Happy 30th Birthday, NES!

Game fans all over the internet are celebrating the #Happy30thNES event (thanks to PlatinumFungi) on their websites and on Twitter. Made to honor the 30th Anniversary of the Nintendo Entertainment System, the event is a chance for us to show and tell why we love that gray box of 8-bit magic. I’ve done my part by making 30 new NES-like sprites based on a few of my favorite NES games while using colors from the original sprites:

You can find the separate sprites (and an extra sprite that didn’t make the cut) in the new NES-like 32 gallery.

No offense to my Atari 2600 and ColecoVision, but the NES was the first system I owned that could play the kinds of games that inspired me to make this site. Platformers, beat ’em ups, run ‘n guns and similar genres really started to come into their own at that time and the Nintendo Entertainment System was one of the best ways to play those games at home. It’s the beginning of what I consider to be the sweet spot of action games becoming adventures while still being unashamed of being games. That’s probably why we still see new games using the look and feel of those NES classics and it’s definitely a big part of why many of us are celebrating its 30th anniversary today.

Help spread the word about the event if you can and feel free to talk about your own Nintendo favorites in the comments section!

Articles: I’ve had this page about Rob Strangman’s Memoirs of a Virtual Caveman book for a long time, but didn’t finish it until now. It’s made in the old, abandoned game review format because of a few jokes in the info section that I thought were funny at the time (sigh). As it says on the page, I’m probably a bit biased because I drew the cover, but I really dug that book and the voice it gives to various parts of the video game community. The article is here and I hope you give Rob’s book a chance!

Arcade Quartermaster’s latest batch of game shrines is monster-themed and features Night Slashers (one of my favorites), Kiki KaiKai (Taito’s original Pocky and Rocky game), Laser Ghost and Nightmare in the Dark.

You know, we’ve had a lot of fun here today, but it’s time to get serious. Dead serious.

Horror returns to ScrollBoss next week. Be there* and be scared.

(by “there” I mean “here.” Just making that clear.)

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Fastest Week Alive, pt. 1: Gordon’s a SPRITE?

I’ve been a big fan of the Flash since I was only a few pixels tall, so I’m having my own little celebration of the character’s 75th anniversary on both Illmosis and ScrollBoss. The Illmosis site has the new picture I’ve drawn of the Flash and this place is getting a bunch of sprites and a new animation. Everything in the post will be Flash-related either by name or by nature. Let’s hit the ground running with the newness!

Custom Sprites:
– DC Comics: Flash Jay Garrick (two poses), Barry Allen (a new scratch-made run pose and an old running sprite made from Cyclops), the Reverse-Flash
– Movies: Flash Gordon (1980s) and Grandmaster Flash (in Wild Style outfit)
– Capcom: Flashman
– Sega: Flashgal (all new sprites, three weapons)

Mini-logos:
– DC Comics: Flash (Flash Comics), Reverse-Flash
– movies: Flash Gordon (1980)

GFX Generators: All new items, logos and characters added to the GroupShot and VsMaker generators.

Now for the special part. This animation is a rough version of something I’ve made for a long-running (groan) idea, but it’s not a Flash sprite set. Everything in it was made from scratch, including that test background:


You’ll get more glimpses of it later this year.

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Mini-update: Mega Man NES edits + more


Graphic Generators – I added 8 new edits to the Mega Man NES styles in the Fake Screenshot generators. The Ninja Warriors 16×16 font in the GroupShot generators was also fixed.

Yesterday’s update on Illmosis has the work progress animation for Abobo and the news page talks a bit about what I’ll be busy with for a while. It’s time to get the new member of the Illmosis network up and running. ScrollBoss will still have small updates and the ScrollBoss Tumblr will remain active, too.

Shadi added some new pages to his beautiful Arcade Quartermaster website! One of the new things is a shrine section for the X-Men beat-em-up by Konami. If you haven’t checked out his site before, browse the whole thing!

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25th A: Kid Icarus, Mega Man and more

This year is the 25th Anniversary of many great games and this update pays tribute to a few of them. I planned to have separate updates for them, but that big commission a few months ago forced me to condense them into this chunky tribute. To make it worse, a cold I caught right before Christmas robbed a few more days of work out of this update as well. Still, between this and the Mega Man NES-style screenshot generator I posted a while ago, I hope this is a worth tribute to 1987.



Graphic Generators – For those who missed the debut of the new Fake Screenshot generator and its NES-style pixel flavor,
Fake Screenshot: Rush, Eddie, a new Mega Man edit based on an MvsC win pose were added I also added more edits since the December 17th update.
Vs. Maker & GroupShot: Dr. Light, Dr. Wily, Eggplant Wizard, Pit, Wonder Momo added. Abobo (new sprite), Joe Musashi (Shinobi 1 sprite added), Marian (new Double Dragon 1 sprite), Mega Man (new palette and re-sized NES sprites), Radd Spencer (new sprite) updated.

Custom Sprites – this update’s additions are:
Capcom: Dr. Light, Dr. Wily, Bionic Commando (arcade version)
Namco: Wonder Momo
Nintendo: Pit, Eggplant Wizard and Monoeye from Kid Icarus
Sega: Joe Musashi (original Shinobi uniform)
Technos: new Marian sprite, new scratch-made Abobo sprite (to replace that crappy Hulk edit), slightly-modded/improved Lopar and Williams.

Sprites – Kid Icarus (sprites and animations from the original NES/Famicom game added).

Fake Screenshots – “Rokman (title screen)” was added. No, that’s not a typo.

Mini-logos – Dr. Wily, Dr. Light and Dr. Right added to Capcom section.

I’d like to thank everyone who has been enjoying the site this year, especially the those who have given feedback. Most of this year has been okay for me, but I’d randomly get some really good feedback right when I was feeling like a wet food stamp. You made me feel better and that caused me to push myself to make updates bigger (especially that Halloween update). I’d also like to thank those of you have been digging the Tumblr account I’ve used to show off weird things that didn’t quite have a spot on the site just yet or game-related thoughts that were rolling around in my head at the moment.

What’s up for 2013: I’m not going to talk a bunch of smack only for it to not happen, so I’m going to stay quiet on it. All I’m going to say is that I’ve been working on a bunch of things I’ve wanted to show you for YEARS, huge chunks of it were finished in 2012 and, time willing, 2013 might be when some of it is done enough to show. Besides the fact that people will pretty much swipe anything that you post on the ‘net if you preview it before the main project is done, it really is better if you see some of this stuff in action first. For now, continue to have Happy Holidays, including a Happy New Year!

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Happy 25th Anniversary, Mega Man!

With this day being the 25th Anniversary of Rockman’s release in Japan, sites are celebrating everywhere, especially with release of the Street Fighter X Mega Man fan game. I was going to save this for the bigger update that’s on the way, but I can’t just let Mega Man’s birthday go uncelebrated here.



This is a new generator that uses some fixes and improvements I made to the main GFX Generator engine. A few things still don’t work 100%, but I think you can still have some fun with it.
Fake Screenshot

I’ll make more Mega Man-style edits these if people tell me that they like this generator. Let me know if you like this generator and want to see more Mega-edits! There’ll be more Mega Man-related things in the “1987” update that will hit the site next week.

edit (2012/12/17, 9:42 PM EST): Minor quick-fix to the resizer so that the smaller sprites aren’t shrunken to nothingness.

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Back in Effect

Here’s a little wake-up call to let you know that the site has been unpaused.

GFX Generators – The huge Capcom character section was split up into multiple areas to make things a bit more clear. More MSH backgrounds were added to most of the variable background screenstyles.
Capcom: Mega Man (added sprites), Rush (new), Roll (added sprites), Miechelle Heart (added MvsC sprite, new green palette)
Marvel: Doctor Doom (added sprites)

Sprite Rips – All 100 CD portraits from both Megaman & Bass (GBA) and Rockman & Forte (Super Famicom) are now in downloadable .ZIP files. Each is a separate .PNG and all have the same alignment according to where they are on the screen.

Game Index – Alien Syndrome (arcade), Contra (NES), Mega Man (NES), Shinobi (arcade), Xenophobe (arcade) added.

Game Logos – Alien Syndrome (arcade, including an animated one), Devil World (arcade, added to Dark Adventure section), Gun.Smoke (arcade and NES), Kung Fu Kid (SMS), Rainbow Islands (arcade), Rastan Saga (arcade), Solomon’s Key, Super Dodge Ball (arcade), Wardner (World and Japan arcade versions), Xenophobe (arcade) added.

Mini-Logos – Xenophobe added to Atari-Midway-Williams section.

There will be a small horror and monster-related update around Halloween.

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News: Elevator Action Deluxe, Hip Tanaka, TOM-PON

Site stuff: I’m still working on this site while doing character designs, logo work and other preparations for my own projects. Work on a new GFX Generator feature can be found in this weblog post and improvements to the Game Index section can be found in this post. A scratch-made sprite of DC’s Black Lightning was posted on Illmosis.

Breakin’ News

Elevator Action Deluxe, an update, remake and overhaul of Taito’s classic “Elevator Action” spy-shooter, is out on PSN today.

It’ll be a while before I can buy this one (gotta pay the website bill soon) but it looks sharp and sounds funky. I like how the in-game documents you steal are Taito documents like flyers that you can view in a gallery. The character designs have a Lupin-esque look mixed with the classic official artwork.

Between this and the criminally underrated Moon Diver, Square-Enix, who now owns Taito and it’s intellectual properties, has thrown some great old-schoolian love our way. I hope those of you who are angry about a lapse in a game series with more entries than most entire companies have games will take some time to support the companies that put work into projects like this when they really don’t have to.

Kotaku feature on classic Nintendo composer, Hip Tanaka
It’s just a short overview of the man’s work but it’s always good to see him get attention for his music. Do yourself a favor and don’t look at the comments section on that page. I’m serious.


Capcom-Unity: Rockman-Unity TOM-PON interview
Capcom-Unity has links to a translated and subtitled interview that Rockman-Unity had with TOM-PON, artist and background designer for some classic Capcom titles starting with Mega Man for the NES.
(Note: more posts and interview segments came out after I posted this so I’m updating this news post as they’re added)

part 1 | part 2 | part 3 | part 4 | part 5 | part 6

Let’s end this one on an high note, courtesy of Wizzy…

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