I was gonna do a proper blue block, but thought I'd try and see what happened if I just changed the palette. This unfortunately resulted in some meaningless pixels popping out. I was wondering if someone was going to notice eventually (several have). I need to do a proper one.
The Goomba head shave only bothers me where it's strictly horizontal (like I said before, I think it works better on curved lines). Yeah, when it animates it becomes really jarring.
The unorthodox pipe is a strange homage to an image I had in my head of the Giana Sisters pipes.
http://www.mobygames.com/game/c64/great-giana-sisters/screenshots/gameShotId,109621/But it was also a way to break up the gradient of the pipe curvature. Large clean gradients are tricky to do with a limited palette. I wanted to leave the pipe open at the top, so I omitted a line, but it looks kind of odd. Looks too flat with a line though, and a line closes the pipe. Also, the ground doesn't have top lines either.
No one has commented on the white gloves yet. I thought those were risky. Highlights on black spherical surfaces was a bit of a questionmark too. The crab is such a mess. Blackface Bullet Bill is a bit of a deviation (could be Missile Marty?), and the lack of black lines on the fins bother me, but I couldn't solve it. Blooper tentacles are a mess.
I can't say that the bush pixels bothers me. I think they are needed to suggest material/texture. Otherwise the bushes might look like plastic or lollipops.
->
Changes: Mario hat pixel, Goombas (their closed line bother me a bit now,when compared to Mario's now even cleaner hat for example), Fish (using a two-tone in the mouth, inconsistent?), Bird nostril gone. Far eye doesn't bother me. Should it?
New blue / dark teal blocks. They're not meant to stack vertically, as there's a drop shadow at the top. I just forgot to erase those at the bottom. Ran into some pillow shading/banding problems that I didn't fully fix because I got sloppy.
