World Map for The Mad Wizard

Back in January, I played all the way through The Mad Wizard by Sly Dog Studios after hearing about it on The Assembly Line podcast. I had already ordered the cartridge by the time Kevin and Beau mentioned it was free to download; not that it made a difference since I’m always happy to support hardworking homebrewers. I did start playing on the cartridge but switched over to the emulator pretty quickly when it became apparent it would be really easy and helpful to assemble screenshots of each of the 128 rooms into a complete world map of the entire game. I ended up doing just that and thought it would be good to share it with everyone else by posting it on GameFaqs.com.

I submitted the map expecting it to be quickly accepted (I even had a post for this blog pre-prepared) only to find that it was rejected. Turns out that GameFaqs, as a matter of policy, doesn’t accept any maps which are purely collections of screenshots. They refer to this as “unannotated” and it was the reason I was rejected. Fair enough, but I’ve only now gotten around to adding some annotations to the map and resubmitting it. I’m happy to say that GameFaqs has now accepted my submission and you can find it on The Mad Wizard page on the GameFaqs website.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/nes/158356-the-mad-wizard-a-candelabra-chronicle/faqs/76030

I have to say that the initial rejection kind of sent me into a fury but not because I was mad at being rejected. Their contributor portal doesn’t have the clearest interface and the rejection message was just the single word “unannotated.” I took this to mean that the rejection itself was unannotated; which is to say that they didn’t even bother to explain why. When I eventually realized that this was the explanation my rage subsided but I didn’t really agree with their reasoning on it.

I disagreed because I felt like the map was self-apparent because you could see everything that mattered like bosses and power-ups right in the screenshots. However, now that I’ve actually added the annotations I really do see their point in how this helps make the map much more useful. Mostly this is because in order to actually annotate the map I had to play through again to figure out what all the different scrolls were so clearly things aren’t as completely self-apparent as I thought.

All that being said though, the reason I really didn’t want to annotate the map was because the world map for this game is just gorgeous and the annotations get in the way of trying to appreciate the aesthetics of it. You just don’t truly get a sense of how well-crafted the entire world is when you only take it in screen-by-screen from within the game. It’s truly a work of art that must be seen at the macro level to fully appreciate it which I hope is apparent from the scaled down version at the head of this post.

I’m grateful for the added visibility that hosting the annotated map on GameFaqs provides and I’m happy to meet their editorial standards as well. But, I do think it’s a mistake, in this case at least, to assume that the unannotated map has no value and isn’t worthy of their gallery. It is, indeed, less functional (I guess functional is really the whole point of GameFaqs though) but the cost is the loss of some of the intrinsic beauty of the whole. So, in addition to the annotated map, I’ve also posted two unannotated versions—with and without grid lines—to my Neocities page. I encourage you to take look; they are a sight to behold.

https://bacteriamage.neocities.org/games/the_mad_wizard/index.html