Topic: Jet Grind Radio/Jet Set Radio (GBA)

[TerraEsperZ]

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.

[TerraEsperZ]

As for the empty stages, let's begin with Benten-Cho. Nothing much to say except that it's plainly obvious how the maps are related to one another, even if the details that are shared across more than one map are not necessarily identical, something that's sometimes visible while playing and you see objects appear out of thin air as the game replaces one map with another.

[TerraEsperZ]

Since some maps are too big for the forum even after being optimized, I'll be using ImageShack for those.

Let's continue with Shibuya-Cho. If I had the time, I'd show a little diagram showing just how impossible it is to assemble the maps of this location together.

Shibuya-Cho - Downhill Streets


Shibuya-Cho - Playground & Highway

[TerraEsperZ]

Here's the stand-alone Grind City.

[TerraEsperZ]

And the still-in-progress Kogane-Cho. There are still two areas here to map, namely the warehouse and the junkyard.

Kogane-Cho - Harbor (this is the one I messed up by resampling the screenshots instead of resizing them, which forced me recapture it entirely)

[Maxim]

It's always awesome to see isometric maps and I have to say, it looks worse than I remember - maybe the darkness of the original GBA screen helped..?

Jon really ought to increase the attachment limits, there's no reason not to.

Is it possible (or maybe you did, I didn't quite follow your description) to stitch together the joins by selecting the parts with more information each time? I did something similar where possible for my Arena maps (still unfinished...) and I think it makes a nicer result overall, even if it is slightly "fake".

[TerraEsperZ]

Some maps can be joined together, but there's invariably at least one or more that would appear over the rest. I'm having a hard time coming up with the right words so I've included two diagrams to show how impossible it is to do it with the Shibuya-Cho areas. In red, I've highlighted the parts where the maps should connect but can't.

The first diagram shows how close together the two connecting areas are on the "Playground & Highway" map, and just how far apart they are on the combined "Downhill Streets" + "Bus Station" map.

The second one shows how the "Half Pipe" section connects to the "Playground & Highway" one. You can see that the center and right connections are positioned correctly in relation to one another on both maps, but the left one is not placed accurately at all.

For finished maps, I'd most likely keep the areas separated but eliminate the redundant parts and for the areas repeated across multiple maps, use the "true" version for each.

[TerraEsperZ]

And finally the rest of Kogane-Cho. That will be all from this game for the moment; time to go back and finish The Final Fantasy Legend!

[TerraEsperZ]

I actually finished another mission, namely "Monster Of Kogane" which takes place in Kogane-Cho Harbour.

[TerraEsperZ]

Next mission, "Love Trap".

[Trop]

Heh, this is one of those games you can tell they made in 3D before converting to 2D.  Of course I suppose with the advent of DS that was the end of that.  Too bad I liked it.