#pixel grotto

[pixelgrotto]

Top-down Planes Galore

Over the last few years, thanks to my wife's English side of the family, I've visited a fair share of interesting British museums. One of these is the Shuttleworth Collection, a neat place that features an array of planes from the early half of the 20th century. If you're ever in Bedfordshire and have a hankering to see biplanes from the 1920s, I really can't recommend a visit enough. I wouldn't call myself an aviation geek, but there's something about seeing a World War II aircraft in person that stirred my imagination, and one of the souvenirs I bought from my visit was a cool pair of socks that had pixelated biplanes on them.

I specifically bought the socks because they reminded me of Capcom's 1942, the first entry in the 19XX series of shoot 'em ups, AKA shmups. Honestly, I hadn't played much of 1942 at the time, but I've always known enough about shmups to think of the game when I see pixelated biplanes. It probably stands out in my head as an interesting example of a Japanese company making a product where the whole goal is to blow up the Japanese. Yep, 1942 puts the player in the role of a Lockheed P-38 Lightning pilot maneuvering his aircraft through the skies of the Pacific Theater, on a mission to reach Tokyo and blast the heck out of everything. Apparently the game was made with Western audiences in mind, so I suppose we have capitalism to thank for a game that is both historically accurate and not historically accurate at all. (Yes, Japan lost the war, but I don't think any of the Lockheeds in the Battle of Midway had spray guns capable of shooting a billion bullets at once.)

I recently dove into 1942 and almost all of the other games in the 19XX series, mostly because I was inspired by my British nephew, who's recently been going on about planes for hours on end. You can play almost all of them via the Capcom Arcade Stadium compilations on Steam, which repackage classic arcade games and make them easily playable without the hassle of needing to fiddle with MAME emulation. (The decision to make each game DLC that you have to buy is probably questionable, but putting that aside, these packages are pretty okay.)

Anyway, I soon discovered that the original 1942 is the epitome of a 1980s arcade quarter gobbler, with a staggering 32 levels of monotony and some of the most annoyingly tinny background music known to man. It's fun to do loops around Japanese bombers for the first ten minutes, and I've always loved the power-up that gives you two flanking planes that help soak up extra damage, which would go on to be a series staple. Beyond that, 1942 grates at the soul and has not aged well.

1943: The Battle of Midway, and its slightly remixed semi-sequel 1943 Kai, are much better. Here, we bear witness to screen-filling tsunami attacks that can instantly wreck all enemies, a more forgiving difficulty level, and varied stages that don't consist of simply flying over the ocean and rice paddies. Everything's faster and a good deal more fun, and instead of solely taking down planes, now you've got boss battles against Imperial Japanese naval fleets, ending in a fight against the battleship Yamato. And thankfully, the tinny music is gone and replaced by battle-ready tracks that are nicely catchy.

This formula is refined even further in the later games, all of which loosen up on the feeling of "one American plane versus Japan" for a progressively zanier feel. 1941: Counter Attack ditches the Pacific Theater for firefights over European skies, and despite taking place in the earlier years of WWII, your pilot goes up against enemy crafts that are so extreme in size and flavor that they border on science fiction. You'll fire away at German rockets that look like they're designed to fly to the moon and tanks that take up a quarter of the screen. The end boss is a Horten Ho 229, the German prototype bomber that never went into mass production, yet is a formidable foe in this game that is sleek and almost alien-like in its movements.

19XX: The War Against Destiny takes that science fiction appeal to the maximum and says, "To hell with a historical shmup, let's go to the future with two X's, baby!" In an amusing move that would later be replicated by the Call of Duty series two decades later (when they jumped from WWII to the arena of Modern Warfare - and later Advanced Warfare), 19XX sees you taking on the Outer Limits, a terrorist organization that somehow has a futuristic army with hundreds of expendable fighter pilots. For the first time, you can choose between three different planes: the old school Lockheed P-38 Lightning (the well-balanced one), the de Havilland DH.98 Mosquito (the heavy firepower one), and the Kyushu J7W Shinden (the speedy one). All of these planes are worthy options against enemies that scale in a ludicrous fashion, and one of the bosses in the later levels is basically a mech. It's great. And because the game runs on Capcom's CPS-2 arcade board, which also powered the Street Fighter Alpha/Zero series, the action is fast and clean to a degree that's very reminiscent of the company's fighting game output.

1944: The Loop Master is the last 19XX game I played, because it's the last one available in the Capcom Arcade Stadium. It takes the action back to WWII, but the gusto and fury of all the futuristic stuff exhibited in 19XX: The War Against Destiny is present and accounted for. Hello, my biplane can shoot lasers? Sure, why not! Technically, this one was developed by Eighting and not by Capcom, and all I know about Eighting is that they made the Bloody Roar games and Battle Garegga, another shmup with a cool soundtrack that samples the techno track "Jupiter Jazz," by Underground Resistance. They did a good job, and while 1943 and 19XX: The War Against Destiny stick out in my memory more than The Loop Master, I can safely say that this one features a little dude who parachutes out of your plane when you die. About time I finally saw my pilot!

Honestly, I'm not a great shmup player. I played all of these casually on my Steam Deck, and I never would've made a dent in them in the arcades. But there's something about the 19XX series that's appealing to me, at the very least on an aesthetic level. It's probably the highly detailed 2D pixelated artistry that goes into the top-down depiction of these warplanes, which are given the same slavish fanboyism that you see in Japanese mecha franchises. I think back to the several times I've visited Japan and been to antiwar exhibits like the Hiroshima Peace Memorial. Minus a few groups of nationalist nutjobs, Japan's by far and large a deeply antiwar country - but there do exist otaku who nerd out over WWII-era tech, usually not in a "the Imperial Japanese Army was right" sort of way, but in a way that basically says, "the Yamato was one of the biggest battleships ever constructed at 70,000+ tons, I shall now proceed to write an essay about why that was cool." And you know, I can appreciate that attention to technical detail, just like how I can respect the planes on exhibit in the Shuttleworth Collection. So give the 19XX games a whirl if you like planes or simply dig fine artistry - and go visit the Shuttleworth and buy those socks while you're at it.

#pixel grotto #now playing #1942 #1943: the battle of midway #1941: counter attack #19xx: the war against destiny #1944: the loop master

[stratusstormcloud]

pop cats

#pixel cats end #breezy grotto #stratus doodles #gif #gif warning #we ignore that cumulus' snail disappears

[kaypixl]

made it technically on time for the first day of mermay! had to give it up to Ariel’s grotto, took so long but well worth it ☺️

#pixel art #pixel artwork #ariel #mermay #mermaid #pixel artist #the little mermaid #little mermaid #disney #disney princess #ariel's grotto

[crimsonjhall]

The Geotic Grotto

#grotto #pixel art #pixel artist #scenery #cave #illustration #artwork #digital art #artists on tumblr #caves and cliffs #32bit

[damn-it-a-hogwarts-legacy-blog]

Omg… Isabel was part of a gaming news article somebody “wrote” about some dumb Reddit post I made in the middle of the night last night. 😂

https://www.gamingbible.com/news/hogwarts-legacy-player-finds-mysterious-hidden-area-212694-20240105

The reporter just linked back to my Reddit post, summarized what I said and quoted some comments… stellar journalism lmfao. But everyone on that site gets to look at Isabel now! I’m so proud of my little gremlin pixel child for her accidental fame on a weird gaming site I’d never heard of before /lh

#hogwarts legacy #deek thinks you should be proud of all the screenshots you've taken #I’m so bummed Ominis wasn’t able to follow Isabel in there because I would have been cackling so hard if my otp got into a gaming article #someday my insane world building will be recognized and the House of Greymoore will be recognized by the general public (JOKING)

[ceboplacebo]

[image description: 3 pixel art paintings. the first uses a green-blue palette and show a bunch of small fishes in an underwater view. the second one is a mossy tree standing in a field of orange fallen leaves. the background is foggy with a couple more trees. the third one is a view of the moon over the sea from inside a grotto in a purple palette. /end ID]

some pixel art practice! all 100px in width

#digital #pixel art #otherwise original

[quetzlepretzel]

Videos Games #1, 7/30-8/5

I've always wanted a place to blab about whatever random game I'm playing. Livetweeting didn't work out, but maybe something like this will? If you don't want to see these posts, please block/filter the tag: #quetzlegaming

Games from this week: Pokemon Polished Crystal, Fool's Gold, Infinite Fusion. Palia MMO, and House Flipper (I fucking LOVE Johto)

Pokemon Polished Crystal

I've got two badges and I just hit Goldenrod! Been loving all the upgrades this hack added to the main game: most HGSS stuff like Lyra, Proton, etc, mild "alt colors" for pokemon based on their DVs (you can see it most clearly in my slightly green Furret there), expanded route maps and hidden grottos... Oh there's in game wonder trade too! That's how I got Skarmory and Clefairy. The last egg there is the Odd Egg, still wondering what 'mon I'm gonna get from it. Pokemon Fool's Gold

Wild looking, ain't it? Fool's Gold is a bit like... if every pokemon in Johto was a "regional form", including its OG cast. From left to right, that's Pidgeotto, Jolteon, Wartortle, Quilava, Corsola, and Houndoom. (Pidgeotto and Quilava are shiny, too.) (Yes I'm playing with the built in shiny code active). They're a pretty great team, have carried me through six badges. 🥰 Literally every pokemon is different, and I've loved playing through the game and seeing familiar faces with a fresh coat of pixels. Pokemon Infinite Fusion

I went with a bit of a theme, obviously. Can you guess it? Can you guess all my favorite pokemons just from looking at one image? Jokes aside, I kind of loved how this team turned out in the end. Two witches and their familiars uwu. I played on the most chaotic randomizer settings, and I lucked out with it being generous with the eeveelutions. I beat IF this week, clearing Mt. Silver on Thursday. I know there's still some postgame stuff to do and I may get back to it eventually, but I think I'm ready to shelve the game for now. Some of the route design got hecka frustrating by the end. Man, I love Johto. Palia MMO

I got in on the open beta this week! Just finished building my starter home last night. Really love the art style and environment design in this one, and goooosh the townsfolk are so cute. I already want to marry Jel. It's really scratching that farmer game itch, and I'm sure once they implement more minigames and areas to explore, I'm gonna get totally obsessed. Hopefully they'll have controller config set up for PC by full release, cuz my wrists are BEGGING me to play less KB+M games. Speaking of... House Flipper No pics for this one. I'm still in the early stages of the game where I only fix homes, not buy and flip 'em for sale, so I ain't got shit to show off. But GOSH it's like if they took AC's happy home paradise, mashed it with powerwash sim, and made a game *just* for me. It's so cathartic- at least when I'm not yelling at my customers for making TERRIBLE decisions that strip away any and all character in the home (yes, I'm complaining about the Michael B. job, you're a MONSTER sir/ma'am/they'm). Looking forward to making my first barbie dreamhouse at a later date.

#quetzlegaming #pokemon crystal #pokemon polished crystal #pokemon fool's gold #palia mmo #house flipper #pokemon infinite fusion

[xavierposting]

Grotto of Tiberius

found this diagram on statue cycles while working on a presentation and I kinda restored it in photoshop bcuz it was really pixelated.

#ocean grunge #ocean #sea #sea grunge #tiberius #classical mythology

[funtime--error]

This person is playing every Resident Evil in release order for the first time

Pixel Grotto posted on ResetEra about their plan to play every Resident Evil in release order:

I never really wanted to play [Resident Evil] while growing up because I was a weenie and too scared of survival horror. I’ve since become interested in the genre, though.

Good. Luck.

Every mainline Resident Evil is a classic but boy, do they have rough edges. I couldn’t get through Resident Evil: Deadly Silence (the DS remake of RE1) because of the awful tank controls.

🎮

#resident evil #games #gaming #video games #gaming news #re1 #re2 #ds #nintendo ds #resetera #pixel grotto #horror #survival horror

[pixelgrotto]

Karate History & Box Art Redemption

About a year and a half ago, I mentioned Jordan Mechner's seminal 1984 game Karateka in a post about Sifu, a newly-released beat ‘em up with a similar martial arts theme and tough-as-nails difficulty level. Sifu's a good game that garnered a certain amount of scrutiny from people who pointed out that it was an interactive experience steeped in Chinese culture but developed by a predominantly white team. This is not inherently a bad thing (Sifu’s devs did a respectful job), but considering Western media’s track record of misrepresenting Asia as an exotic place full of Fu Manchu-mustachioed bad guys and subservient women, it’s always worthwhile to be cautious. At any rate, Sifu reminded me a lot of Karateka, another game by a non-Asian creator that owed its lifeblood to Asian culture...and even featured the main protagonist and his love interest as white on the box art, despite the fact that the game clearly takes place in medieval Japan.

The Making of Karateka, a just-released interactive documentary by Digital Eclipse, explains the logic behind this decision via extensive notes that detail every step of the game's creation. From what I can discern, the box art design doesn’t appear to have been Jordan Mechner’s call. (Though the playable Karateka beta included in this package reveals that Mechner had some wacky non-Japanese names in mind for the game’s villain and damsel in distress... Akuma and Mariko were once dubbed “Kratang” and “Tiger Lily.” Yikes!) Rather, publisher Brøderbund’s marketing team seems to have been the division that assigned artist Thomas Blackshear II to paint the cover, instructing him that the titular Karateka was supposed to look like "a young Chuck Norris" or "Luke Skywalker" while Mariko should resemble an "American blonde." Meanwhile, only Akuma was specified as "Japanese."

Brøderbund’s promotional strategy followed the typical American metality of the era: it's okay to portray a bad guy as a foreign race, but leading men and ladies should be white and ideally blonde. It didn't have to be this way, since Bruce Lee had dominated cinemas with Enter the Dragon only a decade earlier and proved that audiences could accept an Asian hero. But Brøderbund decided to go the safe route, despite the fact that Thomas Blackshear is a person of color renowned for his Black and American Indian paintings. (He also portrayed a decidedly unblonde and possibly Asian main character in his early cover sketches.)

My intention here is not to hate on Karateka or any of the individuals involved. The original Karateka game for the Apple II did, after all, feature white hair for its leading man's sprite that could easily be interpreted as blonde (though that was likely due to hardware color limitations more than anything else), and Brøderbund justified their decision by claiming they were inspired by the multicolored hair of Japanese manga characters. (Eh, sure.) Also, if we're being honest about it, Blackshear's final art is a beautiful composition even with the questionable racial depictions.

Rather, I'm fascinated with Karateka's box as an example of mildly problematic '80s promotion, and I love how we gain insight into its development thanks to Digital Eclipse' painstaking efforts with what they call the first in their "Gold Master Series" of playable documentaries. Aside from these marketing details, The Making of Karateka delves into Jordan Mechner's early life in precise timeline fashion, letting us explore planning documents, early rotoscoping footage and prototypes of not only Karateka, but the games that preceded it, including Mechner's take on Asteroids and a shooter he was trying to develop called Deathbounce. There's even glimpses at the bones of a platforming puzzle game that started out as Karateka II and would later evolve into Prince of Persia.

Just about every review of The Making of Karateka stresses how this package sets a new standard for preservation in the video game industry, a business that is terrible at chronicling its own past. I won't repeat these arguments too much other than to say that I fullheartedly agree. Behind the scenes featurettes used to be a thing when it came to games — as a kid, I remember being utterly absorbed with the "Making of King's Quest VI" footage that came included on the CD-ROM — but these days you're unlikely to see too many of them, especially for titles that were released decades ago. In a world where Nintendo has yet to localize Mother 3 and customers need to rely on emulation and all types of hacks to revisit old games, Digital Eclipse's commitment to curating digital museums dedicated to works like Karateka is an incredible worthy goal — possibly one of the most important goals that a video game company has ever embarked upon. I can't wait to see more volumes in the Gold Master Series, and can think of many potential entries off the top of my head. Pitfall! Ultima! Doom! Maybe even one day...Sifu? (Likely a stretch, but stranger things have happened.)

But going back to the discusson of art for a moment, one of the most monumental things that The Making of Karateka does is offer a "remastered" version of its title game, complete with impressive graphical flairs, a more managable difficulty level, and even...revised box art. While Thomas Blackshear's original Karateka painting is still displayed prominently throughout the package, when you go to select Karateka Remastered under the list of playable games, you'll see a new mockup box. No longer is Akuma a dehumanized Japanese baddie, no longer is Mariko an all-American girl, no longer is the titular Karateka Luke Skywalker. All three characters are Asian...and get this, the central Karateka is not only Asian, but blonde too.

In one swift stroke, The Making of Karateka not only captures history and chronicles its mistakes, but also revises them for a bright future. Take that, 1984 marketing.

Update: An earlier version of this article stated that the new mockup cover art was illustrated by Digital Eclipse in-house artist Mae Livingston. Mike Mika, the president of Digital Eclipse, reached out to me on Twitter to explain that while Mae was responsible for Karateka Remastered's in-game artwork, the actual box image was made via Midjourney, and the characters were tweaked multiple times to look more culturally appropriate. He added that this methodology was an experiment that Digital Eclipse does not intend to rely on in the future.

I have very mixed opinions on AI art, and I do wish this box had been created by a human. I don't know if I would've written this piece if I'd known that the artwork was made by Midjourney, frankly. Nevertheless, I appreciate Mike actually reaching out to me, and the ultimate message of this article still stands. I hope Digital Eclipse considers the power that an image like this holds — especially for multiracial people like myself — and chooses human artists in the future.

#pixel grotto #musings #karateka #the making of karateka

[stratusstormcloud]

its thinking about daffodil hours

#breezy grotto #pixel cats end #stratus doodles

[strategia-taktiikka]

#noita #noita game #nolla games #pixel games #ost #soundtrack #music #holy mountain #noita ost #noita soundtrack #niilo takalainen #grotto #baba is you #video games #noita (game) #noita game ost #noita game soundtrack #game music #soundtracks #Game soundtrack #witch #witches #magic #Game Soundtracks #pixel #pixel game #e3 #nollagames #holy #mountain

[deadmallwasteland]

express your emotions with pixel art

#wwow my handwriting is readable for once #grotto art #pixel art

[pleasaan]

Had a neat idea to try and make a jungle grotto inside of a skull. The outcome: Rotten Grotto. Pretty happy with this one!

#jungle #pixel art #skull #lush #rotten #grotto

[j4gm]

2020-02-10: Beyond the Grotto [228/283]

♪ I'd rather be anything but me, a leaf on a tree, a bug or a bee... ♪

This is from my quest to draw a daily piece of pixel art for every episode of Adventure Time.

Another fun little guest-animated episode. I kind of love lards and the way they are scattered through the series, because they're the kind of fictional creature that make you say "Wait, do those actually exist?" In the show, all the characters talk about them as casually as they would talk about a rabbit or whatever, and they're completely mundane and uninteresting animals. I'm not too ashamed to admit that I Googled them back when I first watched the show to check they weren't real...

#adventure time #pixel art #marceline #my art

[hollowsart]

If the Volya region was a Pokemon game:

“Animated” talk sprites for every important character interaction. Think back to the x-transceiver in BW/2!

A mini-game racing game with specific Pokemon that are ridable in the mini-game and outside of it as well. (Rapidash, Tauros, Dodrio, etc) Think something like the pokethlon in HGSS, that racing game!

Some wandering Pokemon as well as wild grass battles.

Hidden Grottos make a return and you can find rare Pokemon in them.

Almost free-roam movement without being so confined to a grid

Gorgeous pixel scenery and cutscenes to show off the scenery, think back to those beautiful scenes in PMD Time & Dark & Sky!

Pokemon that follow you like in HGSS but they have differing sizes.

DPPt’s mining game returns but is improved and made better!

#Ghostie mumbles #I might add more to this if I can think of anything else to add!