Some initial thoughts:
Shatterhand is a very late addition to the NES (1991 I think), the Genesis had been out for a couple of years (1988 actually), the SNES for one, though popularized in the next two. It fits around the same space as
Vice: Project Doom and
Zen Intergalactic Ninja. What does this mean? It means two things:
These games are informed by 16 bit games, especially in the tilework. The poor NES can't do much about its spritework, but the tiles are certainly trying to look like more than the NES is known for. The earlier patent for this sort of thing is the NES
Batman game by Sunsoft and deeper in, the early Ninja Gaidens.
The other thing this means is that this game comes on a big-ass cart. Although it plays on any NES, what's inside the cart is different than what's inside a first generation NES game like Super Mario. 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.
So, Shatterhand is trying to be a 16-bit looking game on an 8-bit system. How is it doing that with the NES limitations?
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. Think of earlier NES games that were more like arcade games and looked more colorful. They traded visual detail to be colorful, usually the elements were very simple in those games. So Shatterhand (much like Batman) trades in being bright and colorful for detail work with the black shade. After the Megadrive came out (which did the 'black as bottom color and dithering with black' thing a lot too) it seems like the NES got a lot of 'grizzly' black-tinted platformers like this. Cross-pollination, I theorize.
So in your mockups for the challenge, try to use black as the bottom shade, don't be afraid to dither.
Don't be afraid of complicated tile configurations either, you have (imaginary) cartridge space.
Then as far as the colors go you'll notice every tile goes from black to - dark color - -middle color - specular highlight color. Very rarely will there be surfaces with matte colors without any specs. Often middle value is minimized so there's a sea of darkness with sharp glints on top. Most of the time the designs are oily or mechanic to accommodate for this lack of middle value. This makes the game (like Batman again) look very grizzly and unfriendly but also shiny and sleek, it's an interesting combo for sure. Note also how the specular highlight color is very rarely a straight ramp to the dark color, usually there's some hue shifting going on. This is due to the increasing sophistication of the artists working on these games, they're trying to squeeze as much variety out of the NES as possible, unlike earlier simpler arcade ports where stuff was really straight-ramped.
For your mockups, try to make those palette entries for the tiles count, avoid straight ramps in the foreground (background has more two-tone abstractions where tinting wouldn't work as easily).
Also since this is trying to be 16-bit the backgrounds look like they would be made to parallax scroll, like the genesis would do them. Probably more useful to look good on screenshots in mags since of course the NES can't parallax scroll. But keep that in mind for when you build your mockups.
On the aesthetic level this is close to the apex of early 90's sense of 'cool'. Robots, bionic arms, cool dudes with shades that look like
Arnold who probably impressed the Japanese circa the release of Conan or Terminator to be burned forever into their collective subconscious as the default image of overdone masculinity (seen constantly in video games and manga since). There's probably more to be said about that really but perhaps later on. These are some initial thoughts. Get talkin'
