SPIRTE ART GUIDANCE [RM2K]

Another chance to post my favourite spriting tutorial!
http://www.pixeljoint.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=11299

As for my own opinion on the most gorgeous games, I have a few.
I'll be a bit original and mention one I don't think most people think of. Ecco the Dolphin. Underwater levels are always good looking, and Ecco is ALL underwater. Nice.


Metal Slug is also another obvious choice, all of them.


Flink is a little know gem for Genesis (or Mega Drive as it is also known).

Agreed. I remember there being a couple of really neat PS1-2 diving games that I played demos of. Never bought them though.
Flink may not be the most original game there is, but for it's time it was a pretty good game. Add to that that the spritework is really, really good.
The cloudlevel is a work of art, for example.(starts at 51 minutes)

author=sinnelius

author=Zachary_Braun
The Breath of Fire IV sprites may be having their colors adjusted to the surroundings, in terms of hue and brightness.

Something to think about.

That's fancy!
How do they do that?
I mean i know BOF 4 is partly 3d so light and shadow are casted to the pixels...

How do you do it in 2d tho? Via multiply layer? or similarly work it out in 3d environment...since this is 2015 and it's all 3d...

If that is what's going on, then at the very least, they could have a variable which is changed for every area, and the color value of the 2D sprite "texture" is set according to the variable. There wouldn't be any fancy environmental color assessment here, just looking up what a value should be from a database.

I've always liked the very simplistic and minimalistic kind of pixel art. I have mad amounts of respects for whoever did the pixel art in Dragon Ball Z Legendary Super Warriors. Over 20 playable characters, all unique and instantly recognisable to people familiar with the show, despite the super small screen size of the Gameboy Color and only three colours per sprite to work with. Plenty of screens taken right from the manga/anime and translated into minimalistic pixel art that stays true to the original style and still look so great.

Kinda confused by the title of this thread vs what's in it. Anyways, some games that I like the pixel art of and find unique for some reason:
(as opposed to the many, many games like Armored Warriors that look great, but have nothing else of note)

Metal Slug... but Seiromem already mentioned it.

Yoshi's Island, in addition to every sprite looking amazing, even if it's just for a one-time minor enemy in a single level, is also lovingly animated, and very unique in it's coloring and shading style that imitates being colored with crayons. It also uses some tech from the Super FX chip to more fully realize the "crayon" aesthetic, such as applying some scattering to the thick outlines of bosses and other large things, sometimes reshaping the lines in real-time, like the slime boss that you have to mush around with egg shots to expose its heart. It's almost hard to believe that it's really a SNES game!

Kirby's Dreamland 3 has a similar, but much more "pastel" style. Having looked at rips of the game's sprites up close, though, I don't think a lot of it actually counts as "pixel art".


Darkstalkers is a series that I like more for it's animation. Any given individual sprite is no better or worse than anything else Capcom was putting out at the time, but the animations are really nuts. Characters change rather wildly for different poses, and many of their attacks involve temporarily transforming their limbs and such. The zaniness of it all was actually listed as a reason why they were hesitant to implement characters from the series in Marvel vs Capcom 3. Making animations like that in 3D is very time consuming, and also eats up more memory.

Ninja Baseball Batman, Mario & Luigi Superstat Saga, and Wario Land 4 all also have some really fun sprites and animations with unique styles. NBB uses American comic-book style shading with large swaths of black, though it's somewhat inconsistent with its application; Mario & Luigi uses a very flat coloring style with a heavy emphasis on its outlines (though the pseudo-anti-aliasing on the outside doesn't work well on dark backgrounds) to try and match its very 1960's-ish UPA cartoon inspiration; and Wario Land 4 rivals some cartoons like Ren & Stimpy with its hilariously grotesque bosses and such.

author=Nessy
Princess Crown

Speaking of Saturn games that will make you sad that there's no English version...



I'm sure there's more, but really I should just stop now.
(PS: Not actually a game, but still pretty awesome.)

e:

author=sinnelius
Look how blurry those values are...they can't just anti alias everything right?

Pretty sure that's just the picture quality. That, and sprite games on 3D consoles like the PS2 or N64 tend to get blurred, especially if there's any "camera zoom" going on.