01-04-2010, 01:00 PM
Ok, if you don't get what I mean by anti-aliasing, which I'm sure is the wrong term in this case, check out the enemy sprites for Castlevania: Belmont's Revenge on the Gameboy. That is one ugly sprite sheet and a bitch to recolor (which is why I wanted it).
I'm not blaming BadBatman3 for bad quality. He did a great job with what he had to work with. Of course, I thought he might have messed some things up because some tiles didn't seem to line up right, also.
So I loaded up Belmont's Revenge in VBA and took a look at the sprites myself. And what I saw was DISGUSTING. The sprites didn't have crisp designs. They didn't have bold, black outlines. Sure, some sprites had partial black outlines, which served as partial outlines, partial demarcations and partial shadows. I'll give the artist credit for the brilliant use of "black" in the Gameboy. But if you tried to actually colorize the sprites, may God forgive the artist. All the light-colored crap around the outsides of the sprites are ugly and, in fact, can be deleted without actually changing the sprite's appearance too much.
Of course this topic isn't about just one game, since normally I'd just assume it was that one game. But a lot of Gameboy sprites seem to have similar sprite features. I checked out Animal Breeder, I think it was, which had much crisper sprites, but I did notice a faint anti-aliasing (again, maybe not the right term) where light colors "spilled over" the black. Now, Belmont's Revenge was the worst I've seen, but is this the game designer's fault or is it a hardware issue? Does the Gameboy itself put those ugly pixels there? Or rather, is it a software issue with Virtual Boy Advance, or any other emulator -- is there a setting that needs to be adjusted to get rid of the ugly pixels?
I'm not blaming BadBatman3 for bad quality. He did a great job with what he had to work with. Of course, I thought he might have messed some things up because some tiles didn't seem to line up right, also.
So I loaded up Belmont's Revenge in VBA and took a look at the sprites myself. And what I saw was DISGUSTING. The sprites didn't have crisp designs. They didn't have bold, black outlines. Sure, some sprites had partial black outlines, which served as partial outlines, partial demarcations and partial shadows. I'll give the artist credit for the brilliant use of "black" in the Gameboy. But if you tried to actually colorize the sprites, may God forgive the artist. All the light-colored crap around the outsides of the sprites are ugly and, in fact, can be deleted without actually changing the sprite's appearance too much.
Of course this topic isn't about just one game, since normally I'd just assume it was that one game. But a lot of Gameboy sprites seem to have similar sprite features. I checked out Animal Breeder, I think it was, which had much crisper sprites, but I did notice a faint anti-aliasing (again, maybe not the right term) where light colors "spilled over" the black. Now, Belmont's Revenge was the worst I've seen, but is this the game designer's fault or is it a hardware issue? Does the Gameboy itself put those ugly pixels there? Or rather, is it a software issue with Virtual Boy Advance, or any other emulator -- is there a setting that needs to be adjusted to get rid of the ugly pixels?