KOF XII Dot Art

[Arne]

I saw that. I thought the pixel art looked really good until I saw a close up. I can't find that many screens from it though. Japanese promo sites have a tendency to publish small badly mangled pictures.

This was one of the better ref pages which I came across when doing research:
http://homepage3.nifty.com/foruser/athena/index.html

World of Spectrum had some obscure material from the Speccy port:
http://www.worldofspectrum.org/infoseekid.cgi?id=0000307

The first chunk of links on this site has some fun magazine scans:
http://gamedic.jpn.org/museum/tirasi/genre.htm

My Athena project is pretty new. I've poured most of the time into research and playing the games (Arcade/NES), so I only have a few first iteration scribbles and brain farts:
http://androidarts.com/athena/

[Helm]

As for the pixel art-ness... these sprites are pretty huge so there's a lot of barren areas with not a lot of detail. Smaller sprites have more places for clever pixel optimization, perhaps?

actually, it's really beautiful when something large is properly hand antialiased and banding is minimized... a pleasant tension between large flat space and concentrated pixel wizardry.