Killer7 SINdicate

[Krizzx]

Everyone once and a while I like to look back on how unique and detailed gaming and anime art were back in the 80's and 90's before everyone became homogenized and unintuitive. The arcade were especially a place for creative designs. So many interesting games released that never saw the light of day again.

[Jack]

Hot Damn dat bitch thhhiccccc! She has the thiccest 2d ass I've seen. Even rounder than Claudia & Killer Instinct 2 Orchid.

It's funny how we seem to be going backwards in time, coz now we're almost at 1950s levels of prudery. To the point that putting a thong on a female character will get you cancelled by twitter. As if twitter fucking matter
matters. Shit man, look at how fucking boring & generic Xenoblade 3 looks! XB2 always had an interesting look to me coz the characters were dressed so exotically. Now they're all dressed in generic looking Highschool uniforms. It seems that a leak I heard about over half a year ago, where in XB3 you'll play as a bunch of school brats might be true. They even mentioned that go to different planets. They made it sound like it was going to be an action rpg. Still dunno about that. They did leak that it had a 4 player party though which XB3 does have.

At first when I saw this thread, I was like ooh beat em ups that I never heard of before. Time to add them to muh super Retrocade. Nah it's just fighting games. A lot of fighting games from the SF2 era, just weren't that good.
I had that Dungeon Magic beat em up in a PS2 Taito collection. It's alright.

Everyone once and a while I like to look back on how unique and detailed gaming and anime art were back in the 80's and 90's before everyone became homogenized and unintuitive. The arcade were especially a place for creative designs. So many interesting games released that never saw the light of day again.

They were just using the anime art style from the 80s & early 90s, which looked realistic.
Anime is far more economical now, so they prefer to use simpler, easy to produce art rather than the detailed shadowing & lighting that 80s & early 90s art had.
Also, Japs had plenty more money to waste back in the 80s & early 90s which is why nearly all of their big budget anime films were made during that era.

That's the main reason why you don't see anything like Ninja Scroll, Ghost in the Shell, or Golgo 13 The Professional any more. The budget is just way too high, for what has ultimately always been a niche product, except for this short duration of time during the late 80s - 2000s. (In America they had stuff like Frank Miller comics & TMNT Mirage comics. Miller himself was extremely influenced from violent anime during that era.)

The fans of anime these days, are generally no-life retards or kids so the focus has switched over to either that Pokemon style of anime, or that harem anime junk like Sword Fart Online.
When I was kid, most people who watched anime were Metal Head Satanists types. (My big bro being one of those types.) So anime during my era, had an aura of taboo surrounding it considering they were like the Japanese version of the Heavy Metal animated movie.


I've also read from plenty of Jap devs such as Iga of Castlevania, and the Monster World team (have you seen that New Asha game? It's fucking ugly! Why can't they just do another sequel in Genesis style?), that Japan doesn't really have any spriters who can sprite like that any more. Which is why they switched over to 3d.
I think the Monster World team even cited Streets of Rage 4 as having art that's so high quality that they could never hope to match it. (LOL! Genesis era sprites actually looked realistic though. SOR4 looks like a cartoon.)

Honestly, how hard could it really be to do another sprite-based game in the style of SOTN?
If indie devs can do it, why can't the professionals do so then?

That game looks way better than Bloodstained's 3d gfx. I wonder how an indie crew got the rights to Record of Lodoss war though.

Detailed sprites still exist, but you only see it in indie games now.

Blazing Chrome is good, but it's overrated as fuck. It's nowhere near the level of its inspiration, Hard Corps.
Great music though.


You'll also never see any spriting on the level of a fighting or beat em up game, which require the most detailed sprites.

Speaking as someone who can sprite in that realistic iconic genesis style. I'm guessing that it just requires too much work.
I tried to make a Beats of Rage beat em up once, which required that I drew the pictures out first but then I had to redraw every single fucking pixel coz you have to resize the pictures into tiny ass 13x20 - 50x50 sized sprites and you do that for every single animation frame. So everything comes out distorted and pixely until you redraw & recolor every single shade, & texture.

3d is faster coz you just make the model, add in the textures on top of the models, and then you tilt the camera to make it mimic the look of a 2d fighter/beat em up.
You can easily tell how souless that shit looks though, since you're generally automating everything.
Even HD art 2d games look souless, like the new Guilty Gear, King of Fighters XII/XIII, that overrated ass DBZ Legends game, Persona fighter, etc. All of those games look like fucking shit. You can easily tell that they're 3d games, using flat 2d art textures.


Meanwhile something like Vampire Savior still looks extremely fast & fluid to this day.

The funny thing is, 2d HD art is how these games would've always looked like if we never had to go through the pixelation process to begin with. So it's a case of forcing yourself to go back in time to work with archaic technology in order to achieve that same detailed look that 2d fighters/beat em ups had during the 90s.

I think another problem is that back then, most of the sprites were usually handled by 1 - 3 people which gave the games a mostly uniform look. I know for certain that stuff like Streets of Rage only had about one guy or was it a girl? Working on all of the in-game gfx, so the rich high detail of those sprites was really the result of one overworked gook, probably camping in front of his computer alongside a rice cooker.
Most people understandably don't want to work in those types of conditions any more. The end result is that we get something like King of Fighters XIII which looks fucking stiff because it's using a simplified artstyle that the whole team can replicate. (That and they're just pictures used as flat textures on top of 3d models.)

in comparison to how fluid & lifelike, '98 looked.


I really miss how realistic ass jiggle used to be in 2d games, lol. I ain't never see detailed ass jiggle in any 3d game ever. Titty jiggle always looks fake as fuck in 3d games whereas for some reason, the jiggle looks fairly lifelike & realistic from 2d fighters like with KOF's Shermie. The jiggle from Street Fighter games have always been realistic imo, especially with SF3 in Elena & Chun Li. Elena's ass doesn't jiggle enough, but she's also far more lean than someone like Chun Li. Fuck I'm still wondering why the fuck Karin wears panties outside of her shorts. Those are supposed to go under your shorts sweety.

[Jack]

Since we're on the subject about how shit was waaayyy better back in the day. Ever noticed how video game sound tracks used to be far more complex back in the 90s? I'm not even talking about something like Chrono Cross. I'm referring to how even simple Techno osts like Ghost in the Shell used to have atmospheric osts that truly made the cyberpunk theme come alive.

When was the last time you've ever heard a techno ost that sounded this hardcore?
Only one I can think of is Streets of Rage 3 which came out a few years earlier. (It will always annoy me that everyone says that ost sounds like shit, when in reality what they're saying is that SOR3 isn't Pop music, like the first two & the fourth one were.)
Although the PS2 GITS had a pretty good ost. It wasn't as good as the PSX one though. PS2 version sounded too much like dance music at parts wheras the PSX game created a legit electronic soundscape.
LOL then you think about what modern day Cyberpunk looks like. It's usually a bunch of rainbow colored trannies and goofy ass retrowave sounding shit that tries hard to mimic the 80s, but that's all it sounds like, a wannabe.

That Cyberpunk 2077 shit is so damn generic. Kinda reminds me of the industrial rock from the nu-Doom games.

Meanwhile, GITS go hardcore


I remember being mesmerized by the insane intro beat. It also helps that the PSX version has the hottest Motoko that's ever existed.


There''s so many dope ass cuts from the GITS PSX ost that I can't even pick a favorite.
PS2 GITS had some good tracks, but it was mostly generic Drum N bass shit.
There weren't as many atmospheric soundscapes as the PSX original.
Although I've always liked that song, which is drum b bass, but it has actual ambiance.


The PSP music was good, but it just sounded like the tv show. SO it's some weird ass European pop shit, instead of that heavy industrial sound that the PSX game had.

[Krizzx]

At first when I saw this thread, I was like ooh beat em ups that I never heard of before. Time to add them to muh super Retrocade. Nah it's just fighting games.

I was planning on posting a lot of stuff eventually. Things with unique or detailed art from the 80's and 90s.








For the longest time, I couldn't remember what the name of this game was. I saw a vid of it years ago, then went to look for it again, but I didn't know the name. I just happened to run across a vid one day when I wasn't looking for it. There are so few 2D fighting games with animation this detailed.

[Krizzx]

I miss the age of games like these. Nothing particularly exeptional, but it had a unique visual style with gameplay that looks pretty solid. Kind of reminds me of that Capcom D&D Arcade game. Can't tell if the enemies are CG sprites or claymation, but I like the style.




That design for Scorpion was awesome. They need to put him in another game.

[Jack]

At first when I saw this thread, I was like ooh beat em ups that I never heard of before. Time to add them to muh super Retrocade. Nah it's just fighting games.

I was planning on posting a lot of stuff eventually. Things with unique or detailed art from the 80's and 90s.

I already own those games on the Switch lol. Except for the Gladiator game. That's one I never seen before. I generally ignore most Chinese & Korean made Knights of Valor beat em ups, which all seem to be re-sprites of Sengoku 3.

Or at best, they're using the same exact engine.
KOV games remind me of Gaia Crusaders, which actually was developed by the Sengoku 3 devs.


It's a good game, but it ain't no Battle Circuit. Damn near everything about Battle Circuit is perfect except for the characters, story & setting ayy lmao! BC would be at Streets of Rage 2's level of fame if it were just less weird. The gameplay is certainly way better. Even then, I play Final Fight & Warriors of Fate the most from Capcom Arcade Stadium coz they're the most normal beat em ups. Cadillacs & Dinosaurs & AvP are the peak imo, although Battle Circuit actually has better gameplay. I'd rather be playing as a badass Predator though. The entire BC rosters are goofy looking freaks. (Revenge of DeathAdder has an even worse roster though.) Although a playable Plant monster is pretty badass. Makes me wonder why they never made an official Street Fighter beat em up. One where you play as Blanka on the streets of Brazil would've been cool.


BTW, LOL! Supposedly the Brazilian Capcom staff were trying to dissuade Capcom of Japan from giving Laura Matsuda a full blown thong.
https://streetfighter.fandom.com/wiki/Laura

Many of her designs heavily emphasized her sex appeal, particularly for her rear, but the Brazilian staff encouraged them to stray away from a full thong.

Somehow, I don't find that believable. Why the fuck would Brazilians care? They still wear thongs on the street lol.
American prudery is really getting out of control.


It's gotten to the point where I think it's up to us gamers (well I'm more of a lapsed gamer since I'm transitioning towards being one of those Pokemon noobs who play nothing but Pokemon.)
to keep the soul of old school gaming alive through indie gaming (I mean actual indies. As in you release games straight out of your fucking car trunk! AYY LMAO! Forget about Steam or any major retailer coz you're just going to get cancelled by American puritans.) coz major release games are all the same White boy Lefty pandering bullshit, where women aren't allowed to walk outside without a fucking hijab.

I really miss how female characters back in the day, all wore thongs. Fuck even in real life wrestling, the women were always dressed in thongs and they were still just Rated G or Rated PG.

Weird how suddenly, thongs are verboten coz the American government is extremely gay.

For the longest time, I couldn't remember what the name of this game was. I saw a vid of it years ago, then went to look for it again, but I didn't know the name. I just happened to run across a vid one day when I wasn't looking for it. There are so few 2D fighting games with animation this detailed.

I know that game through Psikyo, coz I was a shmup gamer back in the day. I even found some Raiden osts that I had laying around in the house that I never knew I had for some reason lol. You'll never see fighting games with that level of animation again because they're not cost effective. Every single one of them flopped. Art of Fighting 3, Street Fighter 3, Daruku etc., none of these games really did that well in arcades, despite how absurd their spriting budgets must've been coz they're animated way better than most anime.

Psikyo's shooters have far less detailed sprites & animation but they always made bank from them and psikyp shooters still get constant re releases whereas Daruku is almost a forgotten memory. I dunno, I always confuse it with Blitzkampf. I could never find a working rom of Daruku.
Personally, I wouldn't mind if we just went back to Street Fighter Alpha/Darkstalkers era quality of animation. That was the era of the best fighting games, and while the artstyle is far more cartoony than stuff like SF2, it was still realistic enough. Unlike the full blown cartoony bullshit of modern games. Which has to be like that, because modern Jap game sprite artists can't draw. It's not me saying that, it's what's the actual devs have been claiming. I really don't buy it with the Monster World team though. How fucking hard could it be to sprite another game like Monster World 4 & Wonderboy in Monster World? I could recreate that entire game by myself.
It ain't like the Streets of Rage 3 sprite art, which went for the same realistic artstyle as Kenshiro era King of Fighter games, which would actually require an entire team of people who know what they're doing.

Back to what I was saying about 80s-2000s era game osts. The shit we were banging to back in the day was far more complex than the generic shit you hear in modern gaming osts.

I used to ask myself. Why the fuck am I into techno anyway? it all sounds like shit. Then i hear what it used to sound like back in the 80s & 90s. The oldschool techno sounds like I'm listening to an orchestra, made completely with computer sounds lol.

That's motherfucking Sega Genesis, yet despite its system limitations, the Genesis was still able to create one of the most isolated & foreboding osts of all time through Ecco the Dolphin. It really sounds like a voyage to the deepest darks of the ocean.

Nothing on SNES even compares, not even Super Metroid and I love Supe's ost. Although it's mostly coz the compositions are good but the actual SNES chip wasn't able to do the Metroid sound justice. Now this ecco shit on the other hand. It legit sounds like a haunting place filled with monsters.

This is prob one of the best video game songs of all time, and it gets no love coz Tommy Tallarico composed it, lol. Hey mang, as much of an asshole as that guy is. He deserves it, coz he's fucking talented.

[Krizzx]

The PC 88 and 98 also had a lot of games with great artwork that will probably never see the light of day again. This was an era where devs really new how to do more with less.

[Krizzx]

This has early 90s written all over it.



Unique art styles. That is something else I miss from the 90's. Everything didn't look exactly the same. Sure, its not the most appealing look, but things like this made games stand out.

[Krizzx]

Now this is what I'm talking about. Everything about that shit was 90's as fuck. Then its just some bullshit puzzle game when you play, lol. All that production and FMV for this. They don't make them like this anymore. The age when people made FMV's just because they could. Shit must have been really cheap back then.



I never even knew this shit existed. I thought Maximum Velocity was their first foray into 3D.



Now, I remember seeing a video of this series before and always wanted to try it. Mach Breaker Numen. Another one of those things you could only see before the 2000s. The sprite work and stile are awesome. Especially part 2.

[Cat]

This is prob one of the best video game songs of all time, and it gets no love coz Tommy Tallarico composed it, lol. Hey mang, as much of an asshole as that guy is. He deserves it, coz he's fucking talented.

Why is Tommy Tallarico considered an asshole?