Rediscover the world you have lost.

We know what a NES game looks like. Much to the consternation of classic PC and arcade enthusiasts, Nintendo's hardware dominates our collective memory of the "8-bit" aesthetic; when an artist, game developer, or barcade owner invokes "8-bit" art, the imagery they rely on comes not from the Apple II, BBC Micro, or PC-8801, but from the 56 colors possible on the Nintendo Entertainment System. When Final Fantasy recalls its late 80s heritage, it pulls its spritesheets from the NES, not the MSX2. When Capcom needs to print anniver...

There are two fundamental approaches to pixel art, both addressing the same problem from opposite ends of a resolution. The traditional approach is to build up your sprite at its target resolution, magnifying your view field to place one pixel at a time, building up from the darkest colors to your lightest. (Unless you're working with the Game Boy Color, in which case it's a lot like watercolor: start with the highlights and paint down to your dark stuff.) This kind of pixeling is appropriate for very low-res work, it's what you see in Shibuya Kazuko's Final...

In 1999, NTT DoCoMo launched their proprietary mobile networking service, i-mode. This service is best known in the west for its library of exclusive game software that has never been exported out of Japan and will likely be lost forever in 2026, but truthfully i-mode encompassed an entire walled-garden ecosystem spanning not just games and applications, but a separate internet not accessible from non-i-mode devices. Imagine if Apple created an i-net full of web pages that only iOS devices could access, where only licensed users could create...

There are two basic trees from which virtually all item crafting stems, both released in 1997: Atelier Marie: The Alchemist of Salburg in May, and Ultima Online in September. Marie was never localized, and the Atelier franchise as a whole was outside the Anglosphere's mainstream until Ryza's release in late 2019, so the influence of the Atelier games on various item crafting systems is not widely known in the western world. However, when you look at the financial success of Marie in Japan and the sudden influx of Japanese crafting...

When I first took up PGMMV, there were no good tutorials on it. Not even the built-in official tutorial was much help, because it tended to break depending on your monitor's resolution and start pointing to the wrong things on-screen, and the explanation just didn't go deep enough. Everybody was basically just screwing around, swapping info, and pushing out very basic video guides because there wasn't much else to go on. Being truthful, video guides kinda suck for all the same reasons listening to an adjunct instructor's lectures suck. (Apologies to...

You rarely hear people talk about anime without also hearing them talk about how anime was better when they didn't know anything about it. It's like some kind of proxy nostalgia, longing for a time you only experienced through dubbed Sailor Moon and Pokémon episodes aired in syndication. In the last decade it came into fashion to speak of a monolithic "west", with the maelstrom of gamer-anime fandom pitting all of North America and continental Europe against the tiny island of Japan while somehow ignoring the entire rest of Asia and...