Time for the Wrap-Up, including a dip back into the Revenge of 1989!
Custom Sprites – Final Fight: new sprites of Cody (a redone fight stance), Poison, Rolento, and Sodom have been added.
Of course, all the new sprites were added to the GFX Generators, where you can use menus to make a pic like the one at the top of this post!
Finally, it’s time for the Wrap-Up video. But it’s not just that, it’s a recap of 2024’s updates and videos, a mini Toy Haul with 3 displays, and another show of Final Fight clips that’s basically a preview for a larger Final Fight showcase in 2025.
That’s all for 2024. Thanks for visiting the site and I hope you’ll have even more fun in 2025!
A bigger update is coming, but I just wanted to give an earlier heads-up about what’s happening. Here’s what’s in today’s update:
Sprites: Fixes and improvements to all the Final Fight galleries. ToyBoss: A new Marvel Legends group pic of the playable Captain America and the Avengers line-up with the recent do-over of Iron Man’s “Neo-classic” armor (but with the later John Romita Jr. space boots). The retro carded figure from a few years ago is that exact version, but that mold was from when MLs were a bit smaller, making him look odd if he stands next later figures.
Due to a lot of offline things that have been going on for months, the main December update (not this one) will not be that big this year, or at least as big as I planned. In fact, I can say that about a lot of the past year. Even though I need a break to give my drawing hand some rest, I was able to finish some of the static sprites I planned for the site and some animations you’ll see on video before 2025 starts. Here’s a preview of what’s on the way:
There will be a small toy-themed update next week, and then the Wrap-Up will happen a few days before the new year starts.
Reminder: Rob “Dire51” Strangman’s books about video games (and more) are available again on Lulu.com!
Wrapping up the month with a few odds-and-ends before getting back to work on some commission and then getting ready for the you-know-what in October.
Game Index:
– Crime Fighters: a bit of rewriting, plus extra outside confirmation that the game was the template for Konami’s later brawlers, thanks to a great interview Time Extension had with some Konami staff members who worked on it.
mini-logos:
– DC Comics: the 1976 DC Bullet (welcome back, best DC logo)
ToyBoss: a few new photos added, mostly of my newly-acquired 52Toys Mike Haggar figure.
Arcade Quartermaster‘s update is live, too! Two new shrines: Data East’s ninja platformer Hangzo and Konami’s Jackal (a.k.a. Top Gunner)
Reminder that Rob ‘Dire51’ Strangman (author and creator of the OPCFG, West Mansion Splatterhouse fan site, and more) has a Kickstarter campaign for four of his books about gaming and more, including updated versions of his previously released books. Please check it out, back it if you can, and spread the word about the campaign!
Another game-related Kickstarter from a long-time site runner to check out is the NES Endings Compendium: Volume 2. This one is from Rey from the VGMuseum, one of the best screenshot and ending resources out there (and my first go-to site choice when I need to look at screenshots I haven’t taken yet).
So… if you’ve been on social media you may have noticed that people have been trying to bring back goofy arguments from 2016 while the the world feels like it’s on the verge of falling apart for frighteningly real reasons. Really, some of them never stopped, checking in every few months to see if they could get any traction off the grifts again. A while back I’d joked that if this is what’s hot in the streets right now that I’d just start reposting my 2016 updates and acting like they’re new. Now that 2016 nostalgia is at its peak and more annoying than ever, I’ve made a decision about October: I’m going to bring back something dumb from 2016, too.
Time to wrap up this year’s 1989 celebration with new sprites and a new video!
Custom Sprites:
– Final Fight: big update for my 2019 Rolento FF1 sprite
– Ninja Gaiden: new Bomberhead sprite added.
– Strider: new Strider Hiryu pose (based on the Famicom ad from the unrealeased game) and a new side-view idle sprite of the Grandmaster added
– Marvel Comics: Dazzler (heavily updated sprites + new separate and more accurate PotX and Konami outfits) and the Juggernaut (PotX) (appeared in the 1989 NES Uncanny X-Men game and 1989’Pryde of the X-Men’ cartoon pilot)
Bad news: the video is ALMOST ready. It’ll be added to the YouTube Channel and this post either later tonight or tomorrow. Sorry for the delay, but I’ll try to make it worth the wait.
The video is now ready! Here’s the Revenge of 1989 Sprite Showcase video!
Technically I should’ve called it a Showcade (multiple showcases), but some aren’t even whole showcases, but… whatever, man.
This hasn’t been an easy month (for offline reasons), so a lot of items I’d planned just aren’t ready yet, but you’ll see previews of a few (especially the backgrounds) in the new video.
Today’s update has fighter-sized sprites of movie characters from 1989 and some new Kunio/RCR 8-Bit style sprites of 1989 game characters!
Custom Sprites:
– DC Comics: 1989 Batman and criminal from the opening scene, and a generic Joker gang member.
– Movies: Indiana Jones (Last Crusade style). Also, this gallery now has navigation near the top that takes you directly to a movie’s section by clicking on its mini-logo.
– Kunio-Kun/RCR 8-Bit style: Haggar, redone Poison and Roxy, and Buggin’ Out (Giancarlo Esposito) from Do the Right Thing (1989).
Mini-logos: Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade added to movies.
Bonus 1989 content: my pre-ordered TMNT VHS April O’Neil figure by NECA just got here weeks ahead of the ship date. She’s in both the arcade and NES TMNT games that were released in 1989, so she’s theme-appropriate!
I thought I missed my chance to get this earlier, so I feel lucky here. I’ll try to get some photos of her and the green machine (I have all four VHS box-release Turtles, too) before the month is through.
Reminder: The Revenge of 1989 – (35th anniversary edition) Sprite Showcase hits at the end of the month and I’m mostly working on that. Here’s a few teases of what else I was working on this week:
Street Fighter Alpha 3: All of the standard Vs. portraits have been added from the arcade, Playstation, and SFA3 Max PSP versions. I can’t guarantee the PSP rips 100% because I had to fill them in with ripped tiles.
“So what did you do all month?”
Some of it was spent working on things you’ll see through the rest of this year.
I also spent a lot of time trying to get better at using Blender. A background you may recognize from this site’s image generators is coming to life in 3D and I’m taking the chance to get used to doing real UV textures.
It takes a lot of time to find reference for just the toy packaging fronts when I do the 2D version, and it’s much more trying to map out 3D versions, but I don’t have the words to describe how cool it is see that in motion. There’s an unlisted test video on my YouTube account if you want to see it in motion, but I’ll have a better example in a video you’ll see next month (maybe even before the anniversary update) and you’ll probably see it again this September. The obvious problem is that makes me want to get back to an earlier background I wanted to remake in 3D.
So here’s the thing. I made a quick Marvel vs. Capcom video to celebrate the news of the upcoming collection and posted it to Twitter and Instagram. I was going to upload a slightly better version to YouTube but didn’t want to risk it with the copyrighted song and used the MvC1 end credits when I posted it there. Chicken? Maybe. Still, here’s that version:
I had way more ideas for a longer version, so maybe I’ll save the R&B classic soundtrack for that instead.
Mr. Q just put up another combo-heavy preview for the “Fight Forever” project!
You can tell Mr. Q is really having fun with these promo intros! I did the pencil and pixel work for the big select screen portraits, but I’d be hype for this game even if I didn’t, because you know how I feel about Final Fight!
Speaking of Final Fight, I’ve seen pics going around of insane scalping of 52Toys’ Final Fight action figures, including someone trying to sell all 3 for over $300! Don’t feed the scalpers! Two places I’ve bought from before still have them for pre-order.
– BigBadToyStore has all three for $34 each and a shipping minimum of $4.
– AliExpress has them straight from 52Toys where they’re $35 each, $99 if all bought at the same time, and free shipping.
Stay tuned for July 19, the birthday of this website!
Comic Books: Ace Harlem, the first recorded Black hero to star in a comic book story (part of an anthology book) in 1947. He’s been on my to-sprite list ever since I first heard about him a few years ago, so I’m glad he’s also the first public domain character I’ve sprited (and won’t be the last). Marvel Comics: a redrawn Konami stance for Storm. Final Fight: Damnd gets a new standing laugh frame added to the site.
Is that not enough Storm for you? You’re in luck then, because Storm is star of the brand-new Superhero Sprite Showcase video!
That other new pose you saw in the video will hit the site at a later date, I still want to make some adjustments to it.
This is the first real Superhero Showcase I’ve done since finishing the new computer in early 2021, so I had to hunt down and re-render some of the series’ files and streamline how the main videos are assembled. This should make future videos easier, which is a good thing because you’ll be seeing the Superhero Showcase happen more often. My current plan is to make one all-new episode followed by one update until the all four original episodes (Wolverine, Superman, Iron Man, Bat-Man) get remade.
BTW: There was another mandatory PHP update by the hosting company yesterday, so please let me know if you run into any errors. I did some basic checking, along with trying those partial palette choice characters in the image generators and didn’t see any problems. I’ll look around some more this weekend. There will be yet another of these later this year (didn’t seem like this happened that often until recently), so I want to make sure things are alright before all that.
Huge congratulations to the Arcade Quartermaster site celebrating it’s 16-bit anniversary! The site celebrates with a giant update of four new shrines: Final Fight Revenge, the relatively-recently uncovered Danger Express, Lone Wolf and Cub, Steel Gunner 2. Be sure to take a second look at some of the other shrines there if you haven’t been there in a while, because the webmaster’s been updating some of the older sections and you’ll never know what you’ll find (or hear)!
I’ve mostly been chipping away at getting this site ready for the server upgrade, but I couldn’t let August 9th go by without a little Revenge of 1989 recognition to honor a year that brought a lot of the games (and other things) that led to the creation of this site. That’s a literal statement, because the first version of this site were Sega Smash Pack shots of Golden Axe, Revenge of Shinobi, and Altered Beast for the Sega Genesis, all games that hit the U.S. in 1989. So here’s the newness:
Custom Sprites:
– Final Fight: Andore (Final Fight wait pose)
– Gang Wars: new gallery, starting with the heroes Mike and Jackie.
– Shinobi: all-new Kasumi (the Revenge of Shinobi)
– TMNT: NES 1989 game stance (with and without weapons) for Leonardo, Donatello, Raphael, and Michelangelo.
All new custom sprites were also added to the the main GFX Generators, where you can assemble your own fake screenshots and group pics.
The Revenge of 1989: A new timeline page was added, various adjustments were made to the articles, including the confirmation (thanks to an interview with Time Extension magazine) that Konami’s Crime Fighters was indeed their template for later games like Ninja Turtles and the Simpsons.
As I mentioned at the start of this post, I’m working on an all-around behind-the-scenes update of this site, using a hard drive copy of it that simulates the server update. I’ve got a lot of the site working and even the image generators are over 70% working before I stopped to do this update. This is some heavy work, and it’s costing me extra site host fees to run on the older server, so I won’t be doing much other than that until it’s done, trying to finish it (and fixes to my other sites) before the site hosting charge hits my wallet again in September. I started a separate post about that in this link to keep track of where I am in the upgrade project.
Despite that, there will be an update to the ToyBoss section this month because I’ve got that main page working with new code that works on its own and I’ve got some roster pics to update (especially since I got that new camera).
Street Fighter Alpha/Zero 3 portraits: Andore/Hugo (Final Fight/SF), Captain Commando, Harley Quinn (DC Comics), Spider-Man (Marvel), Black Widow (Marvel Comics)
Four of these were requests that I already wanted to make, but for various reasons (I had a Hugo/Andore sketched years ago, but didn’t like it) didn’t get done until now. Harley Quinn is just one I just had an itch to make.
Seeing my custom portraits in fake screenshots is one thing, but did you ever wonder how they’d look in the game? Using a new rendering technique, I made a short video using some of the older portraits I made from scratch:
What’s that rendering technique? I’ll tell you at the end of this post.
GFX Generator: The engine itself got some minor fixes, including a fix to some reflection effects. Also
– a “ScrollTech pattern background (added by request) added to the main generator
– The new portraits were added to the GFX Generators, mainly the SFA3 generator
I’m still on “break” but I had to add a little something to the site to celebrate the 35th anniversary of Capcom’s Street Fighter series:
GFX Generators
– Street Fighter Alpha 3: SFA3 Max portraits added to Maki, Yun, Eagle, made from PPSSPP VRAM rips, as perfect as I could get them. “Where’s Ingrid?” I’ll get hers eventually. Characters who were mistakenly left off the “guest characters” list have been added: Geese Howard, Mai Shiranui, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
edit 2022 August 31st: HERE COMES A NEW CHALLENGER!
Ingrid from Street Fighter 3 Max & Capcom Fighting Evolution/Jam (and the sadly canceled Capcom Fighting All-Stars) is added to the SFA3 and fighter-scale generator.
I’m getting ready to work on some paid projects, but I also made some progress on the Guy vs. Mad Gear video.
