Ultima Exodus, moon gates on world map, by Dave.

Not really created from memory, but I did create this while playing the game back in 1984.  Recently I discovered this while sorting through some old papers.

I never really spent any time with the Ultima series, so this was a quick research project for me to figure out what this was even from.  "Moon Gates", I said to myself.  "I don’t remember that one.  I wonder if it’s about the moon.“

Resident Evil, first floor, by dungeonsdonuts.

Map from Resident Evil (PS1) drawn from memory. Hopefully posted before Halloween. 

Seriously, I love this game to bits. 

I am so in love with this, yo.  I’ve mentioned my RE love here before, I’m sure, and I identify pretty strongly with a lot of the more emphatic notes here.

As for “before Halloween”, uh, yeah.  For realsies this time, I’m gonna get the stragglers out of the queue.  Sorry about that.

Riven, world map, by Will.

Hey, long time Mapstalgia. Riven. Oh man, Riven. Intended to be the only Myst sequel before Ubisoft bought the rights and slowly burned them. Criminally overlooked, absolutely brilliant. Some of the best world-building and environmental storytelling ever, fantastic atmosphere, memorable iconography, oppressive dictatorship, world-spanning puzzles, a sense of exploration that still makes me giddy and OMFG RIVEN.

This is the first game I remember looking forward to. I didn’t know where to find game news at the time so I was pretty much kept up to date by Fox Trot and my sister. I was young and hadn’t beaten Myst but I loved exploring that game and fell in love with Riven immediately. I got the bad ending by mashing buttons and blundered my way around the islands all the way to the side entrance of the gold dome before getting completely stuck, giving up, and leaving it for ~5 years. I also remember stopping and running from the computer at times. Game was creepy as hell.

Long time, indeed!  It got super quiet in the ol’ inbox again, and I’m afraid I got so “dare not look” about it that I’ve let a few things that actually DID straggle in sit for too long.  But let’s make that better!  I’ll get ‘em posted over the next few days.

And, man, one of these days I"d like to have the patience to revisit Riven.  I’ve talked a little bit about my mixed feelings about Myst, but I always liked the idea of the world building and I would have played Riven if the video stuff in it hadn’t consistently crashed my computer during the first couple minutes.  Total non-starter, a real bummer.

Primal Prey, world map, by Alex Biffar.

A fairly unknown PC game from back in the day. Unfortunately I can no longer get it to work on modern systems. Even back then it was pretty buggy and was never patched. It is basically a hunting game, but you hunt Dinosaurs, much like the Carnivores series, except you get actual missions with different goals. There is only one map in the game and this is it, though this make it look a lot smaller than it is. Dinosaurs spawn randomly, but there are certain areas that they tend to be.

I think this is Primal Prey?  I’ve never played it, never even heard of it, but a little bit of googling goes a long way if you’re willing to fill out the ol’ crossword in pencil like I am.

I never really played any dinosaur games that I can recall, other than one little dino-survival thing for the Amiga where you could play as either an herbivore or a carnivore, trying to eat enough plants or herbivores, respectively, to not die of starvation.  Sort of a very, very low-rent Tokyo Jungle?  I was never very good at it, and I don’t know if that’s because I was actually just bad at the game, or because the game was bad in general (a lot of odd titles for the Amiga were), or because the game was set at an extinction event and the whole point was that you’d die, or what.

That game also had a construct-a-dino mode that as far as I can recall you could do nothing with, which seemed to sort of be a nasty tease in a game where you play as a dinosaur.  Like if Skyrim put you through character creation but then that character was just a picture in a locket some other dude carries around all game.

Streets of Rage, Boat Level,by Nathan Windsor.

Less of a map and more of a screenshot, but as it was side-scrolling beat-em-up, there’s not much of a map to really draw. I don’t remember the first time I played this game, all i know is my older brother used to be a lot better at it than me! I tried to get the city backdrop in and the box thing that changed in every level that you smashed for food, weapons etc. I used to have it on Sega MegaDrive, but now I have it on Xbox360 in the MegaDrive collection, on my phone and also on an emu. It’s still fun to play and I still very rarely make it past the “corridor with trolleys” level even when I played it a few weeks ago. 

Oh man, I only knew of these games as “that thing that looks kind of like Final Fight”.

A brief cross-promotional note: when I’m not pestering you for map submissions (*cough*), I’ve lately been recording a podcast called We Have Such Films To Show You, in which me and my buddy Yakov Grinberg re-watch and discuss in loving, rambling fashion each of the nine (!) Hellraiser films.  You can grab it on iTunes too if you like.  It’s a good time, come listen!

The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening, Koholint Island, by Ryan Veeder.

A low-res impression of Koholint Island. Link’s Awakening was my first Game Boy game and my first Zelda game. The first time I played it, I got stuck in the Mysterious Woods because I was afraid to walk on the cracked floors in one of the caves.

I would have liked to include some more detail, but I figured it was most important to get the eight main dungeon entrances. Some important landmarks (the mermaid statue, the monument to the Flying Rooster, the creepy cave entrance with the tusks) have been lost in between.

You still remember a lot more of it than I do at the moment, and I remember looooving that when I first got it.  Man, that big egg!  The big egg.  I’d forgotten all about it.

Thanks for the submission!

Metal Gear Solid, first level, by onysk.

The last time I played MGS1 … Phew, i can’t remember, it was on the Gamecube with the remake i think! Well I don’t really have something to say but this game is awesome. The gameplay, the story, the characters, everything is awesome in MGS, so I dare you to say it isn’t :)

I daren’t! I have a strong abiding love for MGS, having played through it for the first time in a sort of tandem hand-off fashion with some friends in college when none of us really knew what we were getting into.  It was glorious and a bit odd.  We ended up plowing through all the VR Missions stuff too just to have more to play.

Scooby Doo Night of 100 Frights, map, by kaki9.

I don’t have much time for video games any more so when I rifled through my brains for game I could attempt to map, this was the one I seemed to remember most. Until I tried to put it on paper of course.

I played this game quite a bit as a kid and, to be honest, I was really bad at it. As you can see, the playground (aka the easy bit) is the most detailed. I only ever got about a third of the way through the game but it and the second hand console we got it with pretty much introduced me to gaming so it’s fitting in a way.

Oh man, with Tim Curry doing voiceover work!  Thanks for the submission.