Field Report from Skara Brae

 My campaign through Tales of the Unknown Volume 1: The Bard's Tale, beautifully remastered on the XBox One, continues onward, with my party stepping foot in Baron Harkyn's castle this afternoon, leaving behind the undead masses back in the Catacombs for some above ground action. This felt like a good time to check in.

Here is how I am playing: I am checking the automap against my ancient hand-drawn maps for accuraccy (more on that later) by mapping out every square on every level. So far, this has seemed to be enough to keep level with what I am fighting. When exploring a level, I take every fight that comes my way (unless I'm on the way out in a rush), and in levels between the current one I'm exploring and the exit, I skip fights.

My party has levelled up enough that my magic users have learned all their available spells, so now it's all about levelling them up to get more hit and magic points. Loot is scarce in this game, and it seems like forever between weapon and armor upgrades at first. The pace picks up though, by Catacombs Two, and now my bard has a good supply of fire horns and my whole party has been upgraded one way or another.

It turns out my old maps were less comprehensive than I thought, but the majority of the misses are traps that I did not detect before, because at this point in the game your mage should be keeping you levitated at all times.  I hovered right over them in my previous visit without setting them off, so they were not marked as traps until this playthrough. 

A big miss was on Catacomb One where a dead end hallway I had mapped was actually two small rooms, the last with a message on the wall pertaining to the game's story. That was embarrassing! And there was something on the town map that I did not have noted, in a small southeast section of buildings guarded by stone giants.

I could not remember why this neighborhood was closed off, so I checked every building, and in one of them was an NPC basically saying that we were in a trilogy (of threats to Skara Brae/games). Was he there on those floppy disks 35 years ago? I have no record of it.

I have also come to realize that I was maintaining a perception for the last 3 plus decades that I was maybe only halfway through the game, but if my suspicions are correct, I was actually only one level away from the end of the game back then. My maps get even sketchier, less refined, and wholly incomplete the closer to the end they get.

Dragons have started showing up, and there is little defense against their breath. It comes down to a roll of the dice as to which spell or bard instrument can shut them up before they can get off more than a few of those attacks. Dopplegangers, too, which "jump" into your party if there is a slot and imitate one of your crew until you kill them both. Fun stuff!

The good news, in summary, is that I'm actually having fun with all this again, and feel no desire to quit or take another three and a half decade break. I'll check in again when I've got something more to report.

Beaten: Gears of War 4 (Xbox One)

 Finally, game designers with the philosophy "If it ain't broke, don't fix it". After beating Gears 1-3 back to back I thought I had had enough of the repetitive cover-based gameplay, but last year I fired up Gears of Ward Judgment and had a blast. It was exactly what I expected - more of the same - with a great story involving a side character from 1-3, great action, and polished graphics and gameplay. 

Gears of War 4, I feared, would suffer from the design philosophy where they think fans of the game want it to evolve, to become more complex, to be more like this game and that game. I was dreading things like crafting, or levelling up player attributes, or multiple choice conversation trees being added to the game.

To my surprise, the game is a perfect and polished continuation of the series and its plotlines, showcasing the next generation of heavily armored warriors fighting through varied areas of cover-based shooting. The locust threat from the previous games has been replaced by killer robots and a new threat in the form of locust 2.0, and that's all good. There are little guys and brutes and bosses as in the previous games, and their movements and tactics are a lot of fun to fight.

The graphics are gorgeous, and in some of the ruined old brick buildings I felt that Dark Souls vibe as my squad worked their way through those areas. I forgot the scale of difficulty on Gears of War games and played on normal instead of hardcore on this run and it was relatively easy but still challenging at times.

Story wise, it all comes together really well, and some familiar faces from Gears 1-3 show up to help out the next generation of Cog (or former Cog) soldiers.  It was a long enough campaign to be entertaining without wearing out its welcome, and with Gears 5 already in my backlog, I'm sure I will return to the series at some point in the future, this time without the fear of bad design ideas muddying up the perfect and polished formula that Epic Games has established with the series.

Some games do need to evolve and grow and it's great to see in subsequent releases. Other times, however, designers add too many unnecessary bells and whistles and it adds nothing to the experience (a good example is that Assassin's Creed game awhile ago that had tower defense segments). Gears of War is a simple and fun formula that ain't broke, so I am grateful that Epic choose the wise path and didn't fix it.

Thirty Five Years Later, A Return to Skara Brae

 In 1986 I was living in my parent's house, attending classes at the Mansfield branch of OSU, and working full time as a salad bar attendant at a Brown Derby restaurant. It was a golden time of hard work, hard partying, and floppy disks for my beloved Commodore 64. 

Finally, I was state of the art. However, I had yet to take on a super complex role playing game because frankly, they were intimidating when I read about them in the magazines of the time.  I took on text adventures like The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and Nine Princes in Amber, but Wizardry was not on the C64 yet, and the only Ultima out for it at that time was III, and I wanted to start the series with I.

My hometown of Galion, within driving distance of Mansfield, had a few good sources of software among them, but to the south in Columbus was, well, everything. Thus a party/software hunt road trip was initiated on March 28, 1986 with my good friend and fellow gaming enthusiast Andy Kiss, primarily to the Toys-R-Us on Morse Road. There, a long wall of software was on display for a variety of computer systems, and the section for the C64 was the largest.

On the shelf was a shiny new package from Electronic Arts called "Tales of the Unknown Volume 1: The Bard's Tale". It looked as sophisticated as all those other RPGs I had read about, but the animated color monster graphics and the clean screen drew me in. With Andy's encouragement, I dove in and bought it.

After character creation I was free to explore the town, not really knowing what to do or where to go, but I found all the shops and had a few warm up fights in the streets before stumbling onto the first dungeon. It was quite the education from there as I meticulously mapped my way through level after level, and just doing that was enough to grind up my party without the need for too much other grinding. 

Sessions continued that spring and into summer, and Andy, as well as our other friend Barry, spent time with me playing it, assisting in the mapping and note-taking. It was a warm moment of reminiscence last week when I opened the old manila folder with my maps and notes an saw Barry's detailed character sheets listing equipment and spells for each character.

That was March, but by August I had stopped campaigning in one Skara Brae and had started with another, as I took the dive and started Ultima IV, no longer concerned with starting the series at I. I made it pretty far until December, when Bard's Tale II: The Destiny Knight came out, and caught up in the hype, I dove into that, starting a cycle of unfinished RPGs that remains until this day.

Thankfully, inExile entertainment has revived and remastered the Bard's Tale Trilogy on the XBox One, and that is where I am making my second assault on the game. It plays fast, smooth, and slick, allowing for quick in and out sessions where I explore a little more each time, level up my characters, and let the automap do the hard work. 

Checking the modern automap against my 1986 graph paper map shows for the first two dungeon levels at least, a meticulous re-rendering of the original layout, from the walls to the doors to the notes and traps. I've only found one minor discrepancy so far, and it could easily be an error I made 35 years ago.

Assuming I don't flake out this time, I expect my campaign to last into late summer. At some point I will be exploring farther than I did before and may copy the automap of those uncharted levels onto graph paper so if I finish the game then that manila folder from 1986 will be complete at last.

Auditioning

 As a gamer maintaining a vast backlog, I normally have the next game I want to play in mind as I approach the end of one game. Sometimes, however, I'm not sure what to jump to next. So what I will do is audition my next game by trying a few titles from my backlog and seeing if they grab me. 

I've been doing this in the few months after beating Paper Mario, even completing some of the shorter games I've auditioned. Let's look at what I've been playing and checking out.

Farcry Classic (360)

This 2013 remake for Xbox Live Arcade of the 2004 PC game shows its age well. And yes, I said I was burnt out on Farcrys after 5, but this is not the modern open world Farcry. Instead, this is a refreshingly linear game with some large open environments, cool 80s action movie vibe cutscenes, and standard gunplay.

What really stood out in this game was the enemy AI. One would think that 2004 AI would be worse than most modern games, but something weird is going on with these enemies. Sometimes, as is usual with AI, they are just idiots standing there confused by their programming, which in 2021 is still common. Other times, though, they worked together, took and held positions and waited on my next move, and generally surprised the shit out of me with their behavior. It was refreshing.

Status: Beaten

Feeding Frenzy (360)

This Pop Cap casual game is the kind I normally dismiss, but I tried it and had fun with the scramble-around-the-screen-eating-what-you-can gameplay, which is vaguely reminiscent of the Imagic classic Dragonfire. Start eating small fish, grow, eat bigger fish, repeat. Fast and colorful, but the frenetic action never gets out of hand.

It's a casual game after all, so the difficulty is light but the fun is heavy.

Status: Beaten

Marlow Briggs and the Masque of Death (360)

Another genre I normally avoid is the hack and slash. Every one I've tried has been fun at first but later revealed to be frustrating, with difficult combo moves and so much stuff happening on the screen it becomes hard to even see the character, much less what they are hitting.

However, this hidden gem from late in the XBox 360 life cycle is one polished piece of software. The action gets intense but remains manageable. The character and story may seem standard at first, but not long after starting the game, one encounters a self-aware level of humor that was a delight. The companion mask-god thing that follows the player around cracks jokes about the player dying so much that it takes the sting off of dying so much.

There's lots of platforming here, too, but none of it yet has been unfair. The camera follows the player though each area and is one of the best I've seen in gaming. It always seems to be where it needs to be, with very few instances of it being in the wrong place and causing the player to die due to an unforeseen pitfall.

Status: 3/4 completed, stuck on a boss fight

Heavy Weapon (360)

Another Pop Cap casual game from way back in the day, Heavy Weapon is a bullethell shooter where the player controls a tank scrolling right at the bottom of the screen, shooting at aircraft above. Again, this is not my normal genre, for the exact same reasons listed above regarding hack and slash games.

Nonetheless. Heavy Weapon has brought me in with its colorful graphics, simple yet challenging gameplay, and varied enemies. I did not expect to play this very far before quitting forever in frustation, but playing a little every few days over the last week brought me to the end, and a victory over the final boss.

Status: Beaten

Akumajo Dracula X Chi no Rondo (PC Engine Super CD ROM2 via Turbografx 16 Mini)

This Castlevania classic was a Japan-only exclusive for the PC Engine CD ROM attachment, and tragically was never ported over to the U.S. I remember reading about it in early 1990s gaming magazines and being blown away by screenshots of the graphics, which were a step up from the NES series of Castlevania games, but not as good as the later-released Super Castlevania IV for the SNES.

It's got all the classic Castlevania gameplay and weaponry and is totally playable for a non-Japanese speaking player like me. With the TG16 Mini's save states, I plan to keep chipping away at if for the foreseeable future.

Status: At the start of the 4th Stage, no hope of going much further

Splatterhouse (Turbografx 16 via Turbografx 16 Mini)

I had this creepy cult classic in my Turbografx 16 collection before the great purge, and as much as I enjoyed it, it was a tough one to pick up and play over and over. A side-scrolling brawler with limited weapons and a haunted house full of gory enemies, Splatterhouse has great graphics and sound effects accompanying it's onslaught of enemies.

Again, with the save state feature of the TG16 Mini, I have been chipping away at in anew, making it further than (I think) I ever got back in the day. On some levels, I am literally saving again after making it past each small encounter without taking damage. The only healing comes automatically at the start of a new level, so I must make it to each boss fight with full health.

Status: Stage V so far, farther than I made it 30 years ago

Outer Wilds (Xbox One)

I saw this title on XBox Game Pass Ultimate Platinum Gold Express, or whatever it's called, and had to try it out. It's a first person game of exploration and flying that takes place in a tightly packed solar system. You fly from planet to planet unlocking some sort of mystery.

Everything here is right from the graphics to the characters to the controls, but I did not take much time to learn them and had difficulty getting around, resulting in death by crash and/or asphyxiation. Some of the planets have cave systems, and flying inside one I found a weird wormhole thing that transported me back out to space, where I did not have enough fuel to make it back to any planets, which was repeatedly frustrating.

I'm sure it would be a good game, and I hope to return to it and try to familiarize myself with the controls better. It's got a lot of charm.

Status: I crash a lot

The Outer Worlds (Xbox One)

Fresh off their take on Fallout with Fallout New Vegas, and their awesome South Park: The Stick of Truth, Obsidian Entertainment created their own version of a Bethesda RPG with The Outer Worlds. It plays exactly like an Elder Scrolls or Fallout  game, with combat, levelling, inventory management, companions, and conversation all polished, colorful, and a good balance between fun and tedious.

The player is an unfrozen colonist in a far away solar system, cut off from Earth and struggling to survive. The story unfolds well and there are lots of side missions and even more loot to be had. The companions are great, and at the difficulty I played, unable to be permanently killed. The best one is SAM, a repurposed cleaning robot that shoots acid, whose robotic commentary about cleaning is hilarious.

Since Bethesda seems to be going the Rockstar way of ending solo player experiences in favor of big bucks multiplayer games, it's great that Obsidian took the torch and ran with it so well. The Outer Worlds is a tight adventure without an overabundance of side distractions, rather just enough content that the finale comes long before the burnout.

Status: Beaten (this game won the audition and became my full campaign)

Let’s Be Honest, Sony. Play Has Some Limits

 (UPDATE: Later, Sony reversed its decision to close down the PS3 and PS Vita stores, but the PSP store will be closing as scheduled. A temporary relief for PS3 and PS Vita owners.)

In a heartless but probably sensible business decision, Sony announced today that they are shutting down the online stores for PSP, PS3, and Vita systems this summer. 

I just received the long email detailing what this means for various aspects of the service, but the bottom line is that after the shutdown, many games will become no longer available (legally) anywhere.

At the bottom of the email there was Sony’s new catchphrase “PLAY HAS NO LIMITS”. 

The irony was too much, hence the above defacing. If that logo hadn’t been there, I’d have left it alone.

No Guilt Here

 As a middle aged gamer, the need to work out each day amid the cracking bones and sore muscles becomes clear. If I want to retire well into my 100s with my backlog of video games, the time is now to get into and maintain some semblance of physical health.

So I have relocated the Wii U to the downstairs setup and tested it this weekend. It had been awhile:

As we all know by now, the Wii Fit workouts and stats are, shall I say, for smaller people than most of us. The proof:  it said that my 202 pound /55 year old frame is obese, that I need to lose 50 pounds, and my Wii Fit age is 68.

Still, it's good to know that it's working as intended with the same old snarky comments and totally unrealistic body image standards. Let's see how long I stick with it this time.

Beaten: Paper Mario (N64 via Wii Virtual Console via Wii U Transfer)

 I've tried to tackle a few Mario platformers over the last few years, trying to get into one enough to finish it, but eventually yielding to the harsh frustration that platformers in general present. I could get good enough to push through, I suppose, but time is too precious to throw myself at that level of repetitive failure just to get a few more levels into them.

Instead, I took on Paper Mario, the late-to-the-party Nintendo 64 classic that launched the Paper Mario franchise in 2001. In 2001, I was deep into Ultima Online and the N64 at this point was starting to gather dust. I jumped aboard the series later with the Gamecube sequel Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door and later the Wii entry, Super Paper Mario.

Everything that was great about those sequels started here, in a fun and polished package that presents enough of a challenge to not be annoying, enough surprises to keep players moving forward, and enough humor to make the journey enjoyable.

The pacing is great and at no point did I have to grind to level, although I did grind items for a time to increase my wealth. Levelling means raising hit points, mana, and badge slots. Badges are important attack and defense boosters and configuring them is a constant concern, as their various uses can be situational.

I may never take on a classic heavy duty JRPG, but the simplicity and overall lightness of the Paper Mario games, including this first one, makes for a rewarding experience whenever I want to scratch that itch.

Now, I had originally purchased Paper Mario on the Wii Virtual Console, along with a few other games, and had abandoned them all when I packed the old Wii up a decade ago. For the rest of the 2010s I stuck mostly to the Sony and Microsoft consoles and paid little mind to what Nintendo was doing, which was releasing their own new consoles, the Wii U followed by the Switch.

Since the old days, I have gone with one philosophy as to whether or not to buy a console, and that is simply "Is there a game exclusive to it that I want to play?" For the Wii U, that answer was no, so for the first time ever, I skipped a Nintendo console, but later in the 2010s, I did purchase its successor, the Switch. 

My last gaming friend in the world, Jimbo, is a Nintendo loyalist though, and he was quite disdained by Nintendo abandoning the Wii U when the Switch came out. He encouraged me repeatedly to pick one up, and when I kept putting it off even when the used Wii U consoles were cheap, he took the initiative and gave us one as a present in a deal he got from a co-worker who was ready to abandon it.

And while there was still nothing of note I wanted to play on it, it was backward compatible with the Wii, and offered a way to bring one's Wii data over, including those 5 games I had purchased on the Virtual Console. I dithered for over a year an a half on that, knowing it would be tedious work to perform the transfer.

Finally in December, I dug the Wii out and hooked it up to the internet to begin the process. While the Nintendo online store thing was a ghost town, the app the do the transfer was still there and ready to download. Keep in mind, in late 2020, the Wii U has been totally left behind by Nintendo in favor of the Switch, so I was actually amazed that the mechanism to transfer stuff was still in place. One wonders how much longer players have to do that.

All of the work and frustration melted away when I was presented, during the transfer, with this:

Little robot guys actually moving the files, to load them on a spaceship/SD card for their journey to the Wii U. Once the card is loaded and inserted into the Wii U, the robots unload them with similar animation.

Somebody took a lot of time at Nintendo to make all this. No doubt that it was a selling point for some Wii users when the Wii U was released in 2012. In spite of the Wii U's failure in the marketplace, I'm glad they have left the infrastructure in place in 2020 so us late adapters can still make the move. Playing the few Wii Virtual Console games was my main selling point, but having the Wii U installed in my upstairs setup allows me, when I feel the need, to revisit the our Wii game library or try a Wii U hidden gem at some point.

As always, the more the merrier when maintaining a vast videogame backlog.

2020 Game of the Year Award

 I know, I know....I still have not caught up on all the games of the years for the 2010s. I hope to revisit those years at some point by creating a page to immortalize all my games of the years, which this year will reach a milestone of continuous games of the years for forty friggin' years. Surely, my own game of the year award is the only continuous running such award in the entire industry, which sort of makes it the most prestigious in my mind.

My game of the year is simply awarded to the best game I played that year. In some cases, the game that has won was released years earlier but just that year had come to my attention. I'll leave it up to the gaming media to show us the real breakthrough games each year, with the shiniest graphics and most brilliant gameplay innovations, as I am not the one who can play the latest and greatest titles that are released each year, for the most part.

This year I finally picked up my wife's Nintendo Switch to see what games, other than Mario Kart, were worth playing. I found a few very original titles, as well as my only release day purchase of the year, Deadly Premonition 2. Other than that, I jumped around the decades of gaming and caught up with a few great titles from the past.

Here are this year's winner, and runners-up:

Game of the Year: Golf Story (Switch)

I've never picked a sports game to be a game of the year, unless one counts racing games of course, but Golf Story, an amazing hybrid of sports and RPG, was a masterpiece that easily wins it. Golf video games, with their own unique game mechanics,  have always been fun for me, but not a fun that hooks me for extended play sessions, until now.

It's a top-down role playing game, where the battles are not just golf matches, but small challenges along the way. Instead of upgrading armor and weapons, one upgrades golf clubs and related equipment and skills. The usual game mechanism for golf videogames is present in the form of a shot bar that the player uses with an eye on the wind to make a shot. 

They definitely got the golf right, as matches are perfectly balanced and quite challenging at times. Themes and courses vary as the story progresses, too. They also got the story right, as the player works their way up through the ranks in hopes of making it into the final championship tournament. Golf Story is fun, innovative, and perfectly balanced to provide an engaging and enjoyable gaming experience for the ages.

Runner-Up: Untitled Goose Game (Switch)

After enjoying Goat Simulator a few years ago, I felt the rampaging animals screwing with people genre was going to be a thing, but it took a few years to get Untitled Goose Game, an action-puzzle game where, duh, the player takes on the role of an annoying ass goose and terrorizes an unsuspecting small community with honking and stealing and other goose antics.

Doing exactly what I would do were I reincarnated as a goose, goose travels around and steals items, scares people, and gets shooed away. The goals are presented in a small checklist for each area, and finishing each section opens up the next one.  The one drawback is that the game is just too short, but for what one gets, it's worth it. The graphic style and sound are perfectly crisp and bright but not cartoonish. 

Why is it that every modern triple A game experience wears out its welcome with endless side quests and dots on a map that overwhelm any player hoping to get back to their lives at some point, but a gem like this is over in a few hours? I don't want another Assassin's Creed 200 hour campaign, I just want a sequel to Untitled Goose Game that lets the goose loose on Las Vegas or something. 

Beaten in 2020

 As the world and all of civilization continued their downward plunge toward their inevitable collapse, I had a great year playing videogames in between heartbreaking news reports and my own truckload of personal tragedy. Videogames are an escape and few years have been as escape-worthy as 2020.

In addition, the epiphany I had in March to pull away a little from shiny new releases and finally get around to playing classics that had passed me by in the last four decades really paid off, as a slew of mini retro consoles and resources like the Internet Archive and Myabandonware came to my full attention and appreciation.

Time is ticking, and this middle aged gamer could use up his last life any day in the next 40 years, so it was definitely time to approach the hobby this way. Case in point, here are all the games I beat in 2020: 

Full Games:

Assassin's Creed Origins (XBox One)

Untitled Goose Game (Switch)

The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening (Switch)

Golf Story (Switch)

Beyond Oasis (Genesis)

Gears of War: Judgment (XBox 360)

A Boy and His Blob: The Rescue of Princess Blobette (Game Boy)

Ys Book 1: Ancient Ys Vanished (Turbografx 16 CD via Turbografx 16 Mini)

Ys Book 2: Ancient Ys Vanished The Final Chapter (Turbografx 16 CD via Turbografx 16 Mini)

Job Simulator (PSVR)

Assassin's Creed Odyssey (Xbox One)

Marathon: Durandal (Xbox 360)

Tass Times in Tonetown (Apple IIGS via Windows 10 via Internet Archive)

DLC

Dying Light: The Following (PS4)

As 2021 begins I am reminded that, even though I first played Pong in 1975 or so, it was 40 years ago this year that it all clicked and I was hooked for life on this silly ass passtime. In the fall of 1981, when our local bowling alley added Galaxian, Asteroids, and Space War, that's when it really began for me. 

So, here's to a better year for the world, and meanwhile, there will always be great games to escape into when it is not.

Beaten: Tass Times in Tonetown (Apple IIGS via Windows 10 / Internet Archive)

 I first heard of TassTimes in Tonetown when I received my first issue of Questbusters, an absolutely essential 1980s newsletter with reviews and walkthroughs of adventure games. That's how we rolled before the internet. I did not pick up the game for my Commodore 64 until the early 1990s, during my sweeps of bargain bins, and while I played a few sessions, I did not get very far.

Nonetheless, it has been on my radar ever since, and a Google search revealed that the game was free to play on the Internet Archive, a vast, free repository of all things, ever. The sheer amount of software that is there not to just play directly but to download is staggering. Having its existence revealed to me was a watershed moment in my thinking in that, to play games across all platforms throughout the history of gaming, I no longer needed to necessarily acquire ancient hardware to do so.

This time, I played Tass Times in Tonetown using the Apple IIGS version, which featured one of the earliest mouse-based interfaces in my memory. As a standard text adventure with graphics, players can as usual just type commands like GO WEST or USE KEY, but the screen to the right of the area display contains a few common commands that one can use a mouse to click on and select. The icons for those are garishly large but forgivable as that was an emerging interface style at the time.

This being a classic text adventure, it required an extensive map to be made as the game was explored, and I went to town. The very act of exploring a map like this is enough to reveal all the aspects of the map and items in play, which brought me to approximately 80% completion by my own reckoning. From there, it was a matter of learning more about how the items I found work toward a solution.

Immediately upon entering the world of Tonetown, the player is at risk of death by not being "tass" enough. After doing what is needed to avoid that death, I thought there would be more aspects of the game that would task me with proving my tass-ness, but they never emerged. Part of the problem with playing old games is that sometimes, the modern expectations of gameplay creep in and one anticipates gameplay elements that had not been really developed yet.

Nonetheless, the world is fun to explore and the characters and situations are quirky and unique. The puzzles are not that hard, and as I mentioned, simply exploring the map will put most of the pieces in place. A lot of trial and error is required, but luckily for an older game, the player can save anywhere and there are plenty of save slots to encourage exploration.

In the 1980s, as the text only adventure evolved into first the same thing with a picture, then to more user friendly interfaces later in the decade, the themes of these games became more eclectic and varied, cumulating in such masterpieces as Lucasgames' Maniac Mansion. Tass Times in Tonetown is a fun little trip into just how wacky and offbeat these games could get. I'm glad I took the time in 2020 to finally swing back and finish the game, as well as map it out as I explored.

As for my map, I hope to take the time at some point to add it to this blog as a part of a map section, that will contain not just the new maps I make as I go, but scans of classic ones I drew back in the day. So, watch out for that. And be sure to visit and contribute if you can to the glorious effort that is the Internet Archive.