Commercial Critique August: Yoshi's Island

[Helm]

45 degree needs no aaing, rotates fine, also



I have a problem with this tileset, my brain would interpret it as 'spikes, don't land there'.

also, the constant use of black hurts depth to the point where I'd consider these blades of grass on this one



also to be a gameplay hazard and I'd try to not fall on them.

Yoshi's Island looks very flatplane to me because of the art style, most of the time.

[Rox]

I decided to look for videos to show the awesomely wonderful parallax scrolling in this game, and how it allows the foreground/middleground/background art to be so similar. I found one decent gameplay video of the first level, and a rocking commercial! I think the commercial might give some insight about why the game was designed the way it's designed. (Story-wise, it's easy to see why, since it's an old tale of how baby Mario went on a bunch of adventures on Yoshi's back. Fairytale memories from the eyes of a of a to-be-hero baby.)

I wish I could've found some gamelplay of the waterfall caves, but if you imagine the parallax working the same for those levels, you should see how easy it would be to differntiate the various levels. The commercial also has a brief clip of the awesome bird on the moon where EVERYTHING spins except the Yoshi sprite. I love that.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RrMA53X8weI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GuCDkfjVE5E

Not the best quality, but it's the scrolling I want to put in focus. We've already got pixel-perfect art in this thread. Put the two together in your mind.

[crab2selout.png]

Conceit, I think I remember seeing fat shyguy in the beginning of the Wall of Lakitu stage. You could also try looking in a gameFAQ for the word fatguy or whatever they are called.

Despite the heavy use of black, they're pretty consistent in limiting its use to foreground tiles and enemies so that different layers don't meld together. Even in that one background with the pipes and grass, the white highlight on the pipes pushes it above the grassy part.

More screenshots. found a couple shots with the clearable dirt tile. Looks like they made two different variations of it. I'm going to try and get a better screenshot of them. Ther's some interesting shading going on in the shadow areas of the pin-striped castle. I don't think I noticed any other places where the shadows have a different tile pattern than the non-shadowed area. I like it, although I'm not sure I understand it.

[hawken]

what puzzles me... is the linear history:

yoshi's island SNES
yoshi's island 2 N64
yoshi's island 2 DS

frankly, I think the DS looks the worst so far...

[miascugh]

I think it is:

Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island - SNES
Yoshi's Story - N64
Yoshi's Island 2 - DS