Planet Harriers (Sega - 2005, PSP)

A port of the 2000 arcade game and spiritual sequel to the Space Harrier series.

Planet Harriers was a long overdue entry in the Space Harrier series, which hadn't seen a new game since 1998's Space Harrier 2 on the Genesis. Originally running on Sega's Hikaru hardware, which was just a bit too beefy to port perfectly to the Dreamcast. To have it on a home console though, I would've taken whatever graphical cuts they had to make. This game is fast and loud and totally awesome with that inimitable "SEGA" feeling. You know what I'm talking about.

It's nice that this unworthy, ungrateful Earth finally got a new Harrier game in Planet Harriers, but that was 17 years ago; hook us up, Sega.

Hey, where's Harrier?

I don't think this is proper space harrier-ing gear, but I'm not the one with the syringe cannon

The graphics are of course still awesome in their way, but I remember thinking just how INCREDIBLE this looked

So hard to keep these in good shape if you don't put them back in the case...

My latest acquisition!...I wish. Really need to get a new PSP eventually now that I've found my copies of Outrun 2 and Castlevania: Dracula X Chronicles, though.

Wreck It Ralph - Fix It Felix NES style

Here's a preview of the new sprite I did up for the fake NES cartridge I’m making of Fix-It Felix Jr.

The reason I didn’t just use the sprite that Disney made (on the left) is because you have to take into account the capabilities of the NES—only three colors can be used in a sprite, so it was fun to consolidate Felix’s colors while still making him look like Felix. I got a lot of comments about this sprite on Tumblr and elsewhere about whether the black in Felix's eyes and mouth counted as a fourth color. My intention here is for it to be a "background" transparent color. Obviously, this isn't an ideal solution as it would show the building behind him through his face, but I cite other Famicom games of the time as precedent for this unfortunate workaround! Specifically the lovely Tōkaidō Gojūsan-tsugi by Sunsoft.

As for the size difference, Arcade style Felix is 16x32 pixels. While this would be doable in an NES game, to work with their limited cartridge size it wasn’t uncommon for developers to shrink down the proportions of the character sprite. A top-of-my-head example would be Space Harrier, to wit:

"YOU TRIED"

NES games use sprites composed of 8x8 pixel tiles, which is what I tried to go for. Let’s just fudge it by a pixel or so and say NES style Felix is 16x24 pixels here. Figuring out these kind of graphical cutbacks is way interesting to me!