Commercial Critique August: Yoshi's Island

[ptoing]

Due to popular demand we will have Nintendo's classic Super Mario World2 - Yoshi's Island as CC. Go ahead and disect it.









I personally have not much to say about this game as far as pixelling goes, it's all about the style.

[Conzeit]

Ok, I did not expect this one bit, honestly I would've prefered EWJ, but YI still has things to say despite the propaganda.

I belive the style choice has everything to do with pixeling, and it is quite a good reason to talk about this game, I agree it might not allow for a lot of pixel-perfect examination to go on, but I think it did open up a space for new natural media inspired look in pixelart, that is still being progressed in games like the Boktai series.

I think I will start with a tiling trick directly related to the style choice. it might not be the holy grail of tiling, but it's worth noting.

if you watch carefully you'll see that every pine tree is mirrored at the middle, yet the highlights are on the opposite sides in each side of the tree.

I think the brush (or marker) strokes style used in drawing the trees, allows for the same degradation to be used for shadow and light.

[.TakaM]

Im not quite ready to jump in yet. in the mean time I found some png screenshots from YI2, could help with some people's theories:

[Sohashu]

I noticed a change in shading techniques.  In the back ground, the strokes are more stroke like. in the foreground, level with characters, the style is smoother and easier to make out details.   

[Conzeit]

hmm, YI2 doesnt really seem to expand on the style, rather it is taking back from it, it doesnt look like it'd fit with the older screens but it also isnt proposing a new style, just broken up YI.

I think it will not measure up to the original in terms of style atlest

[Akira]

Colourwise, everything is pretty high sat which makes it hard to distingiush foreground from background. they appear to have used the black outlines to combat this though in many situations it just makes it appear a little dirty imo

spritewise i think this game is ugly. does anyone have any sprite animations?

some wikipedia stuff on the graphics:

The game's unique graphical style is said to have resulted from a conflict with Nintendo's internal evaluation committee; impressed by the recently released Donkey Kong Country which sported pre-rendered graphics, they ordered the game's producer, Shigeru Miyamoto, to move the visuals in this direction. Shigeru, who did not particularly like Donkey Kong Country, instead altered the graphics to look as if they had been drawn with crayons and felt-pens and resubmitted it to the evaluation committee, who admitted their mistake and passed the game. Some of the cut scenes do, however, show pre-rendered graphics, done in a rather different form that looks more like the gameplay graphics.

I agree with conceit about YI2. it's lost the style nearly completely.

[Xion]

Back to the original YI, I noticed that the bgs aren't all consistent from level to level.
ie.

In the first one, the shading seems thick and somewhat pillowshadey. In the second, the strokes are less definitively even, and taper towards one end. There's also greater contrast between shades, which makes the shapes seem less silky smooth and delicious. In the last image, the background looks more like a pencil scribble than a crayon or marker sketch. Much thinner strokes and lighter colors make it seem less heavy than the first image and less solid than the 2nd.

I may just be making up pointless things to point out, but I thought I ought to say something since I didn't in the past few CCs.


As for the YI2 graphics, yes, I am wholly opposed to the new style. I mean, it's nice and all, but I would have much preferred the original drawn style, or something close to it.

[fil_razorback]

YI sprites : http://tsgk.captainn.net/?p=showgame&t=sy&sy=8&ga=347

[snake]

Speaking of animations. One thing that has to be noted when it commes to Yoshi's Island is the was they used the Super FX chip. This enabled the SNES to do scaling and 3d sprite rotations and made it possible to make games such as Starfox / Starwing.

YI used the chip in unique ways. One of them being to animate sprites by rotating and scaling sprites. You can see that in a lot of the animations fil_razorback linked to, their limbs are slightly rotated. If you were to jump on an invincible enemy in YI, it would scale to create a bouncing effect. The Shyguys and a lot of the other enemies feet and limbs are just rotated blocks as all their walking and jumping was handled real-time by the chip. This is something that is used in Flash animation today, the only difference being that YI is not using vectors, but pixels. I would think that the black outlines helped the rotation in YI because when you scale pixels (like for example in ms Paint.) it gets messy. Since the style was already made with messy black outlines, you wouldn't notice as much.

Akira mentioned that the backgrounds are hard to separate from the foreground. I never had a problem with this as I was playing it, mainly because all stages had paralax scrolling and sometimes multiple backgrounds. Notice that for stages where the background does *not* move, like here:
and here:
, there is a very clear difference between the Player sprite and the background. The latter image also has a triple paralax star background for the black areas.

There is also a discussion wether the backgrounds were made in 'pure pixel' or if it was hand drawn and then converted into the game. I've found a few hand drawn wallpapers from YI that are pretty much identical to the backgrounds of the game, but I'm sure this documented somewhere.

[Rox]

Yeah, the parallax thing was something I instantly felt the need to mention as soon as I saw these. They look very cluttered when still, but every single scene that has those cluttered backgrounds in-game is also very dynamic. There's never any doubt about what's what when you're playing it. The fact that it's much much more zoomed in makes it easier, too, with the thick outlines, say... three-four times the width than we see them now at 1x.

Insanely good use of of the SFX chip, too, like Snake said. That game has some of my favorite bosses ever. Especially the one where you're chasing a giant bird around a moon, with exactly everything spinning around smoothly to keep Yoshi in the middle of the screen all the time. It looked amazing.