All I could think of is that's Julius from Everybody hates Chris.

I hope a more technical post will be appreciated. If not, I'll head back into lurk mode. The NES stuff always pulls me out.   I also apologize if I compared to other games too much, but I thought it might help understanding.

Just a few corrections here to start:

The cart (probably Konami-designed) has modifications to increase memory size to fit in more sprite and tile data. Effectively this means that this game couldn't have come out as an NES launch title or anything of the type. Keep this in mind if you think 'huh the NES came a long way since super mario and other simple looking arcade ports to this'. The artists came a long way but also, the cart configurations changed. I'm sure we have some actual NES cartridge wizards in the forum that could more assuredly talk about their specs.

Well, I can try. Shatterhand is an MMC3 game. MMC3 and the other MMC series were Nintendo developed as far as I know. This means Shatterhand doesn't have any more of a complicated cart than 1988's Super Mario Bros. 3, and in fact uses less space for code/data/levels, probably to save money since ROM was expensive. (Both games use 128 KB for graphics, but SMB3 uses 256 KB for code/data where Shatterhand only uses 128KB for that. But... I suppose that's not useful info for this discussion) Therefore you can chalk a lot of Shatterhand's graphical victories to its artists, rather than its cart.

It's all about color usage and tile busyness I think. It takes a page from the Batman game, the black color is the universal color here that ties almost every tile together and frees up the other two colors per tile to be whatever else since black can dither into anything for an extra darker shade and unifies.

Three. If black is the universal color in all background tiles, then each tile palette still has three other colors to choose from. There are four background palettes that have: black, and three other colors. It's sprites that only get three colors since the universal color used for all sprite palettes just becomes transparent instead when the sprite is drawn.

Don't be afraid of complicated tile configurations either, you have (imaginary) cartridge space.

In fact, this game could have used twice as much space as it did for tile/sprite data. It just would have been more expensive to produce.

On the whole "parallax scroll debate"

The splitscreen parallax:

I assume they scroll the screen during scanline interrupts?

Is it possible to scroll one part to the left, the other to the right?

Sprites are always layered afterwards?

Yes!

Yes! See Megaman 3 (another MMC3 game.) Press start on the title screen and watch the top and bottom parts of the screen scroll in from the left, and the middle scroll in from the right to make up the robot master select screen.

Not necessarily. ptoing went over the basics of that.

The best "parallax scrolling" I've seen is in Battletoads. (Note: Battletoads is NOT MMC3 but...) One of the features MMC3 adds is a scanline counter. This allows different vertical portions of the screen to have different horizontal scroll values. (Split screen scrolling as described in Megaman 3 above) On the title screen of Shatterhand don't press start. Eventually you'll see an enemy shooting, and a guy will pan in from the right blocking the bullets with his arm. That's an example of this. It's not exactly as wonderful as parallax scrolling with different background layers though.

But actually split screen scrolling can be used in carts with no special configuration. See Super Mario Bros. where the level scrolls but the HUD (score, world etc) doesn't. MMC3 just made that kinda thing MUCH easier since you didn't have to wait in idle loops to change the scroll value mid screen. You could rely on an interrupts. I can't even guarentee at this point if that scene is done the MMC3 way or the SMB way without looking at how it's running through a debugger, but "easy" split screen is a fun feature of MMC3.

I might make a more detailed post regarding what this game does with its graphics codewise during gameplay, as well.

Edit: Or not. A quick run through shows it barely does anything neat. Doh. Ptoing covered that.

It does work now. Excellent!

I'm Kasumi. I joined, even though I mostly intend to lurk. My primary pixel art interest is making sprites and backgrounds that can be used in NES games, since I make NES games as a hobby. One of my long term goals is making at least one game for most of the famous older consoles (NES, Game Boy, SNES, Genesis, etc. Nothing planned for Atari, and the like. Maybe sometime.), though I'm focused on NES right now.

I've made a small PSP game, but the spritework is very basic, and uses few colors. My avatar (provided it's still a girl in a blue shirt with a bleeding person next to her) is from the PSP game, which yes is heavily inspired by EarthBound. Though everything in it is original sprites and not edits. The sprites in it have eight directions and three frame walking animations. I'm not very good at detailed pixeling, but I think I work well enough under NES color restrictions. I joined as a programmer expecting to be wowed by everyone else's stuff, but I may post some things for critique as well. I draw and paint as well and when I want to create a piece of standalone art, I usually pick those up. Therefore most of my pixeling ventures will be made with a specific game in mind. I am deeply impressed by everything here, and will definitely stick around, if only just to look. My favorite kind of pixel art is sprites.

I'd like to point out that your art is not in NES restrictions. You can have 3 colors maximum (+transparency) for sprites

Not entirely true. It's still possible for a NES game. If you overlap two hardware sprites with different palettes using the transparency you can get five (or six) colors on one (not hardware) sprite. You can technically have one (not hardware) sprite use 12 different colors by overlapping four hardware sprites using all three colors from all of the available palettes. But that's not practical because of the 64 sprite limit.

Megaman overlaps hardware sprites with two different palettes which is how he is five colors. (black, white, skin, two shades of blue) Sprites that make up his face use black white, and the skin tone. The face sprites are overlapped over his suit sprites which use black, and two shades of blue. The result is more than three sprite colors in an 8 x 8 pixel area.

and 4 colors for tiles. You have used 5 colors for sprites and tiles.

His tiles are completely fine, since they are only 4 colors. (black and three shades of brown/tan) The background doesn't always use one of the four palette entries for transparency like the sprite palettes, so the first color in each palette can actually be displayed as a color. However... this first color is always the same in all four palettes so you each 16 x 16 (rather than 8 x 8 unless you use a special mapper) pixel area can display the set of three colors from any of the four background palettes, plus the one universal color.  (Which would most likely be black in this case.)

For the record, it's even possible to have tiles look like they have more colors by overlapping sprites but that's not practical because of the 8 sprite per scanline limit, and the 64 sprite limit. Also of note is that you can write different colors to the first entry of of the palettes which use the universal color from the first palette, but it doesn't affect how anything is displayed. The PPU doesn't even read them.