Topics

Is it too late to join the club? I'm finally taking the plunge and buying a 3DS (the A Link Between Worlds bundle to be exact) after several weeks of convincing myself that with the excellent state of my finances, I really could stand to treat myself to a little something nice for once.

...

Laugh if you will, but it's really hard for me to spend money for things that I don't *need*. It took me weeks for example before I bought a tablet, months for an MP3 player, etc. Anyway, I'll post my information on the 22-23, whenever I'll actually receive the thing.

[Michael Jackson's involvement]

If you're a fan of the old Genesis Sonic games, you might have heard rumours over the years about Michael Jackson's supposed involvement in writing some of the music for Sonic the Hedgehog 3. And if you hadn't, then now you do.

Anyway, people have been researching this for years and especially folks from the Sonic Retro website. To sum up the situation, here's what Wikipedia has to say about the whole thing:

Michael Jackson's involvement

According to STI director Roger Hector, Michael Jackson was initially brought in during development to compose music for the game, even though no mention of his involvement was included in any of the game's credits. This was supposedly due to the scandals that arose around Jackson at the time. His involvement was removed from the title, and much reworking, including all the started music, had to be done. These claims are dubious, however, and various interviews have made it clear that any involvement Jackson may have had was done without the knowledge of Sega's executives or marketing staff, and no contracts or formal agreements had ever been made. James Hansen, of Sonic Stuff Research Group, retorts that Cirocco (credited as "Scirocco" in Sonic 3) still has possession of presumably a demo version of fabled soundtrack. "I actually have "ALL" of the tracks...," he writes, "from the original humming of Michael calling in the middle of the night leaving messages, to his ideas at Record One with Matt and Bruce. - BUT, I don't think I can let any of that out to the public without permission." In December 2009, Michael Jackson's composer Bradley Buxer (credited in Sonic 3 as Brad Buxer) told French magazine Black & White that Jackson was actually involved with some of Sonic 3's compositions, supposedly not being credited because he wasn't happy with how they sounded, due to the lack of optimal sound reproduction on the Genesis. Buxer also claimed that the ending music of Sonic the Hedgehog 3 later became the basis for Jackson's single Stranger in Moscow. Recently, it has been revealed that the music for Ice Cap Zone shares the same chord progressions and instruments with "Hard Times", a previously unreleased track by The Jetzons, of which Buxer was its keyboardist and songwriter.

In October 2013, GameTrailers dedicated an episode of its Pop Fiction mini-series to discerning Michael Jackson's involvement. Roger Hector, who previously stated in a 2005 interview that Jackson's involvement in the game was dropped due to scandals surrounding the artists coming to light, reaffirmed his stance, stating any similarities to Jackson's music in the final game was not by design on Sega's part. Whilst GameTrailers were unable to interview Buxer to confirm his stance, and was about to close their investigation they were able to find and speak to an anonymous source who was directly involved with the games development. They echoed Buxer's statements that Jackson left the project due to his displeasure with the sound quality and that tracks that he had worked on before he left the project, which was before the scandals concerning him were made public, remained in the game unaltered with Jackson choosing to remain uncredited. Carnival Night Zone was specifically mentioned as one of the tracks he composed.

If you want to see for yourself the two examples emboldened above, follow the following links.
(Does anyone know how to embed a YouTube video in this forum?)

Compare Sonic 3 - Ending Theme with "Stranger in Moscow" by Michael Jackson (the first part until 1:02).

And even more obvious, compare Sonic 3 - Ice Cap Zone with "Hard Times" by the Jetzons.

I've decided to claim this game to map, and although it's still early, I've already finished the introduction level, with a few more in various states of completion. The labyrinths will require a lot of polish since they features a ton of fake parallax effects that will need to be corrected.

And to put some weight behind my claim, behold!

Scuttle Town (Under Attack):

If you're a fan of the classic 2D Mega Man games, then this post is for you.

In case you've been living under a rock for the past few days, there's a new Kickstarter that just started a few days ago by Mega Man's co-creator, Keiji Inafune. Titled "Mighty No. 9", it's aiming to be a spiritual successor to Mega Man and it definitely shows by the design of the main character. It's pretty much certain that the gameplay will be different enough from Mega Man to avoid being sued by Capcom but the main music composer is already confirmed to be the man responsible for the music of the very first game.

Anything else you can find out on the project's Kickstarter page. I know I'm backing it.

Just like I promised several weeks ago, I've finally finished the maps for the amazing game Machinarium. The delay was mainly due to being on vacation, the size of the image I was working with (which Paint didn't appreciate) and the amount of pixel drawing required for all the arrows and dotted lines.

There are two maps, the "City of Machinarium" proper and the retro minigame "Game in the Brain" (name taken from the expanded soundtrack). The first one is *huge* thanks to me using the 100% size graphics while playing (each screen is 1250 x 790 pixels in size) but Hotmail/Outlook just can't handle attachments this big. I've had to upload them to my new Mediafire account where you'll be able to find them, and will only post smaller, low-quality samples in the forum.

First off, the City of Machinarium (10 985 x 11 046 pixels, 44 MB).


Second, the Game in the Brain (3 065 x 1 759 pixels, 3 MB)


JonLeung, if you do read this thread, consider this a submission. There's really no point in sending you a mail with the same link as included here.

I recently posted an update in my Maps in Progress/Clock Tower (SNES) thread and maybe it's because my attachment was too big (though still under the limit at ~700 kB) but my post never showed up and the thread page seems to end before it should right after the previous message. Is it just taking *that* long to upload the file (~20 minutes at this point) or this the board just go corrupt on me?

This is another game that was essentially fully mapped (three and a half years ago) but never finished but since this project is complete, I decided to put it in its own thread.

If you remember playing a Ghostbuster II game that sucked, well it most likely wasn't this game. What?! Two different games for the same movie? Well yeah. This game only came out in Japan and Europe and was made by Hal Laboratory (who eventually gifted us with the wonderful Kirby series). It's nothing special, but it's at least a very playable game with good graphics, enjoyable music and it actually follows the plot of the movie pretty closely.

Why did it take me so long to finish these? Well, I couldn't find a satisfying way to assemble the various rooms in each stage together. You see, every room or area in the game is either one or two 256 x 240 pixels screens in size. The outer walls of most of these are slightly smaller than the one/two screens and often show details of the rooms beyond them. The problem is that when you start assembling rooms by matching doors and such, things no longer fit together. In short, what you see beyond the walls of the room you're in, and what's really in those rooms once you get there is usually slightly different; some walls will be off by a tile, a bathtub will be gone, etc. It might even become impossible to connect some rooms as doors will no longer align correctly (see level 1, 4 and 5).

In order to collapse the various rooms as much as possible, I had to do a lot of minor editing. Namely, I pretty much had to remove everything beyond the walls of most individual rooms, using only their interior for assembly and in some cases, slightly altering the walls themselves to reflect how they all end up connecting together. Referring to my thread about altering maps, this is definitely a case where I find minor alterations not only acceptable, but preferable.

Regarding the names for the stages and bosses, they aren't official in the context of the game but are either directly taken from the movie or are reasonably descriptive enough.

One last thing. You can choose any two of five ghostbusters (Peter, Ray, Egon, Winston and Louis) at the star of the game. While I personally prefer Egon and Winston, I went with the first two choices offered (Peter and Ray) for the maps. I doubt anyone would have noticed .

Well, this is the mystery project I was referring to when talking about correcting errors in a game's original maps.

I really wasn't interested in mapping this game at first. The whole thing started when browsing the Internet for my name combined with maps and I found a reference on a Gradius message board mentioning an error on one of my Gradius II map. This was followed by a temporary surge of interest in the Gradius franchise and seeing that the first game hadn't been mapped fully, I decided to do it.

This was relatively easy to do. As I mentioned in the other thread, I did some minor "corrections" so they won't look exactly as they are in-game, but like an ideal version of them. My obsession for mathematical and geometric precision pretty much required me to slightly move all the standard enemy sprites by 1 or 2 pixels to align them to the 8 x 8 pixels grid. I also moved an enemy in Stage 6 that obviously wasn't appearing in the right place, and flipped vertically two tiles in Stage 7 which were upside down.

I also chose to add a few notes like the *official* names for the bosses and sub-bosses (which is why some aren't plural when they should be) as well as notes regarding how to get the 1-ups and access the stage warp.

Hey guys. I haven't written on the forum much lately, though that doesn't mean I haven't been mapping (in fact, I've probably been mapping too much, though I haven't finished anything yet).

Anyway, I realized something while mapping a particular NES game that shall remain nameless (for now). In short, the game's maps are rather imperfect. First, one of the map clearly has a few instances of bad tiling (where the tile is upside down compared to how it should be). Second, most of the sprites are *almost* but not quite aligned with the usual 8 x 8 pixels grid. Almost always by 1 or 2 pixels, but it's driving me nuts. Lastly, one level features enemies appearing in specific formations in the background but in one single instances among close to a hundred, the enemy appears in the right place horizontally but a few tiles too high.

My question is, how would you feel if a mapper (me or anyone else) "corrected" a map to make it look a bit better or simply how it should have looked? I did it once already with Sonic Advance but I was dealing with three remote places on two separate maps where single 8 x 8 pixels tiles were missing from the foreground. In this case, although the changes would directly affect things in the player's way, nobody would notice unless they took screenshots to compare and point out how I "misaligned" everything. And in this particular case, I also feel justified in aligning everything on the basis that in the game's sequel, everything *is* correctly aligned to the grid which only makes the first game seem sloppy in terms of coding.

I often like to point out the authenticity vs aesthetic debate. I was previously a fan of the former though lately I tend to lean toward the latter. What do you all think?

For those who remember, way back in 2011 when I started mapping The Final Fantasy Legend for the Game Boy, I mentioned my desire to also map its graphically superior Wonderswan port. Well, I've started doing just that!

The game is essentially the same with very little gameplay changes, barely improved music but most importantly, some great-looking early SNES-calibre visuals. They do a lot to breath some much needed life into the Game Boy's barebone graphics (with some exceptions).

Since the game was never released in English, I had to use a translation by Tower Reversed. It's not the best in terms of how item names are handled to fit within the 7 tile limits (and some names I suspect were not translated at all, like So-Cho being called Boss here) but until/unless Aeon Genesis Translation release theirs, I'm stuck with using it. If a superior patch is ever released, I'll simply upgrade my maps with it.

Anyway, here's what's done so far, to be updated as I complete them.

*Updated 2017/02/05 but most recent map dated 2012/12/23*

World of Continent - Overworld:


World of Continent - Base Town:


World of Continent - Hero's Town:


World of Continent - Armor Castle:


World of Continent - South Village:


World of Continent - Bandits Cave:


World of Continent - Sword Castle:


World of Continent - Shield Castle:


Paradise Side-World - Overworld:


Paradise Side-World - Paradise Village:


Torture Side-World - Overworld:


World of Ocean - Overworld Surface:


World of Ocean - Port Town:


World of Ocean - Northeast Island Town:


World of Ocean - Old Man's Cabin:


World of Ocean - Overworld Seafloor:


World of Ocean - Undersea Town:


World of Ocean - Dragon Palace:


Fish Statue Side-World - Overworld:


World of Sky - Sky Town:


World of Sky - Hidden Town:

Okay, so taking GSA's advice, I've decided to give GIMP a try as my main mapping program. However, seconds after opening a file, I'm already frustrated by the apparently convoluted method needed to simply paste an image from the clipboard while removing a specific colour making the removed portion "transparent".

As I'm fond of saying, MS Paint is great because it's fast. I always use #FF00FF as the "transparent" colour of every file I save. When I'm pasting lots of images like sprites or anything where a portion must be transparent, I only need to make #FF00FF the background colour, select the "Transparent Background" icon and anything I paste will have that colour disappear.

From the various tutorials I've read about GIMP, I'd need to select and then remove the background colour every time I paste a selection. Isn't there an easier way? How hard can simply pasting something correctly be?

Seriously, I'm already willing to pull the plug right there with using GIMP as my primary paint program. I'm probably going to do like Peardian and do more of my work in Paint with the final assembly taking place n GIMP.

I mapped the first four stages of this game in 2009, but only started polishing them today after reading JonLeung complain again that this *gem* (huge sarcasm here) was still unmapped .

So here's what's done so far. I used an outline to make the meats, 1-Ups and special items stand out and even added a few framed "tips" for parts of the stages that aren't obvious. I also decided to use the colors of each stage on a Game Boy Color for the title and map screens instead of their original palette since they're not that important and it allows the maps to compress a bit more.

Completed:

*Updated 11/09/12*
Stage 1: Outside the Castle

*Updated 11/09/12*
Stage 2: Inside the Castle

*Updated 11/09/12*
Stage 3: The Clock Tower

*Updated 11/09/12*
Stage 4: The Top Floor of the Castle

See further down for the last two:

*Updated 11/09/12*
Stage 5: The Cathedral

*Updated 11/09/12*
Hidden Stage: The Dungeon

You've probably seen the following two as they've been doing the rounds of the Internet for the last few months if not a little more. But if you haven't, then take a look at artist Bill Mudron's map works:





The map arrangements aren't canonical but they still look great and work well if you start with the idea that the maps as seen in the games look literally like they do instead of being abstractions. It's not like the Mario and Zelda series have made any real attempts at reconciling their worlds and that's alright. I've always felt that it was better to concentrate on making each game map perfect for said game instead of constantly worrying that it won't match what was seen in earlier representations as long as you don't contradict them too much.

Anyway, I'm posting this because I forgot to when I first heard of these posters and I just ordered both after learning that he was doing a new printing of the Zelda one which had been sold out for a while.

(This thread is a continuation from this messy and outdated one)

Thanks to feos' effort, I've recently switched Genesis emulator and have been using Gens-ReRecording instead of plain old Gens for the last week or so. Thanks to its much more flexible nature, it's made it a lot easier to map Genesis games properly. As such, I've decided to re-do and complete my maps for the first Sonic the Hedgehog game. The re-do is mainly because Gens-RR uses a slightly different palette than Gens and also because I can now (with some work) freeze moving platforms in their initial positions.

I've decided to try and make better backgrounds than before; hope you like the improvements. Just like my earlier attempt, I'm still not going to force the whole map to conform to the game's 256 x 256 patterns on account of having sprites floating in mid-air would look stupid. These maps show all that can be accessed in-game with Debug-Mode; if you want complete but less aesthetic maps, you can go to The Sonic Center instead.

*Note that these maps aren't final and haven't been labeled or fully optimized*

Green Hill Zone Act 1:


Green Hill Zone Act 2:


*Added 17/06/12*
Green Hill Zone Act 3:


*Added 26/06/12*
Marble Zone Act 1:

Long story short, I don't have a blu-ray player yet (mostly because I don't have an HD TV). But I've been starting to buy Blu-Ray + DVD combos recently if only because it's barely more expensive and I can both enjoy the movie right now and later in a superior format. I was considering a generic player for the last few weeks but then, I found out about Journey (PS3).

Journey is exactly the kind of game that would make me buy a console. Okay, maybe not this game by itself, but coupled with the fact that I need a blu-ray player *and* that there are PS3 games I would be interested in without being must-have titles, are slowly tipping the balance in favor of Sony's console. With the PS3 and the XBOX360 slowly approaching the end of their intended lifetime, would buying a PS3 now be a good idea? I'd most likely go for the smallest available HDD to save on cost but a refurbished unit is out of the question. I simply don't trust those (after tons of problems over the years installing refurbished printer parts and supplies at work).

So, good idea? Should I follow my best friend's advice to wait a year for the PS4 to come out and buy a PS3 when they're priced to move ASAP? And how does it rate as a blu-ray player, with and without the DVD remote?

Same is with this thread but with Sonic Advance 3 instead of Sonic Advance. Same techniques, only with different memory addresses. Wanted to see some different graphics for a change, so I thought it would be better to at least stay within the same series rather than to start mapping a completely different game. ...Probably not going to update this thread much until the first game is fully done; still not decided about the second game given its *huge* maps though.

*Added 28/02/12*
Zone 1 - Route 99 - Zone Map:


Zone 1 - Route 99 - Act 1:


*Added 28/02/12*
Zone 1 - Route 99 - Boss:


*Added 28/02/12*
Zone 1 - Route 99 - Push The Switch Mini Game:


*Added 28/02/12*
Zone 1 - Route 99 - Defeat All Enemies Mini Game:


*Added 28/02/12*
Zone 2 - Sunset Hill - Zone Map:

One of my resolution for the new year has been to (as much as possible) stop starting new mapping projects when I get tired of the current one, and to instead go back to previously incomplete ones to try and finish them, and to improve them whenever possible. Which leads me to this old thing.

I started mapping Sonic Advance 6 years ago and I never finished it on account of the massive amount of time needed to fully capture and assemble any single map. A single act usually took me several weeks to capture which made the whole thing take way too long to do. So I made a few of them, got tired and put the whole thing on ice for a while.

I decided to restart this project after playing through Sonic Generations which rekindled my love for classic 2D Sonic (which, to me, includes the first Sonic Advance game). After playing around with memory codes, my slowly improving skills have allowed me to find memory locations that would be quite useful and make this project, if not a quick one, a more accurate and easier one.

I first found the locations for the X and Y coordinates of the game's camera. It's a bit tedious to have to change the memory code for every screenshot to move the camera exactly one screen to the right time after time, but it still made the screen capture much faster than before, as well as allow me to capture every stage perfectly including previously inaccessible areas.

I also, after many efforts, found a memory location which seems to act as a sort of timer (it constantly increases) used to manage all the repeating behaviours in states like moving and rotating platforms, springing spikes and more. Aside from a few obstacles where freezing the timer makes the game crash once said obstacles are on screen, it means that all the platforms can be captured in their initial positions. A big plus for me.

It even helped me to freeze all the shifting colours in the Casino Paradise Zone after quite a bit of searching. There was something like over 70 palette entries constantly moving around, and none of those were synchronized with one another so taking screenshots at just the right frame wasn't guaranteed to always yield consistent colours. After finding and entering all the required memory cheat codes, I could safely capture the whole thing with impunity.

Lastly, I decided to share this because I was tired of working on stuff and never showing any of it out of fear that people would build expectations that I would most likely not deliver on. But considering that I've already almost done half the game, I figured that whatever I manage to do this time, even if I don't do the whole game, would be enough to be submitted to the site. As always, I'm aiming to do the whole thing but you never know with me. At least I haven't encountered a single technical hurdle that I haven't managed to completely flatten with a bit of work!

So here's what I've done during the last month or so, with more as I complete them. If you find the thumbnails a bit big, it's because I got tired of Imageshack not sending them back after submitting images so I decided to do my own.

*EDIT 09/10/12*

*Images removed*

I needed space in my free ImageShack account, so I've decided to remove the maps from this post. You can find them on VGMaps here.

Long story short: I played the sequel/remake of this game, Jet Set Radio Future, on my roommate's Xbox while in college. It was great, but I could only play while my roommate allowed me to (he was a real jerk), and for a long time I tried to find a way to play it again in some form.

About 3 or 4 years ago I found out about a port of the original game for the Gameboy Advance which I tried to map before failing dramatically because of insufficient skills. There were simply too many off-screen areas I couldn't capture. It also became obvious after a bit that each location was made of several smaller maps with seamless transitions between them, and putting neighboring maps together showed just how much cheating there really was in how they were supposed to go together.

Oh yeah, and the game sucks pretty bad in my opinion. Then again, the original game was much less fun than the sequel from what I've seen, and a 2D port of a 3D game was bound to be worse.

Anyway, I recently decided to give it another try as a side project and it turns out that my improved skills at finding and manipulating variables in memory helped tremendously. I was able, with minimal effort, to capture the entirety of every sub-map so far without having to extrapolate or remove anything aside from cutting off the empty black areas, and you can clearly see the transition areas where only a partial representation of the upcoming area is actually there.

This is also the project that I left unnamed in my "Always check the file format when saving a file!" thread for those who were interested. I didn't mention it then because I wanted to avoid the inevitable "Why are you wasting you time on so many project at once!" comments .

Seeing as this is a side project I only restarted because of my love of isometric graphics, so far I've only mapped most of the stage layout without any objects except the "graffiti souls", as well as two actual mission maps with all the paint cans and tag placements. I'm not putting any real effort in finishing this project at the moment and only spending time on it to distract me from my other existing project whenever they get on my nerves. In short, I'm admitting upfront that this is unlikely to be finished anytime soon.

(Now watch me finish the whole thing in record time after such an arrogant disclaimer)

Let's begin with the first two missions.

Sorry for this thread, but I really felt like bitching because I just lost about 8 hours of work because I stupidly saved a map I was working on as a fricking JPEG! I won't bore you with all the details, but I probably hit just the wrong keys on my keyboard while saving under a new name to change the format (thus corrupting the whole thing). And THEN, I changed a few things and saved that version under its original name, thereby corrupting that version as well. You see, MS Paint doesn't just keep the opened map intact in memory after saving it as a JPEG, oh no, you end up with what was saved.

8 fucking hours, a 3704 x 4096 pixels isometric map that I have to completely redo...

While mapping The Final Fantasy Legend, I've been using upper-case letters to identify doors/stairs and show how they connect together. However, right now I'm working on a particular map where I will eventually go over not only 26 pairs of doors (26 upper-case letters) but over 36 as well (in case I wanted to use numbers after running out of letters).

I could simply use lower-case letters afterwards which would give me more than enough to complete this troublesome map, but they're harder to make out against the map itself and I'd rather use something more noticeable.

Is there any sort of rule in the English language regarding this, namely numbering using letters past 26 items? I know MS Excel simply starts using two letters instead (X, Y, Z, AA, AB, etc) but it doesn't look good and the larger label would obscure the underlying door which I'd rather avoid. How would you guys do it?