For this month's "Maps Of The Month" featurette, I wish to draw your attention to KingKuros's Strider (NES) maps.
The Striders are a secret organization of high-tech ninja operatives. The young Strider Hiryu is tasked with kill his friend Kain, who had been captured by enemy forces. Hiryu defies his superiors and instead chooses to rescue him, subsequently learning of a mind-control weapon codenamed "Zain". Strider destroys Zain units located around the world, while hunting down the conspirators responsible.
The NES Strider game is quite different from the arcade game, and follows the plot of the Strider Hiryu manga. Curiously, the Japanese Famicom version ended up being cancelled.
This globe-trotting adventure takes you from Kazakh to Los Angeles to Australia and to the space station, Red Dragon. Thanks to KingKuros, you won't get lost in the Egyptian pyramid while hunting down those Aqua-Boots, or in the caves of Africa while hunting down another Zain unit. Still unusual for platform games at the time, it's not linear, and you will have to revisit areas throughout the course of the story - a story which was pretty good for its time. However, like games of its time, it is somewhat difficult.
So to recognize the effort put into mapping this challenging game, yet taking it all in stride, KingKuros's Strider (NES) maps will be known as VGMaps.com's Maps Of The Month for February 2014.
