I don't really get what you mean about any of this.  They look very similar to me.  Also you could have posted a much cleaner shot of the NES game. Blurry jpgs are never much use for studying pixel work eh?

I downloaded the game a few years ago (to run on emulator as it doesn't run on my real CPC 464 likely needing more memory for the intro and animations and such) and didn't enjoy it much.  Found the gameplay very slow and clunky and didn't care for the graphics at all, finding the style extremely bland and it's use of colour pretty poor.  Too much of the flat Spectrum-style of shading and not enough of the kind that made better use of the 4 color mode for a bit of extra shape and volume.   Scaling up the character portraits (which I didn't think were well drawn anyways so scaling them just made them look even worse) doesn't make much sense either (what's the point of using that resolution if you're going to just make bits of it super blocky?).    Character designs weren't very appealing either.  Come to think of it the little animated bits of the intro were my fave bits of the game.   

Regarding beat 'em ups on 8-bit hardware it kinda amused me that a lot of CPC owners were waiting for Street Fighter II which never actually made it onto the CPC (there was all that waiting in hope for it by Amstrad Action back in the day, even being on the cover of one issue) and that despite loving my CPC and loving SFII I didn't want the game on that computer.  I bought a SNES to play that game which was more suited to it and I loved playing all sorts of other games on my CPC that weren't available on a SNES (I actually prefer western and european graphic styles over japanese for the most part... which is a bit strange cos one of my all time fave 8-bit games is SwitchBlade which was one of the early western games to have a clearly anime-influenced hero but still quite a dark atmosphere rather than all cutesy and over the top dynamic despite the SD-like player sprite) and even the Amiga version of SFII failed to play anywhere near as good as the SNES version (and despite some decent attempts there never really was an Amiga beat 'em up that matched SFII's gameplay and graphics). 

Street Fighter Alpha on Gameboy Color however played very well despite having extremely downscaled graphics (and thankfully didn't resort to the cutesy SD style of the Neo Geo Pocket fighting games).  It had the feel of Street Fighter even if the graphics looked quite scrappy and primitive though easily recognisable as to what was what and who was who.

I really gotta cut down on my use of brackets...

Also this has gone very off the original topic... Sorry.

I'm also extremely insulted that you think pixelation is stuck in the c64 era or whatever,

Heh.  This caught my eye straight away in that post.  The word 'stuck'.  I often (most recently this morning in fact) get accused of being stuck in the past, stuck in the 8-bit era, stuck doing NES or CPC style graphics... I'm not stuck doing any era or style, nobody here is.  It's a choice and not one anyone has to be stuck with.  I bet I'll still get those annoying emails that say I oughta 'learn' how do draw HD graphics and such cos low res/color is apparently crappy and out of date.

Cheers for the links.  Had wondered if I had any colorblindness but it would seem not despite what some people say about my color usage.   

oi...

You speak little to the NES spriters.

Like me (to some extent)?

Frankly you all seem stuck in a time warp fixated on the Commodore 64.

Not me...(I use the other 8-bit computer with the wide-pixels)