Pixel Art - Wherein we curate and sperg over our favorite 2D game assets
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Incompetent
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Blood Omen
It’s not a particularly advanced looking 2D game, especially when compared to say the original Rayman Megaman 8, but it has a great, gloomy sense of style that really only exists these days in games like Bloodborne and Vampyr
It’s not a particularly advanced looking 2D game, especially when compared to say the original Rayman Megaman 8, but it has a great, gloomy sense of style that really only exists these days in games like Bloodborne and Vampyr
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- Sep 7, 2016
I've always had a soft spot for Popeye, the arcade version. It was developed and released by Nintendo shortly after Donkey Kong and it looks so much better, just look at the detail on those sprites, it also had really great and fluid animation, a video is linked below.
Link to a video, check out that animation!
youtu.be
The demoscene was in a tough spot for a while, doing a lot with little was what made it cool but CPU and GPU power shot up to such a level that there no longer was any constraints for a small group. A high end graphics card can draw 100 billion pixels per second and brutal amounts of polygons, how could they even take advantage of that and create high quality demos without having AAA levels of manpower? Things looked bleak for a while.
But it got better, over the last couple of years they started pouring those resources into creating an image quality that games could not match, the went for creating better pixels in a way.
Like this screenshot, it's realtime 3d but looks like print(the screen effect is moving so it looks a bit wonky in a screenshot).
(click for big)
Link to the demo itself:
www.youtube.com
A couple of Razor1911 demos goes for the screen effect as well and IMO they have created the only CRT filter that isn't ass.
www.youtube.com
Don't expect to see much of it in a youtube video though, it gets crushed in the compression, download it and run it from here instead, it's only 64kb.
Link to a video, check out that animation!
Arcade Game: Popeye (1982 Nintendo)
A platform/run and jump game featuring characters from the famous King Features Syndicate cartoon show of the same name. The aim of the game is to rescue Pop...
youtu.be
The demoscene was in a tough spot for a while, doing a lot with little was what made it cool but CPU and GPU power shot up to such a level that there no longer was any constraints for a small group. A high end graphics card can draw 100 billion pixels per second and brutal amounts of polygons, how could they even take advantage of that and create high quality demos without having AAA levels of manpower? Things looked bleak for a while.
But it got better, over the last couple of years they started pouring those resources into creating an image quality that games could not match, the went for creating better pixels in a way.
Like this screenshot, it's realtime 3d but looks like print(the screen effect is moving so it looks a bit wonky in a screenshot).
(click for big)
Link to the demo itself:
Number one / Another one by CNCD/Fairlight
Assembly Summer 2018 Demo competition entry, 1st place. Platform: PC Notes: Made with notch Title: Number one / Another one Author: CNCD/Fairlight Download o...
www.youtube.com
A couple of Razor1911 demos goes for the screen effect as well and IMO they have created the only CRT filter that isn't ass.
The Scene Is Dead - Razor1911 | 64k Revision 2012
3rd place in pc 64k intro compo at Revision 2012 code: rez music: dubmood Info and Download on Pouet: http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=59105
www.youtube.com
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+1 for popeye, it really stands out from the crowd at that time and I bet it's a big part of why Nintendo made the big early gains they did. This is all amazing stuff, it's good to know that Fairlight is still wrecking shit like that. The One demo, with realtime 3d looking like like moving print? I just watched it. I'm floored. It's fascinating as an artifact because think about - if these cats were onto the 3D design paradigms we now take for granted all the way back in the 80's, you can only imagine what sort of hyperspace elf shit their minds are cooking up by now.
This morphing real object look, it's really... beyond in terms of its pure design. I guess conceptual brilliance is the only way to go in a world of unlimited processing power.
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- Sep 7, 2016
Exactly, it's back to design/style and upping the quality in smart and inexpensive ways. The crystal tigers are just amazing as well and shows a brilliant way of approaching things, they had a tiger and a tiger animation but rendered it as a particle system made out of crystals. That's a really clever way of using the available resources, that and making the human models lo-fi/abstract actually makes them appear more real than the best AAA studios can offer and it also masks any irregularities in the motion capture and models that the eye would pick up in that uncanny valley kind of way.
Anyone know which game it was that had a guy in the cockpit of a mech powering up, it was around the SNES era and had some clever palette cycling to create the lights of the instruments turning on and illuminating the character? I think it was dark blue and black as a base and the lights from screens/buttons were green and purple?
AllMightyCow
kiwifarms.net
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Slaps and Beans, the Bud Spencer\Terrance Hill themed game from last year, has some absolutely amazing pixel art through and through:
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Incompetent
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perfection
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Pixel art is the shit. I'm fond of pixel horror (Clock Tower, Ib, etc.) and scenery/backgrounds in particular.
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>People posting Clock Tower pixel art.
I have found my people. Top tier taste, lads!
I have found my people. Top tier taste, lads!
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Eternal Champions: Challenge from the Dark Side
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There's a long history of "cute-em-up" shooting games in Japan. They're basically parodies of shmups. Instead of spaceships and aliens, you get witches on brooms and cartoony action. It's fair to say that Cuphead is born of this tradition. The real flagship of this genre is Parodius, its name being a portmanteau of 'Gradius' and 'Parody'.
I recently noticed something, tho - there's a big recurring theme in these games: The use of giant women as level bosses. I'm not sure why this is, but over the years it's become a a real hallmark of the genre. The first parody shmup I can find that does this is Konami's Parodius.
At first I thought it was a riff on how the lonely nerds who play these games are terrified of women IRL, but my time at the farms has left me cynical. I feel like this shit walks a line between humor, tradition and fetish, oftentimes stepping over to the fetish side. Either way, some of the pixel art is fabulous.
These first 4 are from Parodius.
And in the modern day, we still have it:
I'd say this sequence in Cuphead is definitely a Parodius homage.
One well respected title in the cute-em-up genre is Harmful Park. It checks all the boxes, including the vaguely fetishistic giant woman boss battle. You know how some game bosses change appearance when defeated?
This one gets uglier when defeated. Here's the sprite sheet, it's an incredible amount of effort to put into a short lived set piece, if you ask me. Judging from the game's release date, this character appears to be a riff on the Ganguro girl phenomenon of mid-late 1990s Japan.
The way that this character in Harmful Park serves to comment upon the cultural icons of its day is a great example of why games need to be preserved, they're reflections of human history. They tell a story without even meaning to.
I recently noticed something, tho - there's a big recurring theme in these games: The use of giant women as level bosses. I'm not sure why this is, but over the years it's become a a real hallmark of the genre. The first parody shmup I can find that does this is Konami's Parodius.
At first I thought it was a riff on how the lonely nerds who play these games are terrified of women IRL, but my time at the farms has left me cynical. I feel like this shit walks a line between humor, tradition and fetish, oftentimes stepping over to the fetish side. Either way, some of the pixel art is fabulous.
These first 4 are from Parodius.
And in the modern day, we still have it:
I'd say this sequence in Cuphead is definitely a Parodius homage.
One well respected title in the cute-em-up genre is Harmful Park. It checks all the boxes, including the vaguely fetishistic giant woman boss battle. You know how some game bosses change appearance when defeated?
This one gets uglier when defeated. Here's the sprite sheet, it's an incredible amount of effort to put into a short lived set piece, if you ask me. Judging from the game's release date, this character appears to be a riff on the Ganguro girl phenomenon of mid-late 1990s Japan.
The way that this character in Harmful Park serves to comment upon the cultural icons of its day is a great example of why games need to be preserved, they're reflections of human history. They tell a story without even meaning to.
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These are great, what are they from?
