When we think of islands, our minds are aflutter with images of sandy beaches, fruity cocktail and waiters with accents who inexplicably wear white tuxes. And yet, not all islands are such wonders of nature. Some are wonders of human ingenuity, and others are blunders of the highest degree — not even fit for a swallow to rest its weary wing upon. So do yourself a favor and check this list of amazing and abysmal manmade islands before Apple copyrights the word ‘island’ for its new slander-detecting software.
 

Spiral Island

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Spiral Island was an artificial, floating islet built in a lagoon near Puerto Aventura, south of Cancún, Mexico. It was built by British eco-pioneer Richart “Rishi” Sowa, using discarded plastic bottles as flotation, supporting a plywood and bamboo base, upon which sand was poured. Rishi also planted many plants on the island, including mangroves, which were to grow up to 23 feet (7 meters) over the course of the island’s seven-year existence. It would have stuck around much longer, but Rishi’s prize creation and testament to self-sustainability was Falcon punched into oblivion by Hurricane Emily in 2005. Before its destruction, the island boasted a two-story house, a solar over, a self-composting toilet, and three separate beaches. It boasted all these things after its destruction, too — just in much smaller pieces.   

Even though it appeared as though Mother Nature had just guffawed at poor Rishi’s attempts at sustainable living, he drew inspiration from his island companions, the hermit crabs, and decided to move on to something even better. Thus, Spiral Island II was born, a tropical utopia featuring beaches, a house, 2 ponds, a solar-powered waterfall/river, and solar panels. The island is not yet as big as the original Spiral Island, but Rishi has affirmed that it is a work in process, so many have high hope. Rest assured that next time a hurricane rears its punk head, Rishi will be ready to blow it out of the sky with a bamboo granola cannon.  
 
 

The Island Homes of the Uros People

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The Uros people of Peru and Bolivia have found a novel way to deal with annoying neighbors who complain when they play their pan flute too loudly at 3 a.m.: just push their house away with a bargepole while they’re sleeping and watch the hapless morons float away. That’s right – the Uros people live on a cluster of 42 manmade, floating islands on lake Titicaca. Not only is this extremely cool because of the amount of innovation that goes into building a seafaring mobile home, but Titicaca is easily one of the most enjoyable words in the world to say (try it), and they get to say it on a daily basis. 

The Uros’ dwellings are made of a combination of dried totora leaves and sheer willpower, though the Uros are not against incorporating modern technology into the design of their homes. Some of the islands have motors attached, some have solar TVs, and the main island even has its own radio station! The amount of technology the Uros are able to cram on such a seemingly primitive reed-island is simply mind-boggling. Think of it this way: in a normal home, if you have a problem with your plumbing you have to suck it up and crap at your neighbor’s house for a few days. In Uros-land, your house freakin’ sinks. 
 
 

Donauinselt

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Donauinsel, meaning ‘Danube Island’ in German, is a small manmade island in the (you guessed it) Danube river, specifically the section of the waterway that runs through Vienna, Austria. The Island was created between 1972 and 1988 as a measure of flood protection. The island provides a barrier, creating as new water basin that can act as a reservoir if the Danube is ever to become flooded. Because of that role, the island has an unusual shape, being a strip 13.1 miles (21.1 km) in length with a varied width of 230-690 feet (70–210 metres).
 
However, despite the purely protective nature of its genesis, Donauinsel is primarily known today as a popular relaxation spot for the Viennese and tourists alike. It is one of the few easily-accessible and substantial green patches in Vienna, and is home to a pleasing variety of restaurants, nightclubs, and bars. It is famous for hosting the Donauinselfest, the largest annual open-air festival in Europe. The website for the festival proudly claims that the event has been graced by over three million visitors and there has yet to be a ‘major incident.’ Hmmm, sounds almost like an invitation. 

Our Lady of the Rocks

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Our Lady of the Rocks is an islet in the Bay of Kotor in Montenegro, which sounds like a good hideout for a super villain of some sort. The amazing thing about this manmade island is that it had been constructed over centuries. According to popular legend, its genesis came when a group of sailors found an icon of the Madonna and Child emblazoned on a rock in the sea. From this point on, they did what any logical group of hopeful island-builders would: they began sinking old ships and vessels seized from enemies with rocks, building from the ocean floor up. If this sounds like a haphazard and infeasible way to go about constructing an island, consider that the only structure on Our Lady of the Rocks is a Roman Catholic Church for which the islet is named. Maybe they were trying to thank somebody for not letting their creation topple or sink. If you’re worried about the longevity of said church, don’t – it’s been there since 1722. 

Perhaps the most amazing thing about Our Lady of the Rocks is that its construction continues to this day. On every July second, an event called fašinada is held, during which locals take to the bay and dump a bumper crop of rocks on the borders of the island, thus increasing its dimensions. The island has been in construction since 1452, forty years before Columbus set foot in the New World. Now that’s work in progress.  
 

Palm Jumeirah

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Dubai is famous as a playground for the rich and tasteless famous, so it’s no wonder that they wouldn’t be satisfied with some little mass of soil or a drab offshore pontoon. Nope, the fellows over in the UAE (that’s the United Arab Emirates, not some obscure wrestling federation) decided to take the idea of paradise to the extreme and fashion a luxurious, sandy island into the familiar shape of a palm tree, that enduring symbol of the tropical vacation in the sun. Forget the fact that once you are on the island (or anywhere besides a space station or high-flying aircraft) you won’t have any way of telling how lovely the island’s curves are — this is a fantastic way to stick to those arrogant space tourists who think they are the only ones paying top dollar for their relaxation time.  

Palm Jumeirah cost over $14 billion to build, is the size of 800 football fields, and has its own monorail service (have they learned nothing from The Simpsons?!). It also adds 323 miles (520 km) of shoreline to Dubai, and thus 323 more reasons for us normal people to quietly roll our eyes at the ridiculously wealthy.  
 

Dream Island (Yume No Shima)

 
Here, we move from a decidedly trashy island to one made entirely from trash. The ironically named Dream Island in Tokyo Bay, Japan was started in the 1960s as a last ditch solution to Tokyo City’s garbage problem. The city was experiencing a massive glut of waste and was finding it hard to come up with a remedy for the problem. Dream Island became home to an amazing myriad of refuse, from coke cans to Daigo Fukuryū Maru, a tuna fishing boat that was accidentally exposed to radiation in the US’s first hydrogen bomb test in the Bikini Atoll.  

The citizens of Tokyo gave and gave to Dream Island, and occasionally the island saw it fit to give back. In 1965, an enormous plague of flies tormented most of Eastern Tokyo. As to its origins, you have three guesses and the first two don’t count. Today, the island is almost unrecognizable from its humble beginnings, having been given a facelift even Madonna would be jealous of. It has been covered over with soil and grass, and is home to a sports park, a greenhouse, a beautiful yacht harbor, and a sports stadium. Finally, the island is allowed to live up to the grandeur of its name. 
 

Flagler Monument Island

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Flagler Monument Island in Miami Beach, Florida is an Island that was constructed with the sole purpose of honoring the biggest badass in Floridian history: Henry M. Flagler, who was responsible for developing most of the easy coast of Florida and founding both Miami and Miami Beach. Even though this means we have him to thank for Rick Ross, Flagler is pretty damn awesome. Flagler was a partner in Standard Oil with John D. Rockefeller back in the day when being an oil tycoon meant you were a legend — not a jerk. He was responsible for the entire Florida Eat Coast Railway. He did not mess around.
 
Upon Flagler’s death in 1913, the city of Miami knew it needed to honor its hugest mac daddy properly, and plans were put in motion to build a monument island in Flagler’s honor as part of the Venetian Islands project. In 1920, Flagler Monument Island was finally finished. If you’re wondering about the city’s choice of monument to honor Flagler, it was a huge obelisk… for obvious reasons.  
 

Middelgrundsfortet

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You may think Middelgrundsfortet has been standing proudly since the 1890s, but has recently ended it illustrious military career, having been purchased by a private investor in 2002. Let’s just hope that this ‘private investor’ isn’t a criminal mastermind, or we could all be in big trouble – the only real access to the island is by ferry. 
 

The Principality of Sealand

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Oh boy, we are really stretching the definition of the word ‘island’ with this one, but it’s definitely worth a mention if for nothing else besides its sheer craziness. The Principality of Sealand is comprised of a single sea fort in the North Sea, off the coast of Suffolk, England. When it was abandoned as a fort following the second world war, it was occupied by a number of people who used the island as a platform to host pirate radio station, which are just like normal radio stations only all of the content is rated ‘arrrrr.’ The most recent and most persistent of these radio pirates was Major Paddy Roy Bates, who took residency of the island in 1967 and set up his own radio station, Radio Essex, named after the classiest county in England.  

From this point on, Roy Bates began to descend into complete insanity. He began claiming the island as a nation and designed a flag and coat of arms and began minting his own currency. When some British workmen came to fix a navigation buoy near the island in 1968, he had one of his sons fire warning shots from the fort. They tried to prosecute the lunatic, but because the island was situated outside of British jurisdiction they couldn’t do so much as give him a parking ticket. Another time, he kidnapped a German citizen who was attacking his ‘nation’ and refused his release until Germany sent a diplomat. Before sending the diplomat, the German and Austrian governments petitioned England for the citizen’s release, but they simply cited the 1968 decision, basically saying “no givesies backsies,” but you know, in official speak.  

Thilafushi

 
If you were to see Thilafushi when it was first built out of white sand in the crystal blue waters of the coast of the Maldives, you‘d probably think, ‘that looks like a nice place to relax with a mimosa and a book about boating or turtles or something.’ Not the municipality of Malé: they decided it would be a good place to dump boatload after boatload of garbage. “What about the old quarry?” “Nah, forget the quarry, this is closer. Plus, everyone loves chasms filled with exploded rock fragments.” Thilafushi was conceived and created as a garbage dump, despite the fact that it looks like the Maldivans could earn enough tourist dollar from it to build a rocket to shoot their garbage to the sun, or at least across to the southern tip of India.  

In recent years, the island has been re-designated as a place of industry, and as of the last few years, the tiny island of 106 acres (430,000 m2) has been generating an annual gross revenue of approximately $1 million from industries such as boat manufacturing, cement packing, methane gas bottling, and warehousing. As an interesting side note, wikipedia lists the island’s “Administrative Information,” which doesn’t include a phone number, but does list the island’s fax as +960 6640065. Feel free to draw them a pretty picture.  
 
 

Ellis Island

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This may be a surprise to many of you, but although Ellis Island has its foundation in a real landmass in the Hudson River between New York and New Jersey, 83% of the island was created from landfill. The famous inscription on the Statue of Liberty reads: “Give me your tired, your poor/your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” Ellis Island, for those who don’t know, is pretty much where all these huddled masses rocked up with their suitcases and high hopes. Ellis island operated as the primary point of immigration to the United States from 1892 to 1954, but it wasn’t until 1934 that the island was expanded to its current size.  

The island became a place of myth and legend for those seeking a new life in America. The first person to pass through immigration was a young Irish girl named Annie Moore, who was given a ten dollar American gold piece upon her immigration. Besides young Annie, many notable figures of the early 20th century made their way to the United States though Ellis Island, including composer Irving Berlin, actor Cary Grant, comedian and actor Bob Hope, and director Frank Capra. With all these amazing people passing through Ellis Island and the kindness shown to Annie, its no wonder immigration in the United States is still fueled by that beautiful combination of optimism and pride.  
 

Dejima

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Dejima is a Japanese island with a Dutch name. Confused? As we all well know, if there’s something the Dutch love as much as windmills, it’s sailing around in boats and trading things with people. On this same note, if there’s anything the Japanese love more than it’s being excessively nice to guests. Hence, this island in Nagasaki, which was a major point of trade between the Japanese and Dutch as far back as 1641, was named for the Dutch word ‘desjima,’ meaning ‘protruding island.’  

The elegant, fan-shaped island was originally constructed as a port of trade with the Portuguese until the Japanese realized they liked raw herring more than dried salted codfish and dissed and dismissed their former mainstay trading nation. When it was first built, the island had the ulterior purpose of constraining foreign traders as part of the policy of ‘sakoku,’ which may sound cute but literally meant that anyone attempting to enter or leave Dejima was subject to punishment by death. Write that one in your Hello Kitty scrapbook. 

South Channel Fort

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South Channel Fort is a tiny manmade island of the coast of Port Phillip Bay in Victoria, Australia. The island only measures a tiny 400 feet by 249 feet (122 m by 76 m), but what it lacks in size it more than makes up for in durability: the island is constructed entirely of tough bluestone boulders, concrete and sand. That’s basically big rocks, solid cement, and little rocks. It’s a good thing the fort was so solid, because it acted as a key player in the oceanic protection of both Melbourne and Geelong, two of Australia’s most populous cities. Construction began on the island in the 1880s.  

According to the fort’s official website, South Channel was put in place to “illuminate the channel at night and electronically explode mines under attacking ships coming through the Heads.” Now that is pretty impressive. You can just imagine the soldier sitting there playing battleships for their superior position. Just in case the mine guys were asleep, the island was also equipped with disappearing guns, which sounds pretty frustrating if not downright intimidating. These guns would be used to shoot at ships, then would curl around and disappear into the ground, be reloaded, and repeat the process – not a very attractive prospect for intruders.  
 
 
 

The Republic of Minerva

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Here we are, once again knock-knock-knocking on insanity’s door with another wacky claimant nation reminiscent of our dear friends at Sealand. The major difference here is that while Major Roy Bates only had around $600,000 to his name, Michael Oliver, the chief proponent of the scheme to fashion Minerva as a nation, claimed to have over $100,000,000 from investors through his Ocean Life Research Foundation. Minerva founded on the Minerva Reef, south of Fiji, on top of two submerged atolls of the same name. Oliver had sand brought in from Australia to build the atolls into island of a livable size.  

Minerva was envisaged as an attempt to create a truly libertarian (the mention of this word should stir the pot, but just for good measure – Ron Paul) society with “no taxation, welfare, subsidies, or any form of economic interventionism.” This may have some ring of nobility but it’s more or less just a euphemism for ‘tax haven for the already wealthy.’ The plans to build Minerva into the ‘utopia’ Oliver envisaged eventually fell through. Minerva was the goddess of wisdom, but it looks like she took temporary leave when Oliver came up with this harebrained scheme.   
 

The World

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Dubai, the opulent ones that they are, couldn’t bear to only make one appearance on this list. They called us on the phone and straight out demanded that we include another of their mega-islands on our list. We said no. They offered solid gold motorbikes. We said yes. ‘The World’ is a series of tiny islands that loosely resemble the continents of the world. As soon at these little islets were put on sale in 2007 they were snapped up by companies, patriots and idiots alike who were happy to pay as much as $5.5 billion for their country of choice.  

When the global financial crisis hit the world, it hit The World just as badly, and a number of deals fell through. The man who bought Ireland, John O’Dolan, committed suicide in 2009 and many of the other investors face the bleak prospect of either a zero return on their investment, or worse still, net losses. Construction on the project has completely halted and many are claiming the islands are merging together and even sinking back into the ocean. Frank Sinatra once sung that he had the world on a string, which is a whole lot better than Dubai’s World on the sea, nothing more than a mucky, sandy glop of God-knows-what in the middle of crisis.

As video game technology advances, the worlds created to be the playgrounds of sadistic manchildren become ever more complex and disturbingly realistic.  Sometimes these game maps recreate vast sprawling cities populated with hordes of people and stunning architecture.  Then sometimes they recreate vast, sprawling, unremarkable and formless blobs of landscape — the likes of which you haven’t seen since visiting your parents in the suburbs.

Assassin’s Creed

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Game Map Quality: Deep as a stiletto neck wound

Released in November of 2007, Assassin’s Creed was a third-person action-adventure that generated a lot of hype prior to its release.  Set in Crusades-era Jerusalem, Assassin’s Creed promised an epic, sweeping Gothic storyline with loads of good old fashioned Medieval violence and several flagons full of crusader blood.

Assassin’s Creed turned out to be a repetitive grind fest with a meandering plot that involved time-traveling assassins, super powers, and seemingly no idea what it was doing.  But much like pizza — sex and games set in a beautiful, rich, interactive game map — even when it’s bad, it’s still pretty good.

The ancient cities of Assassin’s Creed were unparalleled in their depth and complexity.  Every building could be scaled, every window was a handhold and every roof was a potential escape route.  Even though the “action” often consisted of waiting to press a single button, the tense chases through the winding streets and sprawling rooftops of Jerusalem stood head and shoulders above anything gamers had seen up to that point.  Despite the fact that the gameplay suffered from a terminal case of boring and the story had a bad habit of shitting itself inside out, Assassin’s Creed managed to distinguish itself with some kick-ass cartography.

EVE Online

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Game Map Quality: Sprawling like yo’ momma’s gut

A tremendously complex MMORPG popular with people who have way too much time and love of spreadsheets, EVE is set in a massive universe where players compete for territory and resources.  Notable for its epic battles that result from giant guilds all inhabiting the same server, EVE is also notable for being really ridiculously huge.

Of course, any game set on a galactic scale is going to be huge.  Eve kind of took this idea a little too far by making its game map actually the size of a motherfucking galaxy.  With a series of warp gates, near-light-speed travel, and a sophisticated autopilot, even a mundane stop to pick up some milk at the galactic grocer’s can take a few hours.  Longer jaunts to the far corners of the known galaxy can take days.  And we’re not talking video-game “play the song of the sun and skip a few hours” days — these are real-world time scales.  You heard that right: in a game that charges by the month, most of it will be spent going from point A to point B.

Starcraft

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Game Map Quality: The grandaddy of good design

For those of you who are reading this on your great nephew’s computer and haven’t used the internet since 1998, Starcraft is kind of a big deal.  Even though it’s more than 12 years old, uses outdated graphics, and looks a little like a Second grader’s 2D diorama (in SPACE), Starcraft is still good enough to merit world championships and suicidal devotion.

However, this monolith of a game didn’t get to the top through space marines and Aliens references alone.  It succeeded through well-paced storytelling, balanced gameplay and some of the greatest game maps ever engineered.  At a time where the placements of cliffs, rocks and trees were often simply charitable suggestions as far as the technology was concerned, Starcraft stood out as being absolutely flawless in its map design.  While it’s easy to make a perfectly symmetrical map and call it multiplayer, Starcraft developers decided that was beer-league BS and instead crafted asymmetrical maps that nonetheless were exceptionally balanced — so much so that tens of thousands of dollars regularly ride on what amounts to chopping up a chess board, putting it back together in the shape of a water stain, and trusting that no player has an unfair advantage.

Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall

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Game Map Quality: Finger painting on an endless canvas

Way back in 1996 when the internet consisted only of ASCII porn and goatse, Bethesda Softworks unveiled the latest installment of their popular Elder Scrolls series.  While the village elders claim that this ancient game was “kinda okay I guess”, modern man still stands mystified by its purpose.  This is mostly due to the fact that Daggerfall is the largest game map ever constructed.

Using a methodology so nerdy it will melt your pocket protectors, Daggerfall has been estimated to span an estimated 62,394 square miles.  That means, based on in-game objects of measurable size (such as an average human’s height), the game map measures about 250 miles on each side.  To put that in perspective, that means the game map of Daggerfall is larger than Tokyo, Seoul, Mexico City, New York City, Mumbai, Shanghai, Moscow, Beijing and London combined…  and with plenty of room to spare.  Why would a game possibly need all this space?  It doesn’t.  The vast majority of the terrain in Daggerfall was randomly generated filler.  The game is now available free for download from the Bethesda website so if your computer has a whopping 200 MEGABYTES of space to spare for an equation that will generate a flat, formless plain that will take you about 22 days to traverse (in real-world time), feel free.

Grand Theft Auto III

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Game Map Quality: Short and sweet

This revamping of the storied Grand Theft Auto series was the first to bring the franchise to 3D.  It wasn’t the first to inspire reams of outrage. To be fair, the game does allow you to pick up a hooker, bang her for extra health, then brutally murder her to get back the money you just paid for sex.  Despite (and perhaps because of) the outrage, gamers loved GTA III thanks to its solid gameplay and immersive city environments.

Remember how Daggerfall’s game map was tens of thousands of square miles in area?  GTA III somehow managed to come out 5 years later and get away with a paltry 3.  How is this travesty allowed to stand?

GTA created a dense city populated with about as realistic a citizenry as was possible at the time, then stuck the player in the middle of it.  Though most of us took this opportunity to create massive pile ups and have cop-killing contests, the fact remains that GTA succeeded by creating an environment that felt real instead of just one that felt large.

Super Metroid

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Game Map Quality: More labyrinthine than David Bowie

Let’s get this out of the way first: Super Metroid is an excellent game that far exceeds just about any other action adventure in the 16-bit generation.  It had solid gameplay and an unsettling atmosphere even in that pixelated time.  It was layered and complex, with enough tricks and turns to keep even experienced gamers on their toes.

The thing is, there’s a fine line between “challenging” and “just being hard for the sake of it”.  Super Metroid’s game map was full of back passages, subtle tricks, and tiny, insignificant details that the player needed to pick up on in order to beat the game.  When a game requires hours of aimless wandering and experimentation to find that one, completely invisible, hole in the floor that takes you to the next level, it ceases to be fun and just becomes sadistic.

World of Warcraft

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Game Map Quality: Winning in a tournament of losers

To most sane people, the world of MMORPGs is a scary time-suck that leaves us mystified as to why someone would turn gaming into a second job.  Among this shadowy alternate world, World of Warcarft is known as the “least worst”.

With a massive game world that is home (and I do mean home) to millions of players worldwide, it’s a wonder that WoW still manages to churn out quality content without turning its game map into a mess of disjointed side quests.  In addition, it has managed to toe that fine line between being big enough to inspire a sense that the player is actually part of a large, vibrant game world and still not taking hours to traverse.

Pokemon

Game Map Quality: I choose you, Monotony!

Admit it, you played this game.  It’s okay, we all liked stupid things when we were younger.  For the fortunate few out there who didn’t have to experience the raging obsession that was catching and trading Pokemon, this game consisted of random encounters designed to allow the player to “catch” and “train” ever more powerful little battle pets.  The goal was to eventually become the greatest master of forcing innocent animals to fight to the near-death for you.

The important thing to understand is that Pokemon were rarely encountered as opponents in the game in the traditional sense.  The vast majority were encountered randomly as a result of walking around in circles.  While this isn’t a terrible model for a game (hell, it’s the bread and butter of Final Fantasy), Pokemon made the mistake of giving players a game map full of an abundance of big, empty space to wander about randomly.  It’s one thing to have an open map full of random encounters, it’s another thing to have a game map so lifeless and unremarkable that it essentially turns your game into little more than a random number generator.

Mass Effect

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Game Map Quality: A galaxy without sprawl

Widely hailed as one of the best RPGs of all time, Mass Effect set a new standard of depth and storytelling for Sci-Fi.  Operatic in scope, Mass Effect tells the story of an evil race of ancient machines bent on eradicating all life in the galaxy, and the brave band of brothers that stands against them.

One of the greatest flaws of such wide-reaching stories is the inability to make the plight of the galaxy — which presumably includes trillions of life forms — seem at all personal and comprehensible.  Though Mass Effect has some truly stand-out writing (especially for a video game), its game map lends a huge helping hand in two respects.  First, every mission is accessed through the galaxy map, a gigantic interface that constantly reminds the player that every action is couched in a wider context.  Second, the maps levels are typically wide, open, and organic.  When driving around on the planets surface, players are consistently reminded that every conflict takes place in a region, on a planet, in a star cluster, just a few parsecs over from Earth.

Ocarina of Time: Water Temple

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Game Map Quality: Just plain sadistic

It’s a well-established fact that, despite all the anime weirdness of Twilight Princess, Ocarina of Time is the best Zelda game ever made.  And that was 12 years ago.  Generally speaking, Ocarina of Time has a very well-constructed game map that scales up very well over the course of the story, but certain parts of this game are just plain ridiculous.

Many of you might remember the Water Temple, better known as the point in the game that you gave up.  With multiple overlapping puzzles that have no discernible connection to one another, this temple seems designed specifically to engender a sense of overwhelming hopelessness.  While normally the concept of multi-layered puzzles that amaze and challenge is exciting, when it just becomes an exercise in ”controller-snapping frustration” it’s time to rethink your map design.  Maybe another Forest Temple — that one was fun.

Doom

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Game Map Quality: The great-grandaddy of maps

Doom is well known as the game that gave birth to the most pervasive format in gaming nowadays: the first-person shooter.  Doom was so influential, for most of the 90s these games were just called “Doom Clones” — in the same way that a lot of open-world sandbox games nowadays are called “GTA Clones”.

But in our world of linear hallway shooters that have a little fit whenever you try to step outside the established path, many forget that Doom was a pretty open game that had players constantly opening the in-game map to orient themselves.  The funny thing is, even with our fully 3D-rendered worlds that don’t require floating sprites to animate enemies, Doom is still fantastically fun to play.  While this has something to do with Doom’s smooth gameplay and the immortal BFG, a big part of it has to do with the games rich game maps.  With their numerous twists, turns and hidden rooms, it’s enough to keep a jaded gamer interested even 17 years later.

Final Fantasy VIII

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Game Map Quality: Glitches and general confusion

While it often gets unfairly panned as the more tedious, red-headed step child to Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy VIII is a generally solid addition to the series.  With a focus on cinematic moments that was well ahead of its time, Final Fantasy VIII, while not the best of the FF series, definitely has its moments.  Unfortunately, these good moments come into direct conflict the terrible game map.

At a certain point about halfway through the game, the player is given control of (surprise!) an airship capable of traveling nearly everywhere on the map.  Unfortunately, the wider game map was apparently cobbled together from broken code and a few pieces of an old shoe.  The player’s avatar is a huge, bumbling animation prone to getting stuck in the scenery far from the all-important airship–not to mention that several interesting secret areas lie on tiny slivers of land that you have to float around for a few hours trying to find that one sweet spot where the game will let you disembark.  To the game’s credit, they seemed to realize how ridiculous this whole system was, so they shoehorn in a bigger, badder airship later in the game.

Civilization

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Game Map Quality: Okay this one’s a tossup

Civilization is one of those old workhorses of PC gaming that absolutely refuses to submit to modern conventions of “not having turn-based play” and “not having shitty code that grinds the game to a halt”.  As recently as Civilization III, it was possible to conduct a game “online” by having each player send their respective moves by e-mail.
To it’s credit, Civilization is perhaps one of the most addicting games ever programmed, and this has a lot to do with its game map.  Deceptively simple, the map in recent iterations of Civilization has dozens of tiny, innocuous variables at play.  Think your chariot unit can defeat that cadre of samurai?  Tough luck, because you attacked them across a river into a forest while Jupiter was aligning with Neptune which lent them a +4 bonus as a defending unit.

Whether or not this is a fun game mechanic depends on your general outlook toward games.  To some, this is unnecessarily complex and casts aside skill for arcane knowledge of the tome-like game manual.  To others, this is exactly the sort of complex and realistic interaction they’ve always craved from a game map.  Whether you like this or not depends on your pre-established level of wonky nerdiness.

Superman 64

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Game Map Quality: BAHAHAHAHAHAHA

Who doesn’t want to be Superman?  Zipping through the buildings of Metropolis, picking up cars, hurling them at baddies, giving hope to the regular citizen.  It sounds so romantic and heroic.  Unfortunately, that isn’t anything close to what Superman 64 was.  That is unless Superman lives in on a Tron-like planet of completely formless ground interspaced with generic buildings like he’s living in the world of Starfox 64.

Widely reviled as the worst game on the Nintendo 64, Superman 64 not only had some of the worst gameplay this side of ET for the Atari, it all took place in a completely unremarkable game map that evoked memories of exactly zero cities on this planet.  It turned Superman into a clunky superhero completely incapable of aiming his freeze-breath, living in a world without a single outside character that he is supposed to give a damn about.  That sounds like a recipe for a superhero who just randomly chucks heavy objects into buildings, which is exactly what everyone started doing after owning this game for more than 5 minutes.

Fallout 3

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Game Map Quality: Transcendent

Set in a post-apocalyptic Washington DC, there are plenty of reasons to love Fallout 3 aside from the presumed incineration of most of Congress.  Its innovative VATS system was a way to combine an RPG progression with a first-person shooter.  Its open world system encouraged exploration and ambiguous morality.  But more than anything else, Fallout 3 was a game that was defined by its game map.

To anyone who has ever lived in DC, playing Fallout 3 is a somewhat jarring, depressing endeavor.  The game recreates the capitol landscape with an eerie accuracy, to the point where you can walk out of a subway station in the game and point out more than a few buildings that you pass on your way to work in the morning.  Toward the beginning of the game there is a point at which your character is expelled from the safety of the giant bomb shelter that he or she grew up in.  There’s a moment where your eyes adjust to the bright, barren wasteland and most players utter a barely audible “shit just got real”.

Not only does the game map scale up wonderfully throughout the game thanks to the fast travel system that allows you to quickly jet between known locations but forces foot travel to new areas, but the whole capitol wasteland is just straight depressing.  The entire length of the game, you are confronted with images of an optimistic, progressive 50’s-era culture contrasted with a starving, brutal, destitute culture of barbarians and mutants.  And the entire time, the player is forced to look at a bleak horizon of charred, barren rock, with little to no hope of safety or solace.  This is a game that realized that the game map is a character all its own, and it used it to create a pervasive ambiance of hostility and desperation.  So, not all that far from modern Washington DC.

The database includes the following fields intermixed in all kinds of ways so that you don’t have to worry about manipulating the data. It has zip codes, cities, states, counties, latitude, longitude, state abbreviations and more.

The data is even in proper case, so you don’t have to worry about that either. Check out the video to get it free.

The file is in excel format and has many sheets that each break down different data in different ways:

• All Cities In USA
• All Counties In USA
• All Zip Codes In USA
• Latitude and Longitude of Cities/Zip Codes
• States and State Abbreviations

So if you’d like to get your hands on it free, email info |at-sign| zipcodeguy.com use the form below to get instructions on linking to our site.

Prior to sending you the database we ask that you write up a quick blog post about the zip code maps that we sell on our site along with a link. Email us the location of the link and we’ll email you the link to the database… Bada Bing… Bodda Boom!

The database is over 27 MB, so we cannot email it to you, we will email you the link.

You can also buy it for about 25 bucks below.

Enter your information in the form below and we’ll send you the details.

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