Modern games which either surpass or respect old pixel art

Freedom Planet nails the "feel" of a 16-bit Sega game, even though it goes far beyond the limits of the old hardware.

Mega Man X Corrupted, assuming it ever releases.

Mercenary Kings but the game itself is shit

La Mulana, though I'm unsure if that counts as pixel art of if it's just low-res.

I spot rixels in the second one. Shame, because the rest looks good.

I liked the idea of what that game wanted to do, but the colours were too garish to me. It was almost impossible for me to understand what was happening onscreen, and my normalfag friends who played it with me were utterly lost.

I'd be surprised since I haven't seen anything like that and the girls are actually pretty.

I'm fucking triggered.

Yeah, it looked like a hybrid of Monster Hunter's faults and slow platforming. It's a shame since that guy is an amazing animator, and he did some work for the video game episode of Gravity Falls, too.

None, modern pixel art always looks like shit because pixel art with a few exceptions (King of Fighters, Metal Slug) always looked like shit, it was only acceptable back then.

Everything was better in the past.

Men

Women

Cars

Computers

Games

Food

Life

The past can't be outdone and you have to be a libtard from commiefornia to believe otherwise.

I disagree for the reason you gave immediately after. Games like this and Shovel Knight are aping the aesthetic for street cred. They're only slightly better than the usual indie pixelshit.

Not with that mindset. Imagine how bad things would be if people were trying even less.

The textures of modern games have surpassed any pixel art.

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Owlboy.

It's really weird.
On one hand he hates the indie clique, especially zq and wu.
On the other hand he sucks Rami's dick because he liked nuclear throne, and was friends with the offspring fling guy (who is one of the five guys, but the only unrelated, non-corrupt one).
Pretty sure he's not a sjw, but just tries to behave to not get ostracized by the industry.
He is now working on a 3D game, which was initially planned to be momodora 5 but he killed the franchise because of the negative reactions to the momo5 (too) early reveal trailer, further proving that he has no spine.

Anyone know a good torrent for the first one?

yeah too bad we don't live in retarded videogame land where thinking something really hard makes it come true.

I'm waiting for the day people will look back at these games and say "how did anyone think that much post-processing sharpening looked good" the same way people look at games with bloom lighting.

Too bad we don't live a retarded game land where you can just be a fucking pessimist and expect to get things done either because you'd fit right in.
Civilization C+ burst soon faggot

freshly arrived from the Berrensteins i take it?
archive.is/0c5Il

what are you even talking about?

i dont know what you're trying to say user, but thats some straight outta reddit stuff.

I wish i could play this on a crt at 240p.

Yatagarasu looks good, but its animations tend to be heavily traced.

Say what you will about Freedom Planet, but I remember reading dev interview about Shovel Knight's art style when it was first kickstarted where the art guy was talking about the game could actually run on an NES, visually speaking, to the point where they had to remove detail from characters' sprites (such as King Knight's cape) so they wouldn't be too fancy.

You got a source for that? I haven't heard about any Momo5 reveal trailer.

You have chosen the mathematically worst option.

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Watch the video. The new game is in 3D, and there was a backlash, or, the guy wanted to be praised and got butthurt.

I'm speechless. What a stupid move. If he'd waited until they actually had some gameplay and non-placeholder assets and non-placeholder animations, I'm sure people would have loved it. Christ, I hope this doesn't fuck up the studio; I loved the Momodora games.

Now that's some agdg levels of unfinished work. I agree with the guy above me, I hope they still finish this

i mean it's good porn but still

Paprium is coming out later this year on genesis. How much more authentic can you get?

momodora does NOT have good pixel art
anyone who has played BoF, SF alpha 3, Super Metroid, Mario & luigi games, knows Momodora does not even compare. Its slightly better than Cave Story pixel art wise in magnitude

Also, let's not forget about Vanguard Princess, which was made by one single dude.

his studio is fine, he told me he is just rebranding but his game stays the same. He always wanted to make a 3d game

Shit waifu. Kill yourself.

You are a retard to compare the work of a single person to that of professional animators. You're like a guy going into a webcomic thread with scans from Jack Kirby.

It has good pixel art, it's just not the best there is.

Too bad if the series is kill, Reverie is really good.

I wish all these underage waifu-warring NGE pseudo-fans could be banned from using the internet somehow.

I don't know. It's really kind of a lost art at this point.

The sprites used to actually have, you know, detail.

kys

kys

Also according to academia, menstruating on a canvas and closeup portraits of the human anus are art, so I declare pixel art "super art."

POST SEXY DITHERING

I remember when cuckchan shitposting like this didnt exist.
Good times

Look no further than KoFXIII

Forgot my embed

This game nicely captures a kind of look that I don't think exists, it looks like an Infinity engine game before infinity engine and before pre rendered graphics became big, strangely enough however there's an expansion pack coming out for it that changes everything, gameplay becomes turn based instead of real time with pause and the game becomes 3d, what a strange as fuck expansion.

I'm willing to give that one some benefit of the doubt, since pixel rotation was a present thing on the GBA. It'd be amazing if all of it was hand-sprited, but it's not the complete end of the world.

Are you joking? It's heavily based on Darklands artstyle and gameplay; the devs hardly made a secret of this during development.

yeah

Sounds about right.

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Where do you think you are?

I got nothing against sprite rotation if it adheres to the grid, but the image I mean has pixels that are literally rotated.

Do you notice stuff like that when you're actually playing?

When it's egregious enough you can.

sure, sometimes

Well Shingo knows how to treat his fans.

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If it isn't art then nothing is.

Didn't the guy basically have an open diary of development for all of the momo games? I'm wondering why the state of that trailer surprised anybody. From what rdein said himself it looks like he is just as confused by the general reaction.

It looks like the missing link between Darklands and Baldur's gate, assuming such a game doesn't already exist, and it's visually more akin to Baldur's gate then to Darklands. the camera angle is more like Baldur's gate, the interface is more like Baldur's gate even having that little gear thingy to tell you when the world is running

Nobody really knew about the Momo games before RutM (3 and 4 are the only ones he takes money for; the other two are available for free), which I think came as a very pleasant out of nowhere surprise for a lot of players. If he did have an open diary for development of the series, then I haven't seen it anywhere.

Thinly veiled Shantae thread?

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maybe you should go back there

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Vaporware 7 years in the making.

I've been patiently excited for this for a long time but then I saw that new art and now I'm worried.

I will never understand how anyone can be stupid enough to think Konjak of all people would place politics or other SocJus influences above gameplay. The character designs have been mostly unchanged for years, before many of us gave half a shit about politics.

Please try to avoid speaking as a group leader, speak only for yourself when addressing the public.

Absolutely. Maybe I'm more aware of it because I do pixel art myself, but I notice anons will generally dislike how a game looks if they opt for a pixel style yet break some of the "rules" or limitations that older titles had.

For instance, I think stuff like Shovel Knight is fine since they mimic the NES style but simply expand the palette a bit. Devs don't have to adhere to limitations these days but it's a good guideline to have.
But if they started adding stuff like smooth gradient lighting it would kill the entire artstyle. Stuff like that simply wasn't possible back then and it clashes hard with the pixel aesthetic.

Shovel Knight I feel looks very inconsistent
For example the very first enemy you meet is a very undetailed bug that looks that it fits the whole retro aspect
Then a few enemies later you meet this gryffin that's very well animated and much more detailed, something that feels like it belongs in an artstyle a decade later.

Pretty sure konjak turned into a sjw but I never bothered saving post proof.

Why are you comparing indie garbage to decent spritework then? Kudo points?

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post lewds

I actually haven't played the game, just going off the videos and screenshots I've seen.

I looked up both enemies, it honestly looks fine to me. The amount of colors is similar, as is the animation speed. The griffith just looks more detailed because it's bigger.
I guess most big bosses in the classics are a lot less animated and just move around as static sprites. Best example being the classic head & arms boss or helicopters. If you want to be a purist you could stick to that, but I personally don't mind if artists break the limitation and put in more work. It's when they break the limitation and use a lazy way around it that it bothers me.

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Well, she is a dragon. That's just part of her leet dragon skillz.

Games like KoFXIII make me wish I had been playing fighting games sooner so I could've experienced it. The sprite quality is like they took character artwork and drew it out pixel by pixel.

I had no idea there were so many character cameos, either, or that so many of them were that easy to miss. That's nuts.

whyboner.jpg

So people into fat do have shit taste.

Found this game. Crused Castilla. It's pretty fun. Art ain't bad too.

Seems like some classic fun. Got a magnet link?

/vp/'s fangame has pretty cool pixel art. Also, skullgirls, if it's drawn character frames/backgrounds can even be called "sprites"

This game looks gorgous, but I never ended up buying it because the first two weren't on steam. Do they also look that good?

Not a big fan of it, even if I get what it's going for, but the game itself and the music is 10/10

I used a direct download link.
This is a magnet:
magnet:?xt=urn:btih:C1678ADBD8A68A49BAFA7DF5BB744D46977BB140&dn=Cursed.Castilla.Maldita.Castilla.EX.rar&tr=udp%3a%2f%2ftracker.opentrackr.org%3a1337%2fannounce&tr=udp%3a%2f%2ftracker.leechers-paradise.org%3a6969%2fannounce&tr=udp%3a%2f%2ftracker.coppersurfer.tk%3a6969%2fannounce&tr=udp%3a%2f%2fp4p.arenabg.ch%3a1337%2fannounce&tr=udp%3a%2f%2ftracker.aletorrenty.pl%3a2710%2fannounce&tr=udp%3a%2f%2feddie4.nl%3a6969%2fannounce&tr=udp%3a%2f%2ftracker.ilibr.org%3a80%2fannounce&tr=udp%3a%2f%2ftracker.ilibr.org%3a6969%2fannounce&tr=udp%3a%2f%2ftracker.zer0day.to%3a1337%2fannounce&tr=udp%3a%2f%2fp4p.arenabg.com%3a1337%2fannounce&tr=udp%3a%2f%2ftracker.internetwarriors.net%3a1337%2fannounce&tr=udp%3a%2f%2f9.rarbg.me%3a2780%2fannounce&tr=udp%3a%2f%2f9.rarbg.to%3a2790%2fannounce

Do check it for viruses though, I tend to download from dirty places.

I'll take my time and wait for somebody else if they feel up to it. If I get desperate maybe I'll run it on a VOS or something. I'm pretty bad when it comes to security so I tend to just not take any chances at all. Thanks though.

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You could always give IGG a try, or - or - you could play the free version of the game on the developer's website.
locomalito.com/maldita_castilla.php
The paid version adds some extra content, like more levels and a bestiary, but the free version's still good.

Gonna dump some more sprites and graphics from this that I think are impressive

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Last set unless people want more

I knew reddit was on this board, but jesus.

3d cool pixel arts when?

You must always be a dick
t. Neo Holla Forums

Pokemon Sage was a surprise in so many ways; it's a real shame I have no patience for the Pokemon formula any more. As for Skullgirls, while the animation quality is high, they're hand-drawn animation frames and thus not sprites.
There's almost no story to the games and they aren't connected, so don't get the idea you'd be missing out on story beats. The other games look fine, but they have a very chibi art style with giant heads since your character only occupies one tile instead of two. Good fun, but not really rewarding in the same was as RutM

I don't have much tolerance for playing pokemon games frequently myself, but I think it's refreshing to play one every few years, especially ones you haven't tried before.

If I were you, I'd maybe just check the final game when it comes out, and not try any of the demos between now and then to avoid the actual playtrhough from becoming repetitive,

KOF13 is god tier.
It's true that headswaps to roster ratio is higher than usual, and most of characters lost a special or two, but still it's my favorite.

The first two are freeware. Momodora III is on Steam. None of them look as good as Reverie.

Say, anyone have that swf of a pixel art rainy city with pretty vocal music? Or the source of it? I'm afraid it downloaded into the wrong format for me when I tried to save it.

The original game is freeware, get it from Locomalito's site:
locomalito.com/maldita_castilla.php

Last year he released an improved version (called "Maldita Castilla EX") for Steam, XBONE and PS4 (I preordered a physical copy from Play-Asia). You should try the original game to see of you like it.

thread related, you could check Hydorah and Gaurodan as well by the same guy

Also, the curse of Issyos is a great action platformer, like the old Castlevanias

I don't know what you mean, but this wouldn't be the song, would it?

Definitely not. I'm fairly certain the music came out of a Japanese animated movie.

Though this is gorgeous, thank you.

Ah, I'm fresh out, then. Have a gondola.
Hollow Knight is one of my GOTY contenders, and although you have no reason to respect my opinion, you should definitely play it. Completely worth the time and money.

Thanks. If it will help, the city in question looks like something out of the late 19th or early 20th centuries, real Western elegance.

Honestly, dubsman, I figure that if a game can elicit unreserved and honest praise from a Holla Forumsfag, it's probably worth it. You bastards are notoriously hard to impress.

I don't really have a massive webm collection. I only save stuff that I find significantly interesting, and I'd remember if I had anything like what you're describing.
Tripsman, I'll be honest with you: this game gave me more genuine emotional reactions and moments of honest engagement than anything I've played since Dark Messiah of Might and Magic in 2013, and it didn't use anything except gameplay and good character design to do it. I've never had so much fun getting lost.
Fuck the deepnest, though.

So we're talking about a genuine good game here?

thats XI you tard.

RIP Mithrabutts, never 5get.

way to JUST

Sounds like it.

Wow, that music is cozy, in a high-class bierhaus sorta way.

Never seen a pixelart webm, though, huh. Unfortunate.

Yes. I recommend playing without the compass charm, though, since half the fun is finding your way around with only a map, or without much idea where you're headed at all.

This is some G-d tier music right there, fellow goy

Sauce?

For what, the youtube video? It's from Hollow Knight. I don't know where the belltower gondola music is from.

What technique do they use to make the castlevania sprites?

We've gone this far without anyone mentioning Sonic Mania?

holy shit at that 1:40 mark in that song. they nailed it.

Yeah, I agree. I feel that the "detail" aspect is really lost on most indies. The reason good sprite art is timeless is that when artist meticulously picks out each individual pixel, it achieves a quality similar to a well-made stained glass window. It isn't enough to simply be low resolution, you have to methodically ask "Hmm, what is this pixel suggesting?", which gets exponentially harder to do with higher resolutions. When this is done, the amount of visual information per pixel is very high even when compared to 3D rendered images, or even live-action photos (though those tend to contain more visual information in total).

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
no

first pic looks pretty good. Second pic is a nigger with shit on her face? How can you fuck up this badly?

Vidya porn makes pokemon fan-games? Never played a Pokemon game but that sprite work looks good. You telling me its not shut down by Nintendo? When can I play this?
the first two games are free (with the option to pay if you feel charitable).
rdein.itch.io/momodora-i
rdein.itch.io/momodora-ii

I guess there is none.

halfchan /vp/, so no, not the porn board

It's not done but they have a demo out on their wiki, but a new demo is supposed to come out in the next few weeks so you are better off waiting. Here's the wiki, regardless. capx.wikia.com/wiki/CAPX_Wiki

I'm out of cool pixel art examples to show from it because I only have what's been posted on their update threads on /vp/ that I've saved, but in terms of artwork, their main artist can replicate the official pokemon artstyle super well, as pic related demonstrates

whoops posted the wrong file for that first image, might as well post a few more while I'm posting the one I meant to

Does this count?

These are all very cool and creative, too bad they are all done in that butt-ugly Ken Faggimori style, talk about wasted talent when it comes to cool videogame fan-art.

That's sort of the entire point bro. They're supposed to look like official artwork. Don't worry, I'll be patient, I know you have autism

why is there so much cross posting lately? Is 8/v/ really that dead?

I know that's the point, otherwise it wouldn't have been done but my point is that the artists often limit themselves trying to emulate these talentless hacks, just imagine how aesthetically pleasing it would be to look at some nice Pokemon fan-art like that, done by someone who doesn't restrict their artistic abilities by trying to fit into a mould that's been surpassed countless times by better game character designers.

I'm curious to hear what you would think would be a better art style for pokemon designs then.

Personally, I can't stand most fakemon designs because the art style always looks awful even if the designs themselves are good. Sugimori's old and current art style is all I really like pokemon type designs in anyways.

Here's the full dex, though as you can see, not everything has been done by that artist yet.

I know you probably don't mean it that way, but here being so relatively unactive and dead is actually exactly why I also still browse, there's often no threads up here that I give a shit about so when I get bored I go check out Holla Forums, /vp/, /a/, and /his/ over there.

I'm retarded and forgot the image

Sidotama's style (pict #1), he is also quite the pokecuck himself and has done lots of Pokemon fan-art, some would consider it too "edgy" but i think it fits because they have flashy colors without losing detail and Nintendo games often capitalize on flashy bright colors.

And if you're also curious how this kind of design would work in 3d there's pic #2 and #3 from 7th Dragon 2020

Some more of his shit.

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I disagree. That game's art looks lazily done.

Wrong image.

Fuck off.

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It is. Just because like garbage doesn't mean it's good. Terraria, despite art not being a selling point, puts a lot of detail in the pixel art. Momodora skimps on detail despite that being one of it's selling points. Terraria more adequately resembles classic pixel art because it puts a lot of detail in a small space as opposed to filling up large portions of the screen with solid colors like Momodora and indie shit like it does.

Again, I will say that Momodora fills up the screen with a lot of solid colors and even the characters themselves are lacking in detail where plenty could have been added. Take this image for example: The player character barely has a face (super mario on the fucking nes has a face despite his size). Her hair is 1 solid color (not shown too well in this image), when Terraria characters have detailed hair.He weapon has no detail. Her skirt has no detail. Her hood just has a red trim and nothing else. The background is completely black. The witch has a tiny nose despite having a large face. It's devoid of fine details despite, again, being so large. The witch's hair only has shine on the top in the way of detail, the rest of it is a solid color with a few stray strands on the edges. This image came directly from the steam storefront. This lazy shit is what they pride themselves on. This isn't even an indie game. They have a god damn publisher.

People like you are the reason pixel art is dead. A bunch of cheap animations are enough to impress you.

Those look cool but they just fundamentally cease to be pokemon then.

Kek. Git gud

But Terraria is good pixel art. It's clean, simple, and very distinct. Momodora isn't clean, simple, or distinct. It's very messy.

Not saying it's a bad game, but the art isn't very good.

Konjak's a Swede or Swedish-American who has some connection to the Bay Area cliques, including IGF. He follows several openly SJW users on Twitter, and while not directly or even antagonistically, has agreed with what SJWs have said about harassment. This isn't really enough to say anything, especially not when unlike most SJWs and leftists, he's made decent work on his own, and whenever he worked for Wayforward(Though people like Alex Ahad contributed to Half Genie Hero's development), so if he believes in anything, either he puts more time and effort into his own stuff than political stuff, or he knows to not get into such subjects.

That said, I remember there being discussion about the main character's facial features, mainly the lips and nose(a few times eye color as well). If you wanted to get extra Holla Forumsish, you could say that's possibly trying to apply negroid features to a white person's head. My memory's fuzzy but that image seems more subdued in that regard, regardless of intentions. If anything, the concerning thing is that Konjak's art resembles Aaron Diaz's, AKA that one transhumanist SJW with the pseudo-intellectual webcomic and a massive obsession for Ashly Burch's feet after getting acquaintancezoned super hard.

I've only played the first two Momodora games, but most of the good about its art is generally that it's not hard to look at, but overall it's visually just a Cave Story knockoff, but Cave Story at times used multiple colors and tones more often than what I've seen of Momodora(While its gameplay is more "Soulsified"). Games with sprites showing only the eyes tend to remind me of RPGs, like FF Tactics, but even games like Chrono Trigger had details for things like open mouths. I think there's quite a few times in Terraria where it seems like there's more colors on the sprites than what you can easily and immediately see, but the game assets don't really become unrecognizable in gameplay, other than the relative size of the player characters and NPCs, which has more to do with screen size versus screen space filled.

If nothing else this means he deserves to be bullied.

The point of the thread was to talk about games which used sprites and pixel art in ways old games didn't, or which paid respect to the limitations of old games. While RutM may be lackin in detail compared to something like Owlboy, the sprites look very good in motion
The images you posted of Super Mario and Total Recall also do that, you fucking mong. What about this image, then - are multiple layers of background detail and a foreground fog effect enough for you, or does that not count for whatever reason?
WEW

No shit, Autismo. You know the difference between Total Recall and Momodora? Total Recall was made 27 years ago for the NES. NES shovelware made almost 30 years ago had an image that more impressive than any of the "art" in Momodora.Super Mario Bros had a lot of technical limitations and yet Mario still had a fucking face. The point was, Autismo, that games that didn't pride themselves on being beautiful still put a lot of effort into their art despite the lack of resources/focus. Momodora is fucking lazy.

Right. A game that pays respect to the limitations of old games would actually resemble them. Momodora has decent animations as that's all. Everything looks like current year indie bullshit.

This screenshot you posted is still filled with a lot of solid colors where there could/should have been detail. The background is literally snes tier and everything else doesn't even stack up that high. Pitfall is more impressive than this shit.

Here's the game in motion. Notice how Harry moves with a lot of agency. Yet he is still fairly detailed. You can see that he's wearing a belt. His pants are torn. He's wearing 2 layers of clothing on his upper body (they could have just put him in a closed jacket and saved themselves the effort of animating it). He keeps his whip on when he's not using it. Shit dude, you can see cuffs on his jacket where he may have rolled it up. Momodora's art is completely outclassed by an ok snes game made decades ago. It doesn't even use all the fancy snes technology like mode7 or the fx chip (afaik anyway).

I live how SNK gave zero fucks about these cameos. They don't care & neither do I. Bring on Team Last blade in the next game.

Fug

kek

That looks like trashy tattoo art. Are you high?

confirmed for shit taste

cool idea, nice sprite art but still no gamepad support and too much was left in the hands of the "community". It primarily was a level Editor and they where like "HERE KIDS FINISH OUR GAME".

What is patrician taste?

Found some more good pixel art from sage

Is there an infodump on the project?

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Oh god I love this

This would be horrible as a mainline pokemon, but as a spin-off, it would be god tier.

They want 70$ for the physical boxed copy with full color manual and actual genesis cartridge. Seems better than getting a download code contained within plastic swiss cheese.

Real talk though just download the dumped ROM day one. I didn't say you had to buy it.

Triggered

I love terraria but
NO

What I wanna know is why anyone would ever consider that character a "dragon". Looks like some sort of feline with tendrils.