For this month's "Maps Of The Month" featurette, I wish to draw your attention to Maxim's Micro Machines 2: Turbo Tournament (Genesis) maps.
Micro Machines 2: Turbo Tournament is a racing game featuring the popular Micro Machines toys, with racetracks and obstacles composed of everyday objects. Though not the first game of its kind (obviously, there's the first Micro Machines game on the Sega Master System, among other consoles), there are a few things that make this game stand out.
Firstly, it came in a special cartridge, called a J-Cart. J-Carts included two more controller ports on the cartridge itself, allowing four controllers to be plugged in at once. Secondly, besides the obvious four player action, you could actually play with up to eight players: two players could share each controller to control separate vehicles!
And also, our resident Sega fan Maxim not only mapped this game very well, but he did so with a program he wrote himself: the
Screenshot Autostitcher! How fitting that he'll enable our machines to micro-manage screenshots starting with a game about Micro Machines! This game was his opportunity to introduce this valuable tool to the community of video game cartographers who continue to add to this site week after week. Anything that makes our job easier is certainly welcome, so thanking him for the Screenshot Autostitcher is long overdue.
So to recognize the effort put into automating mapping, Maxim's Micro Machines 2: Turbo Tournament (Genesis) maps will be known as VGMaps.com's Maps Of The Month for March 2011.
