Some earlier games used voxels which is a bit like a 3d pixel. Command and Conquer used them and the modding community had a voxel editor which was pretty cool to play around with. Some newer games have been looking at voxel rendering again because it's generally considered to be less taxing on hardware.

This isn't the same concept.  What's actually being discussed is making 3D models before hand, screen shotting them, and then using them as the 2D sprites.  As a result, the 3D models aren't actually 3D, they're just snapshots of 3D models that are then blit onto the screen the same way a pixel drawn sprite would.  Voxels are more of a real time application.

The result is usually very ugly.  Golden Sun did it better than most games, and worked very well for its map tiles, but the sprites looked very much like plastic as a result.

'Tis the season soon again, which reminds me of something that's always been bugging me greatly: drawing trees wrong. I remember having had issues of wrongly drawn trees at the age of six, and I still do. To illuminate what happens when you THINK you know perfectly well what something looks like, so well that there's no point checking reference pictures of  something that's SO OBVIOUS that a child can draw it.

Can anyone spot a problem with these 3d trees:

http://ungroup.net/jjntemp/digikuvia/fir_trees.jpg

*looks at some tree tiles he made, then proceeds to bang his head against a wall until he hemmorages*

Kenshiro?  I never saw Hokuto no Ken but I recognize him.

FF7 is the Keanu Reeves of 2D Platforming Games.

I could be wrong, but it's likely that the NES had an 8-bit global rainbow palette, and all of the 4 color palettes for the tiles and sprites simply chose good looking colors out of that.