Personally i prefer X-man's approach to pixelling. Cyclone's, while being pretty as a whole (design, colors, etc), looks too blurry, kind of like color reduced digital illustration. On the other hand, X-man's has what i like best about pixelart: the definition (and such definition! the textures!). You can't color reduce into THAT!
An example of gameart i thought was great at the time was Sega's Story of Thor:
(not the best picture, but couldn't find any better).
This thread is great, learning lots of stuff here, this should definitely become a sticky.