Topic: Super Mario World

[snesmaster]

Hi, I have a question.  I have started mapping Super Mario World for the SNES and have World 1: Yoshi's Island complete so far.  I'm mapping this game for my website, and to allow me to make posters for the game.  The game is already mapped here, and in fact has won Map of the Month honers back in 2004.

Map from this site:
https://www.vgmaps.com/Atlas/SuperNES/SuperMarioWorld-Yoshi%27sIsland-Yoshi%27sIsland4.png

New map I have made:
http://www.snesmaps.com/maps/SuperMarioWorld/SuperMarioWorldMap06.html

The maps from this site are taken from the Lunar Magic map editor, there are some labels added to it, and the boss areas that are not in the map viewer have been added.  But aside from that they are pretty much straight from the editor.  I understand this since it was done in 2004, before there were that many tools available for mapping SNES games.  However now a much better job can be done.  Notice how I included the water at the bottom of the level.  I also labeled all the items in the game like showing there is a Fire Flower in the first question block.  Lots of subtle errors in the placement of sprites are off in the map editor maps.

I always feel a little bad when I submit maps to this site that end up replacing someones maps, but in this case those maps earned map of the month so how can they be replaced?  I don't know if I should submit my maps or not.  Opinions are welcome.

[TerraEsperZ]

I've always found replacing maps with someone else's to be a rather touchy subject.

Objectively, the better set of maps deserves to be on the site for any given game. Subjectively however, my opinion would depend on the quality of the maps being replaced and the difference in quality between the original and the replacement. I'll admit my reasoning is purely emotional because even though I rarely receive comments about my work, it still feels good to know they're being featured on VGMaps for everyone to see, and knowing they're considered good enough to be there. If I did a crappy or incomplete map and someone else submits a much better one, then they deserve the spot more than I do. But if you've spent hundreds of hours on a game and ended up putting together very good and exhaustive maps and they get posted on the site, it would hurt a lot for them to be replaced just because someone did an even more amazing job. It would suck to see all your hard work sort of invalidated even if visitors of the site would end up winning with better maps to see.

In short, I don't know. The original Super Mario World maps clearly aren't complete since transparencies are missing and in the case of water, that's really integral to the stage. And if the maps were really taken from an editor, it should have been the mapper's job to add in what was missing. But then again, they've been given the Map of the Month award, so JonLeung is really the one who should make the call.

[Rew]

I think Terra makes some excellent points, and in general I would agree that an established mapmaker's maps (particularly ones honored as Maps of the Month) should stand--but in this particular case, it's been since 2004, both since the maps were made and honored. That's almost a decade. Mapping has improved considerably since then, so (with all due respect to Stefan) I would like to see SNESmaster's SMW maps go up.

Of course there's also a personal bias here in that I recently played SMW a few months ago for the first time in several years, and I found it slightly jarring (and annoying) that I couldn't remember where power-ups were--and there were no maps I could find online that would tell me which question blocks held power-ups!