I'm a longtime SC/BW fan that is making a return to the game after having taken years off. I spent countless hours during my teenage years playing UMS maps for Brood War, and now that the scene seems to be dying down considerably I think it's important that we try to preserve the amazing legacy of the Starcraft 1 UMS community. One thing that threatens this legacy is how hard it can sometimes be to find particular maps that are either scattered all over the 'net or not hosted anywhere in particular online. Some people have taken it upon themselves to attempt to amass a definitive collection of sorts of UMS maps, eliminating duplicates and organizing everything into genres and subgenres. So I figured why not make a thread that can house links to these map packs so that people can make strides toward filling out their collection.
I'll start us off with a few:
Scmaps.net's Archive (18000+ UMS maps) - This is a pretty damned good start for a UMS map collector. It's definitely not a complete collection, as I've noticed several maps that I personally have but aren't present here, but it's certainly a huge slice of UMS map history. They offer both direct download and torrent links at the site that I link here.
ScOULaris' Personal Collection (1000+ maps) - This is a ZIP file containing all of my maps that I've naturally amassed from playing SC on and off for years. While I'm sure there is quite a bit of overlap with most of the bigger map packs out there, I know for a fact that I also have dozens of rare maps in there (especially RPGs) that aren't easily found elsewhere. For example, I have pretty much every iteration of the once-popular Kyprion Pact RPG (by Vinzalf). I remember playing sessions with Vinzalf himself every time he'd release a new update into the wild, and it's fun to revisit each version and notice some of the rather radical changes between each one. Unfortunately I haven't taken the time to do any cleaning up or organizing, so this is just a raw list of maps.
The Mega UMS Map Collection (35000+ maps) - This is hands-down the most comprehensive, well-organized UMS map pack I have come across anywhere online. It has pretty much everything you can think of, and it does a great job categorizing a lot of the quality maps in there as well. The only problem is that this is only available as a torrent download, and as of right now nobody appears to be seeding it. If anyone already has this collection, please take this opportunity to seed in light of the exposure that this thread may bring.
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That's all I've got for now. Hopefully these links will be of use to some of you around here.
I just wanted to add that I think it's amazing that these forums are doing their best to keep the UMS scene alive. I just came back to SC1 recently, and I've found some absolutely stellar new maps on the Showcase forum already. Since SC2 basically killed UMS for all intents and purposes, I can only hope that we'll see some kind of resurgence for SC1 in this regard.
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