is as small as it can be, I have a habit of using FMS File Date Changer to change the time to midnight that day when I rerun PNGGauntlet.  The idea is that if the date changes, then it compressed again, but if it hasn't, then it's reached its final size.  This process is so that I don't waste time trying to recompress files that have already been compressed as much as they can be.  Once I'm satisfied that they're all compressed, I change the dates of all of them to midnight again to indicate that their sizes are finalized.  That means all maps submitted and (usually) published within a day all have the same timestamp, and it would have affected both the "Date Modified" and the "Date Created" fields of the file details.

Anyway, like I said, I looked at the 25,000th file in the folder, and we got our 24,997th map on December 21, 2014.  That is, if we are ignoring (1).  So the 25,000th map would be the third one after that, right?

The thing is, I have 447 maps with a timestamp of midnight on December 22, 2014.  That's an insane number of maps for one day.

But when I look into it - and you can see for yourself on the News Archives if you scroll down on the "NEWS" on the front page, if you click on 2014 - there wasn't an update on December 22, 2014.

Looking at the 447 maps again, I notice many of them are by KeyBlade999, and then now I remember being BOMBARDED by a whole slew of his maps.  It happens from time to time when a longtime mapper (perhaps for GameFAQs, or for their own interest) learns of VGMaps, and/or suddenly decides to contribute a whole mass of maps all at once.

Because it was around Christmas, I probably wasn't able to get all of the maps up in one day, and indeed, I see that many of these maps were put up later than Dec. 22, 2014, even going into January 2015.

This actually helps, because I was going to say, the third map out of 447 would be impossible to pinpoint.  But since they weren't all published right away, you'd think it should be easier.

It looks like the third map should be from one of Ax Battler: A Legend Of Golden Axe, Shadow Force, or Amazon: Guardians Of Eden, since those were the first games whose maps were published after Dec. 21, specifically Dec. 26.  Amazon's maps technically have a date of Dec. 21, but 11:59 PM - usually my own indication that I wasn't able to compress it, but that it still was received on Dec. 22 (but then maybe that throws off the count by another four?), Shadow Force's maps have a date of Dec. 24 and Ax Battler's maps have a date of Dec. 26, meaning that they jumped ahead of the queue, maybe because I figured I would tackle KeyBlade999's huge mass of maps later, after getting Richard V. Grant's, Will Mallia's, and George s's maps out of the way first.

I'm usually good about putting maps up the same day, or at least putting them up in the order that I received them, so that brings us to...

(3) Apparently when it MIGHT have been - if we ignore (1) altogether) - I was apparently handling a ton of maps at once, so it was one of the rare times when I couldn't put them up in order of when I received them, and with so many games it would have been totally arbitrary which I would have put up.

All that to say... we really don't know.  Judging by that there would have been a good number of remakes of maps already, I can say it almost surely happened in 2014, but that's about it.

(And yeah, this turned out to take longer to write out than I thought, because I was investigating various things while writing this up...) 

Yesterday was VGMaps.com's 24th birthday.

Less than one year until this web site turns 25 years old; ¼ of a century in existence!

I have tons of requests, but some of the games I have requested are particularly iconic, that it's surprising that after all this time, that they haven't been mapped yet.  Here's hoping that these games in particular will be mapped before that 25-year milestone:

Time only ever moves forward (as far as we can tell), so while it's not surprising that we'd get here, it's still surprising that it doesn't feel like it's been that long.

A month and a half ago, we got our 50,000th map, and submissions for this past year, especially in the calendar year of 2026 so far, do feel like they're more frequent.  So we're still going strong.

24 years isn't a typical milestone, especially with 25 years (¼ of a century!) coming up in "only" 365 days, but I still felt like recognizing it with a little puzzle of 24 maps.  I was originally going to put the "24 best maps" but then I decided it'd be better to show a variety of platforms, so 16 different platforms with no more than two games on each are shown here.

How many can you identify?

[Smash T.V.]

I haven't made many new requests for arcade game maps until recently.

I was thinking that we sure do have some early '80s arcade classics, but that we should have some more from the early '90s.

I remembered Smash T.V. and requested it here, and resident arcade mapper George s came through!

Have you played this twin-stick shooter that takes place in the future year of... 1999? 

Thanks, George s!

Ninja Five-O

For this month's "Maps Of The Month" featurette, I wish to draw your attention to Spanettone's Ninja Five-O (GBA) maps.

Known as "Ninja Cop" in Europe, Ninja Five-O is a platformer that might remind you of old-school ninja action games like the Shinobi series.  Besides jumping around, Joe Osugi will have to utilize stealthy approaches and master combat skills to make his way through 20 stages.

Spanettone, a GBA mapping veteran, has laid all those stages out here, with items and hostages labelled in all of the rooms so you can survive all these missions that will take you from the Bank all the way to the Base.

This game received rave reviews at the time, but didn't sell well. It has since become very sought-after, with the GBA cartridge now going for hundreds of dollars on eBay.  Its delayed appreciation made way for its rerelease last year, for the PS4, PS5, Switch, and PC, so that more gamers can appreciate it, despite the original version's rarity.

So to recognize the effort put into mapping this coveted classic, Spanettone's Ninja Five-O (GBA) maps will be known as VGMaps.com's Maps Of The Month for May 2026.

[Super ZSNES]

zsKnight and Demo are back, and working on Super ZSNES, a rewritten-from-scratch GPU-powered emulator, a 17-year-later "sequel" to the original ZSNES, a popular Super NES emulator that I'm sure many if us here have memories of.

Here's Super ZSNES's website.

Some new features include being able to add high-res textures and even some 3D effects.  Also enhanced audio.  Thanks to a user-friendly enhancement editor, other users will be able to design their own mods.

Now, I'm sure several of us are purists and might not use enhancements, but there might be something here of use for mappers.

For example, as seen in the video, it's possible to play it widescreen, by seeing more of the playfield that's in the game's memory, normally off-screen.  I know other tools already exist to see beyond the normal play area, but the extra area might be handy for those who like to map directly from screenshots (by reducing the number of screenshots required and/or getting to hard-to-reach areas without needing location/walk-through-walls codes) or in conjunction with autostitching tools.

In any case, increasing interest in Super NES games can always help get more people intrigued about game mapping... (maybe we'll get the Super Star Wars trilogy and Shadowrun maps yet!)