The Shining Nexus

After a busy couple weeks and and an illness that has befallen me for a few days, I am able to share my map progression thus far. I finished up on The Cave of Truth and 90% of the Labyrinth Level 1 floor and am now just arrived at the final trial, The Cave of Wisdom. This trial looks like a real treat and I am looking forward to tackling and mapping this level. But first, the story so far... ---- Tricky map, but nothing my little brain can't handle! It's a ghost! This was an interesting floor with some dull trap mechanics. First off, we got the spinney turn tables that are easy to figure out, the magic sucking slime floors, walls that drop from the sky that block your path, puddles of water that tries to kill you, ghosts hiding in false treasure chests (oh, and they can cast death on you for an instant kill), a misleading wall that brings your hopes up then crushes it, and a hungry golem that's disguised as a damsel in distress so it can trick you in beco

Another week, another update to my journey with mapping the Shining games. This session went a lot smoother and I was enjoying myself greatly as I listened to some great podcasts. For those wondering, the podcasts I listened to were  Axe of the Blood God , which is about RPGs, and  Retronauts , which is about retro video games. Unfortunately, I was not able to work on this project very long, but I do plan to work on this throughout the week so I could make more significant progress. Goal right now is to finish Shining in the Darkness  in about 3 months and move on to Shining Force . This might be wishful thinking, but we'll see. I've also been thinking about how to layout all the maps. One version would be to create individual maps to view separately and the other version would bunch them up together to create a poster. Regardless, the goal here is to create a digital version of my maps so that people can print them out to use as they play the game. I'll probably end up

Unfortunately for this session, I was not able to make progress into the next trial. Here's why... Ay caramba! So as I was mapping out the new area past the false wall on the first floor, I noticed the path in the upper right corner was going to travel along side another path. This triggered an "uh oh" in my mind because I knew I messed up the space count somewhere. I traced back to my recent drawings, but found no issue with it. I decided to consult a guide and found two problems I found on my map... Those two red circles indicate a miscount in space and caused the map to extend one space to the left and right. Doh. Sadly, trying to fix this mistake would essentially make me re-do 90% of the map, so I decided to start this floor from scratch with a new fresh coat of paint. Behold, my new monstrosity! It's alive! So yes, I re-drew Level 1 with updated icons and fixed the spacing. All is well now. I do plan to create a separate notation sheet and

Welcome to the Shining Cartography series. In this series I will be mapping out selected games in the Shining series:  Shining in the Darkness, Shining Force, Shining Force 2, Shining Force CD and Shining Force Gaiden: Final Conflict. I've decided to include SitD because of its first-person dungeon crawler design, which makes good practice to improve and standardized my mapping aptitude. Also, its story is closely tied to the Shining Force  games and finishing these games are on my bucket list. I'm a huge Shining Force fan and these games are the reason why I'm obsessed with strategy RPGs. Mapping out video games is an interesting and enjoyable hobby of mine and I genuinely look forward to drawing and playing these wonderful games. This is a huge project to embark on, which will essentially take me quite a bit of time to finish, especially with my limited free time. The plan is to work on this project a couple of hours one day per week and update this blog along with it.

Good year, good games, good times. Here's a list of my favorite games of 2018. ---- Octopath Traveller A JRPG that returns to it's 16-bit roots, Octopath Traveller is a wonderful adventure that hearkens back to a SNES era of sprite based graphics and turn based combat mechanics. There are many components about this game that just breathes nostalgia and improves upon them. Its cast of eight playable characters offer unique talents to build team compositions with and it becomes important to build thoughtful compositions as the difficulty ramps up. And boy does it ramp up. Bosses are fierce and unforgiving that punishes the player for making the slightest mistake. The turn base combats are fun, complex, and rewarding. Mashing the "A" button won't take you very far, that's for sure. The story was good and I enjoyed all the individual character arcs, but it's lack of significance in the overall scheme and an absence of meaningful interaction between