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Maps Of The Month / Found Chaotix's Bosses' Names!

« Last post by Cyartog959 on Today at 03:29:52 am »

This may be a little discovery, and I might've been behind on it, but the bosses in Knuckles' Chaotix all have official names, and it seems the Sonic Wiki Zone's got pages about them in serious need of updating to adopt that. They're already reported official, as written from the soundtrack's names.

The bosses' names in each Zone of Knuckles' Chaotix are...

Egg Catcher - boss of Botanic Base Zone (https://sonic.fandom.com/wiki/Botanic_Base_boss)
Egg Arms - boss of Techno Tower Zone (https://sonic.fandom.com/wiki/Techno_Tower_boss)
Egg Repilca - miniboss(and the game's only miniboss, albeit recurring in it, nowhere else) of Amazing Arena Zone (https://sonic.fandom.com/wiki/Amazing_Arena_sub-boss)
Egg Projector - boss of Amazing Arena Zone (https://sonic.fandom.com/wiki/Amazing_Arena_Boss)
Egg Barrier - boss of Marina Madness Zone (https://sonic.fandom.com/wiki/Marina_Madness_boss)
Egg Merry-Go-Round - boss of Speed Slider Zone (https://sonic.fandom.com/wiki/Speed_Slider_boss)
Metal Sonic, Weaponized Selector - penultimate boss in Newtrogic High Zone (https://sonic.fandom.com/wiki/Metal_Sonic_(Knuckles%27_Chaotix))
Titan Metal Sonic/Metal Sonic Kai - final boss in Newtrogic High Zone's Central Core (https://sonic.fandom.com/wiki/Metal_Sonic_Kai)

Guess Ian Flynn may not have known that nor their names yet, but Sonic Team's people do.

Little history heads-up on its final boss' creation, as I have also learned...

Ryo Kudou, involved in the game's development, and who designed some new Badniks and most of the bosses, was tasked to design that boss for Metal Sonic Kai's first transformation. Because of complications that had him swamped, Kudou delegated that task to Takumi Miyake, the designer for the game's stages, graphics and some of Dr. Robotnik's Badniks, instead, giving him another role of boss designer.

Once he got the task, he used Strata 3D, a 3D modeling, rendering and animation program used in its past years, to translate its design into 3D polygons and then used its model to draw over it to create its sprites.

The naming for Metal Sonic's monstrous, red-painted titanic form was a bit back and forth, though. Kudou and some of his programmer friends wanted that form to be named "Devil Sonic"(a little heart frightening, yes, and for sort of obvious reasons as to why, but I won't say them here), as a shout-out to an anime series, Mobile Fighter G Gundam(yes, there's also plenty of other shout-outs to other numerous anime series with giant mechas and their countless battles in past Sonic games, but not many then-young Sonic fans understood such references at that time, not even me; I thought that was out of nowhere until now), preferably, one of its mechs, "JDG-00X, Devil Gundam", but as an attempt to compromise, Kenichi Ono, a game designer also involved in the development, insisted for it to be named "Death Metal Sonic".

With very little methods to deliver official names from the game's bosses to any form of media outside of games globally at the time, the name "Metal Sonic Kai" was what fans came up with and was referred to for many years, which was deemed official from Ian Flynn's book, "Sonic the Hedgehog Encyclo-speed-ia". Guess that book may need a printing update someday.

Thought I should let you all know this bit of the game's history, too.

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Map Gab / Re: VGMaps.com now has over 50,000 maps!

« Last post by JonLeung on Yesterday at 08:25:44 pm »

50,000 maps for 3401 games means an average of 14.7 maps per game.

So how about individual platforms?

This table shows the average number of maps per game, per platform.

(How often do you see the Wii U ranked so highly?)

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Map Gab / Re: VGMaps.com now has over 50,000 maps!

« Last post by JonLeung on April 12, 2026, 04:43:46 pm »

3401 games have at least one map on VGMaps.com.
Here's the breakdown by platform.
818 games are on the NES (including the Famicom and Famicom Disk System), a whopping 24%.

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Map Gab / Re: VGMaps.com now has over 50,000 maps!

« Last post by JonLeung on April 11, 2026, 09:17:36 pm »

Still celebrating VGMaps.com having 50,000 maps!
It's little surprise that the majority of maps are for console games.
(It'd be nice to have more computer games mapped!
And I don't know what to classify the Virtual Boy as, so it might as well be its own category.)

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Map Gab / Re: The LARGEST map - G.E.R.'s map for Hollow Knight: Silksong - 3.65 GIGAPIXELS

« Last post by dark_lord_zagato on April 11, 2026, 10:24:42 am »

Now I see why the PC section has the largest maps by file size.

This is one of the most impressive maps i've ever seen.

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Gaming / I worry about Atooi and Jools...

« Last post by Cyartog959 on April 10, 2026, 11:44:35 pm »

I'm not putting anyone down or anything like it, but I truly do worry about Atooi's status as an indie game company and Jools, the founder, managing it and the game projects being worked on, and priorities shifted many times that kept its release being completely settled and finalized.

For one, we were supposed to be having Treasurenauts, the long-developed game still in the belt, but constant delays and priority changes to other projects and matters outside of game development has been hurting so much for the game and the people wanting to play it for so long, it shredded their patience and anticipation for the game in their hearts and minds, even stemming so much doubt in others that game could ever be released as time goes by. Even I feel doubt, too.

Why, even the words about the game being "ready when its ready" really comes into question about the project's well-being in development, as well as other games suffering constant delays without warning nor notice. Hatch Tales suffered too much from delays and slight hesitation about appeal to people, when its meant to be universally applicable. That, and the game's marketing might've been better off handled to someone else that is more experienced at that field, but have hopeful, positive visions in them.

For a lead having too many hats in one sitting, and with so many created IPs, Jools should've handed a few of them to others to speed things up.

I guess for tools Jools has for game dev work on his belt, I believe he uses Pro Motion NG, and Photoshop to put together the games' aspects, mainly because games like Mutant Mudds and Chicken Wiggle are all hi-bit pixel art games in their own right, and other games uses Unity as their engine, but such games uses its own created proprietary in-house engine; that of which was made for Treasurenauts originally, but Mutant Mudds had ghost levels in the works that had alpha transparency in them for its final update, back when Renegade Kid was the IP holder for it, so you know, and the previous engine wasn't capable of that, even on the 3DS, so, work on moving everything to its new engine and testing had to be done first before it can be updated to the original 3DS version, to complete the whole package.

Adobe's Illustrator, I think, was also used for Hatch Tales' content and vector-based graphics, too. Perhaps a better, more efficient program could've made it easier to make vector graphics.

I think Jools' workflow, in my perspective, needs to be improved by using Aseprite, which does pixel art a lot better than Photoshop, Tiled Map Editor, that does a lot better for level editing, compared to Pro Motion NG's capabilities, because by using them, they can streamline a lot, as it does for other devs and studios, so games could be done quite quicker with very minimal delay, especially when it comes to preparing all planned content ready for coding, testing, and then launches.

Communication should've also been better about progress on game projects, because without any form of transparency, how is anyone going to gain trust in these kind of developers, the players, and the games they were looking forward to playing them when they've been delayed and kept in the shadows for far too long?

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Map Gab / Re: VGMaps.com now has over 50,000 maps!

« Last post by Cyartog959 on April 10, 2026, 10:47:21 pm »

Measurements in meters or square meters really don't mean enough to be listed on the atlas pages.
And technically, it could be applied to 2D games as well, but we're not going to do that.
Even now, as it is, some days I wonder if the pixel area and filesize are even necessary, so I'm definitely not going to add another column with limited value.

Calculating it isn't easy for multiple games, let alone just one.  For one thing, it's completely arbitrary what scale is in each game.  It's usually calculated by taking the known height of a character.  But what if that isn't known, or it's some abstract game?  Or if there are changes in perspective or game modes, you have to calculate them for each one?

It can be interesting in certain instances (like comparing the cities of GTA-style games, or open worlds in general), but not something you can realistically expect to be applied to maps "en masse".  If you still want to discuss the intended area of particular game maps, that should be a different topic thread.

I didn't say calculating the field distance meters would be easy nor impossible; just thought that would be a little necessity for 3D game maps. I'm not making that a big priority, too.

I mean, sure, its nice to see how long or large 2D maps can go, but when it comes to seeing and playing 3D games, my mind sometimes wonders, "how much distance meters do these 3D fields have?".

Pixel areas and file sizes are indeed necessary for maps, to me and plenty of people, anyway, because knowing is already natural as well as learning. It is already worth good effort for people to learn and have some knowledge in it as well as the experience without them feeling they're wandering off too much going blind, so to speak, or not knowing how long any game map it takes for anyone to go through and reach the goal.

Knowing is only half the challenge, but calculating is part of it, too, depending on the matter.

Yes, it does require effort, I know, and I'm not expecting too much on the matter, but I won't worry about it.

OK, I'll do a thread on that subject at a later time.

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Map Gab / Re: VGMaps.com now has over 50,000 maps!

« Last post by JonLeung on April 10, 2026, 09:50:09 pm »

Thank you so much, Jon, for making it possible for all of us to contribute to this amazing internet project you began so long ago. And I'm happy to have been a helping hand in reaching the 50,000 milestone.

It's been a lot of fun viewing all of these "windows" into the state of the website these past few weeks.

And wow, I definitely wasn't expecting to be the fifth most active contributor on VGMaps! Have I really done that much?!

You're welcome!

I have a few more stats I could show off, and probably will (just not tonight), but it's definitely winding down, there's only so much that's worth saying.
Glad people find them interesting!  I knew this one about how much the top mappers have contributed would get people's attention!

Yeah, you're up there, FlyingArmor.  Is there really any doubt?

What I find interesting is that the top five contributors are all about 1000 maps apart from each other.  That's pretty even!

There's some mathematical theory or law or something about how when something is big (like population, for instance), the largest one will be considerably larger than the second, whose difference from the third isn't as big.  Probably some distribution thing I can't remember right now, and Google's not helpful.  Maybe it applies to map sizes, seeing as how G.E.R.'s latest huge map is three times bigger than his previous one, as mentioned here.

In any case, it's clear from that table that this site's content and success is due to you guys, so I should be thanking you.  I mean, just look at that!
G.E.R. alone has made almost 11% of maps on this site, that's over one-tenth - and almost one-ninth - of ALL of this!  The top 12 mappers alone have made up half the site!
Guard Master only recently starting sharing his maps with VGMaps, with so much of it in 2026... which is amazing, already shooting up to 7th place by providing 1/40th of VGMaps.com in a short amount of time.

So thank you all again for your hard work!  This community may be small, but it's amazing.

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Map Gab / Re: The LARGEST map - G.E.R.'s map for Hollow Knight: Silksong - 3.65 GIGAPIXELS

« Last post by VGCartography on April 10, 2026, 07:34:04 pm »

All of human evolution and technology have led to this achievement. NASA is jealous of these image dimensions. 420,000 screenshots is like.... 5% of the satellite images google maps uses to make a coverage map the entire planet.

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Map Gab / Re: VGMaps.com now has over 50,000 maps!

« Last post by VGCartography on April 10, 2026, 07:30:48 pm »

Thanks for the cool data, Jon. This is good stuff.

Also, those Silksong map dimensions. G.E.R. is truly a madman