great improvement! stylistically the mix of dithering/noise and big fat outlines seems like an odd choice to me; it makes the surfaces look more dirty than textured. at least for me - it may be i'm too conditioned by the likes of drill dozer and warioland, but i'd be very interested to see some smoother coloring and less dithering (like you've done with the sprites) on your background tiles. nice progress so far!