1,000th post!
Now for my own map, cant wait for the reactions after Ive crucified everyone elses, lol:
Map Name: Carved Cavern
Map Game: FireRed
Comments: The idea behind this cave was that it was carved out by an ancient river that ran through the cave, before changing course many years ago. Hence the many different ways that players could take, the dead ends and sand remaining on the ground:
Review: Mm, you don't see maps like this much anymore. This reminds me of my early days of mapping. Alrighty, I'll get right to the rating.
The first error that I spotted (very quickly, mind you) was the glaring issue of playability. For a good deal of the map, the player is confined to one, maybe two tiles of walkable space. While this makes for very beautiful maps, it can be a pain in the ass when it comes time to play through the map in-game. Caves, much like water routes, actually benefit from an excess of empty space. While you don't want to leave large areas of un-featured dirt everywhere, open spaces make a map considerably more annoying (which, in my opinion, is one of the major goals in making a cave map). With outdoor routes, the player always has a good idea of where they're supposed to go because the trees shape out the possible paths. But on water routes and in caves, there are often areas with no scenery and every direction is a possibility. Though your use of dead ends and a maze-like layout certainly makes things annoying, it couldn't hurt to space things out a bit more.
Another thing that I noticed was that your dead ends aren't nearly long enough. Unfortunately, because of the nature of the GBA, the player will be informed that some of your paths are dead ends before they actually enter them. This is a problem because the whole idea behind dead ends is to frustrate the player by making them take unnecessary steps and possibly encounter an extra wild pokémon that they otherwise would have avoided. If this map is dark (Flash-usable) then this might not be such a problem but you didn't mention that in the Comments so I'm assuming that it isn't, in which case this should probably be fixed.
Other than that, there isn't a whole lot else that I can complain about. It's been a while since I've seen a mapmaker spend so much time focusing on the little details and I have to say it's a refreshing change that I could certainly get used to. Though if we're talking about details, a little trick that I like to use, and that I didn't see you use, is to have sand "dribble" over a layer or two (or three) of mountains. If you can, I think it'd be a nice touch to see some sand on those non-walkable levels.
Suggestions: Add some sand to the higher levels, add some padding to those walkways, make the dead ends a little longer. Yeah, that's all I can really think of. Keep up the excellent work!
––––––––––––––––
Map Name: N/A
Map Game: Pokémon Emerald Version
Comments: This one's different. I wanted to do something special for my 1,000th post but the only thing that I could think of (that didn't require a lot of planning) was to post a map. I noticed that I hadn't made a new map in almost a year so I wanted to see if I still had it in me. I didn't want to make just any old map, though. So I challenged myself to create a fully Nintendo-styled map. I've always liked my style of mapping because I feel like it's a nice balance between natural- and Nintendo-styled mapping but until this map, I had yet to give full-on Nintendo-styled mapping a concentrated effort. So basically, the idea behind this map was to to try to get as close to a real, Nintendo (or Game Freak, if you prefer) map as possible. In the process, I learned that Nintendo maps aren't defined by "squareness" or empty space. There's so much more to them and that's the essence that I tried to capture with this map.
If you're going to rate it, please only rate it on how accurately I emulated the Nintendo style. I only want criticism on how well I did in that regard.
Mapshot: