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They don't look as awful either. (although still a little off.) Honestly, I've looked online for DKC GBC, and every picture I saw used the same color scheme as in the video. What's the most popular GBC emulator, because the colors must be way off.

This is kind of a random thing to say, but I'm surprised the sky on the jungle levels in DKC GBC aren't using a color gradient like in the SNES game. I assume it's relatively easy to change colors per scanline on the GBC, seeing how many games do it? I honestly always thought it kind of looked strange though on the GBC vs. how it looks on the SNES, because you have a "16 bit level" gradient with near NES graphics placed on top, if that even makes sense. You know, do any games actually change the tilemap color, as in not color 0 or whatever color is the sky? It would be like having an 1x8 palette area. I don't know how many colors you can change per scanline though.

It's probably still Visual Boy Advance I presume, but that one does have the color correction I was talking about... I think it's disabled by default though, which probably explains it.


Wacky Races does it on the track to create some variety (e.g. the rivers with the bridges, or the difference between dirty and rocky areas), take a look. Also apparently it was attempted in Telefang, but no idea how reliable it is (unless that was removed just to work on a non-color Game Boy?).

No wonder why those weren't used. It looks almost as bad as a youtube video from 2005.

...but predates the Game Boy Advance. At the time those were some pretty good graphics for a handheld actually.

I honestly thought they looked perfectly fine. There's some weird attribute table problems and blurriness, but it still looks very impressive.

When it came out I thought it was the best looking SNES game.

If you're talking about DKC, I still think the series have the 3 best looking SNES games ever made. I don't care what anyone else says, but I find pre rendered sprites to have a bit of charm to them, but only when done correctly and when the thing that was pre rendered looked good in the first place, which, in my opinion, are both true in this case.

Prerendered sprites can look OK as long as 1) you take into account what palette are you going to use and 2) you put effort into the animations (a lot of early 3D had awful animations, and this was an artist issue, not a technological issue). The bad reputation from prerendered sprites comes from failing horribly at these two things (especially the latter). Something similar happens with digitized actors (which is why Mortal Kombat is like the only series that doesn't look awful with those), or anything not pixelart, really.

I guess Mortal Kombat doesn't look awful for the same reason Prince of Persia doesn't look awful: the massive amounts of cleanup done to the source footage.

Does NBA Jam also look awful? It uses digitized basketball players.

Just had to look up the arcade version. Honestly the console versions looked way more like pixelart. Good catch. To be fair though, it's Midway again, so if they could get it right in Mortal Kombat it's not surprising they could also get it right in other games.

I don't think Prince of Persia quite fits into this category. From what I recall PoP has rotoscoped animations, where the animations are more or less traced from videos of the game creator performing those actions in his house.