What's so good about tile maps?

Question

I've been testing a 2d platform game I'm working on (for a bit of a laugh), and I was about to start working of some sort of tile map system for the scrolling backgrounds, and I though 'what the hey, rather than use a tile map I could just draw the whole level as one big gif', or maybe break it down to 5/8 images or something.
Fullscreen bufferStrategy can easily handle all the unnecessary off-screen drawings and I'm not relying on image data for collisions as all collisions are done with bounding boxes (I'll eventually only be testing the onscreen bounding boxes, so there's a small saving :)
I done a test with the player checking for 2000 (way OTT) collisions per game loop, and drawing 2 huge scrolling images (one a transparent gif the other solid, and it didn't drop a frame). Also this way there are no restrictions to the detail I can put in the background and anyone will easily be able to draw there own image and load it into the editor (when its finished) and click in a few platforms/badguys and stuff very easily.
The background image size will probably end up about 233k per level. The screen rez will be 320/240 for that chunky pixel look.
Am I being lazy :)

Answer 1

John Carmack once described tile-based systems as, essentially, a really poor compression scheme.
Compression aside, there is value in tile-based systems.
You can create many, many maps (and let your users make their own) with little trouble with a map editor and a tile set. The reason Baldur's Gate, Baldur's Gate II, Icewind Dale and Icewind Dale II were so painful to make for the artists was that each map had to be hand drawn - all of it. Neverwinter Nights uses 3D tilesets, resulting in easy development, even for unskilled (in terms of art) hobbyists.