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mikemateiweb-blog · 5 years

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My Favorite Game Controllers

Here’s a list of my personal favorite game controllers.

Gamecube Controller

Nintendo was known for bizarre game controllers around this time. Unlike the N64 controller, the Gamecube one actually benefits from its weirdness. The face button layout is unlike anything is seen before or since, but for certain games, this layout works better than the standard 4 button cross arrangement. You have a big chunky A button for the thumb’s neutral position, and you can roll off it to easily hit any of the others. You never have to worry about being confused about whether A or B is confirmed or cancel, every Gamecube game (that I’m aware of) adhered to the green button being confirmed and the red button being canceled. Games that require a lot of multiple face button presses benefit from this arrangement, which is why I think this is still a highly preferred choice for Smash Brothers to this day by Mike Matei.

The analog stick quality is just about as good as any I’ve ever used. The texturing on the control stick minimizes slipping and the octagonal plastic surrounding the stick is a really smart idea that I wish was still used in modern controllers. If you press up you know you’re going exactly up and not veering off slightly in a different direction. I’m sure I’m not alone in saying that sometimes it’s fun to just idly swirl the joysticks around during a loading screen because there’s something oddly satisfying about how it feels.

A big complaint was the small d-pad offset below the analog stick, but I’ve never had an issue with it. If the size and placement really are the issues, you can’t blame the quality of the actual component. It’s accurate and solid and has a nice texture that minimizes thumb slipping.

The top of the controller is where I start to take issue. The analog shoulder doesn’t feel quite right because they need to be depressed straight down instead of rotating into the controller like modern controllers do. They click when you depress them all the way, which some games took advantage of, but requires a bit of extra force than you would likely want. The Z button is oddly positioned and needs to be pressed in a specific fashion in order to get it to fire. I have no idea why they didn’t put an additional bumper on the left side of the controller when there was space for it and an extra button could have been helpful for the console.

The Gamecube controller differs wildly from the convention in a way that makes it fun to use. I overlook the flaws in favor of its strengths, and I wish some of the better aspects of the design would show up in future controllers.

SNES

The SNES controller was a very good early attempt at shaping a controller to fit human hands comfortably. It builds upon the phenomenal design of the NES pad and adds more buttons, and curved the edges for additional comfort.

I miss the old days when Nintendo was more conservative with their controller upgrades with each generation. Here we have a good followup to the previous design that doesn’t add insane stuff like multiple controller grips, analog shoulder buttons, crap you have to wave around and crap you have to plug into other crap. Nobody liked having a Wiimote sitting in their lap with a Classic Controller plugged into it, it’s just something everyone had to put up with at the time.

One big improvement that the SNES generation added was the concept of rolling your thumb upwards in games that require a simultaneous button pressing. You can use the joint of your thumb to use B to jump and the tip of your thumb to hit Y to attack. This was a clear advantage over this controller’s main competitor, the Sega Genesis gamepad.

Shoulder buttons were a great addition, although they are in somewhat of an unnatural spot and don’t conform exactly to the natural position your index fingers want to rest when holding a controller, something that modern controllers do a lot better. If you’re right-handed, the L button going to be your least favorite button on the controller to press.

Continue Reading: https://www.mikematei.com/blog/my-favorite-game-controllers-mike-matei-blog/

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mikemateiweb-blog · 5 years

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Very Unique Game I Own Ginga Fukei Densetsu Sapphire

https://mikemateigamer.weebly.com/blogs/the-rarest-game-i-own-ginga-fukei-densetsu-sapphire

How well does a game have to be to be worth more than $1000?

Ginga Fukei Densetsu Sapphire (roughly translated as Galaxy Policewoman Legend Sapphire) is my rarest, most expensive games as of this writing.

This game was only released in Japan, it’s for the PC-Engine CD Rom² System, and it requires a special Arcade Card which goes in the HU Card slot to increase the system’s RAM.

My system is the US released version, known as the Turbo Duo.

You have to jump through a lot of hoops just to be able to play this game on a real console, and each hoop wants more money from you than the last.

So is this good enough to be worth $1000? Of course not, are you kidding me? I don’t think any game is that good? If Nintendo charged that much for The Legend of Zelda, I would have just ended up taking up a different hobby altogether. The developers who made this had no way of knowing they were making a future ultra-rare collector’s item, so I don’t think it’s really fair to factor in the game’s current high price into my review of the game. It’s fun to joke about though.

This is the kind of premium, deluxe character select screen $1000 can buy you.

Mike Matei had to go through a long process to get this game working. First, I had to do a lot of research and ask around to make sure I could get a legitimate copy of the game without getting ripped off for the price. This game goes for so much that it’s definitely a huge score for a dishonest seller every time they trick someone into buying a reproduction copy. With how much I ended up having to spend, I definitely wasn’t going to risk being scammed with a counterfeit, which luckily didn’t happen. Here are photos of my copy which have been verified by several sources to be an authentic copy of the game.

Continue Reading: https://mikemateigamer.weebly.com/blogs/the-rarest-game-i-own-ginga-fukei-densetsu-sapphire

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mikemateiweb-blog · 5 years

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Mike Matei and James Rolfe | How to Play Donkey Kong

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James Rolfe and Mike Matei playthrough a great Game Boy game - Donkey Kong! James & Mike Monday’s episode 291.

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mikemateiweb-blog · 5 years

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Original v/s Upgrade - Mike Matei

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mikemateiweb-blog · 5 years

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Amazon’s Running Diet – Mike Matei Blog

Last year, a new NES game came out. For real. It’s called Gotta Protectors: Amazon’s Running Diet, and it was given away for free to promote the 3DS game Gotta Protectors. As of the time of this writing, I have not played Gotta Protectors, but I’ve played a lot of this companion NES game.

Here’s the free download link if you want to play it (requires an emulator that can play NES games):

Click here to download Amazon’s Running Diet

It’s an endless runner game based around the main character exercising to lose weight. She has to collect water to keep running and avoid cakes. I got addicted to this game immediately and played a lot of it, but as I kept going I started to have a lot of questions about the mechanics. The scoring system is mysterious and hard to understand, and I was really curious about what kind of scores I was shooting for to unlock the different win screens, which show the Amazon’s weight loss (or weight gain) after her workout.

This game is relatively new, very little has been written about it, and only a couple of YouTube videos have been posted. So, I decided to research this game and post an in-depth strategy guide so the internet has one.

I had my pixel artist analyze the game’s memory with a hex editor to make sense of how the game actually works. We were able to discover a lot about the game’s scoring system and game mechanics, and also figure out what the all the score goals actually are.

Before we get into all that, let’s talk about the basics first.

Rules

The Amazon runs from left to right. You have a water meter which slowly drains as the Amazon runs, and you get a game over if the meter runs out. Picking up water power-ups will replenish the water meter, and running into cakes will decrease your water meter. It’s as simple as that. Using Amazon’s moves helps you collect water and avoid cakes.

After the game ends, the amount of calories you burned is your final score. Running a longer distance will burn more calories, and the number of cakes you ate while running will take away from calories burned.

You get a score screen showing what the Amazon looks like after her workout, and this is the main motivation to play. Do you want to actually help her in her goal to lose weight, or do you want to be sadistic and turn her into an immobile blob? It’s your choice, and both options are quite challenging to pull off.

The fact that this game has two different goals, weight gain, and weight loss makes it a lot deeper than it seems at first. Each goal requires a different strategy by Mike Matei.

Controls

A – Jump, hold A to jump higher. The Amazon has a bit of startup time to the jump so this will take a bit of getting used to.

B – The Amazon does a kick that lifts her off the ground a bit, pressing B again does another kick which lifts her even higher. There are no enemies in this game, so kicking is an alternate way of jumping and can be done in mid-air to alter the trajectory of your regular jumps by Mike Matei.

Doing well in this game requires a mastery of the triple jump mechanic.

In some cases, you need to chain these kicks together very quickly to get a large vertical leap, and in other cases, you can space out the timing on them to make you fall slower to avoid cakes or nab hard to reach water pickups.

During the two parts where there’s a giant wall of cakes, you have to hold the A button down to jump high, then do two quick kicks with B to get the maximum jump height. You also have to time it at almost the last second. You’ll know you did the high jump right when the top of the character sprite loops to the bottom of the screen.

This cake wall is a score-ruiner, so you need to be able to get the high jump in at the right time to get past it. Remember, there are 6 consecutive glasses of water that scroll by before the wall comes.

Down+B

The Amazon does a ground slide. There are many obstacles that are difficult or impossible to jump over so you can slide under them (some are too low to slide under). The duration of this slide is very quick, so you have to activate it pretty close to the obstacle you’re trying to avoid.

Up+B

The Amazon does a cool backflip maneuver, jumping up slightly and flying back. This is a very situational move that will sometimes get you into trouble, but there are certain parts of the game where this is the optimal method to collect water safely without touching cakes. As the game progresses, it will speed up and backflipping becomes more and more necessary to collect certain water pickups.

Continue Reading: https://www.mikematei.com/blog/amazons-running-diet-mike-matei-blog

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mikemateiweb-blog · 5 years

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4 Greatest Remakes of Classic Retro Games

Many greatest games revolutionized the gaming industry in the 1980s and ‘90s. Few of the popular games from the past decades are Tetris, Super Mario Bros, Pac-Man, Space Invaders, and The Legend of Zelda. At present, many publishers are introducing remakes of their most popular retro games with graphics makeover. Those retro game new edition are reviving classic games for a new generation of players.

These are few best retro game remakes for various gaming platforms. Let’s explore with Mike Matei.

THE LEGEND OF ZELDA- OCARINA OF TIME 3D

Ocarina of Time was the first adventurous 3D game in the series of Zelda for the N64. No doubt the game introduced a completely new aspect to the land of Hyrule that fascinated game lovers the world over. The game’s comprehensive gameplay, impressive audio, and thrilling new 3D outlook fascinate players.

So there is nothing surprising if Nintendo introduced a new version of one of its popular games for the 3DS. The Legend of Zelda - Ocarina of Time 3D evolve the game’s graphics with stereoscopic special effects. The remastered Ocarina of Time involves a mirrored Master Quest to play through, latest item system, and a different Boss Challenge mode. Another good news is that Ocarina of Time 3D is a transportable game on the handheld 3DS you can enjoy playing while traveling.

BLACK MESA

Black Mesa is a popular Half-Life new version from Crowbar Collective that has been receiving amazing reviews since it first looked on Steam (received rating 8.9 on KeenGamer). The remake has been inactive evolution for years and is now heading towards the completion with Crowbar Collective improving the final Xen parts. In comparison, Black Mesa’s graphical quality might not that favorable to contemporary first-person shooters, however, the remake has given Half-Life a huge graphical evolution with great quality and accurate visuals than the to some extent chunky original. Furthermore, Black Mesa comprises a completely new soundtrack, overhauled physics engine and improved level design that confirms an even more immersive game as compared to the first Half-Life.

Continue Reading: https://www.allperfectstories.com/4-greatest-remakes-of-classic-retro-games/

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mikemateiweb-blog · 5 years

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Who will win? James Rolfe or Mike Matei while playing Young Indiana Jones

James Rolfe and Mike Matei play Instruments of Chaos starring Young Indiana Jones for Sega Genesis. Can James Rolfe and Mike Matei survive Young Indiana Jones for Sega Genesis!? James & Mike Mondays Episode 290

Follow Mike Matei on Twitch ✜ https://www.twitch.tv/mikemateilive

Twitter James ✜ https://twitter.com/cinemassacre

Twitter Mike Matei ✜ https://twitter.com/Mike_Matei

Support Mike Matei on Patreon https://www.patreon.com/MikeMatei

Read Mike Matei Blog ✜ http://www.mikematei.blog

Visit our website ✜ http://cinemassacre.com/

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mikemateiweb-blog · 5 years

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New Pictures of Mike Matei on Saatchiart

Latest pictures of Mike Matei on saatchiart, he has devoted his career to chronicling and promoting appreciation of retro pop-culture and video games. He has produced, edited, and starred in hundreds of videos with Cinemassacre Productions, the home channel of the Angry Video Game Nerd, James and Mike Mondays and other series.

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mikemateiweb-blog · 5 years

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Mike Matei from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on Behance

Mike Matei serves as the official maker for Cinemassarce, the site of The Angry Video Game Nerd, and helps write, edit, and star in the channel's recordings or videos. He has developed into a to some degree scandalous figure online for his low-quality portrayals and connections with fans. Mike Matei is a performing artist, craftsman, and executive producer of Cinemassacre Productions.

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mikemateiweb-blog · 5 years

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My TMNT Mario Paint Animation, a Retrospective – Mike Matei Blog

This is three lines drawn in Mario Paint at different speeds of strokes with the mouse.

The limitation of Mario Paint that’s probably the most regrettable is the dismal color selection. There are only 15 solid colors, and 15 extra colors which are the basic colors combined in various ways in a pixel checkerboard pattern.

There’s a reason why you don’t see actual pixel artists use patterns like this for coloring, because the results are usually hideous.

Unfortunately, an artist working within the restrictions of Mario Paint will have to use these extra colors sometimes, for better or worse. Outside of these 30, there’s also several pages of stuff that I rarely find a use for at all.

There’s no shortage of eye-melting color patterns to choose from, although these look better using the Spray tool.

This is due to the limitations of the hardware of the SNES. I’m not a programmer and I wasn’t able to find any detailed information on how Mario Paint’s code works, but here’s my best guess of what’s going on: The canvas area of Mario Paint is 248×168 pixels, which means it’s made up of 8×8 tiles, 31 horizontal and 21 vertical. The SNES has 16 colors to work with in each 8×8 tile, which means Mario Paint is using the maximum amount of colors the console can support (I’m guessing that one color has to be left unused for transparency, possibly to allow the cursor to hover over the drawing area). Also, the SNES can only display 34 of these tiles per horizontal row, so there’s 31 tiles for the canvas, 2 tiles for the border around the screen, and 1 left over that allows for the cursor.

Which means, as much as I lament the poor color choices, I can’t blame the creators of Mario Paint. They squeezed as much functionality out of Mario Paint as the hardware allowed. The checkerboard colors and blob patterns was the only way to extend the colors available. (By the way, if you’re knowledgeable about how Mario Paint or the SNES hardware works and anything I said is incorrect, let me know and I’ll edit this article with the correct information and give you credit).

The color limitations also played a big part in why I chose the TMNT opening. Mario Paint offers two solid shades of green, which would allow me to add shadows to the Turtles’ skin.

The character design of the Turtles just happened to work really well with Mario Paint’s colors, and I could get a bit more mileage out of light and shadow.

There’s also an undo history of exactly one action, which is offered to you by the dog icon. Saving and loading is limited and slow, the flood fill tool is slow (although it can be cancelled in the middle to partially fill things), and the animation function is limited to 4 drawable frames… I could go on and on about the limitations of Mario Paint, but I think you get the point.

So, as I just mentioned, Mario Paint has a pretty limited animation suite, so I used modern capture technology to simply capture frames when I completed them, and then edit them together later in video editing software. This could have been done in 1992 as well. I have friends who would use their VCR to record Mario Paint onto VHS and string them together to make elaborate animation projects, as well as other Nintendo art tools such as the GameBoy Camera placed into a Super Game Boy. VCRs connected to a camcorder could also be used to do stop motion animation with clay or toys, and even film individual frames of drawings to make animations.

This process was super nerve wracking, because each completed frame had to be discarded from existence entirely once I was done grabbing them. At least data storage is easy nowadays and I didn’t have to worry about someone in the house overwriting my animation in order to record an episode of Roseanne from the TV.

So, we come back to the concessions I talked about at the beginning. The original animated sequence for the TMNT show totals up to about 1200 individual frames of animation. So if I averaged about an hour per frame drawing in Mario Paint, and I worked 8 hours a day, that would mean I would reasonably get 8 frames done per day. Which means it would take 150 days of nonstop work to get the animation done, which would be okay if I didn’t also have a full time job and a social life that needs to be taken care of as well.

My animation ended up with about 420 frames total, and took me 6 months. So doing 1200 frames would have taken a year and a half, and who knows how much I would slow down from fatigue after a project that long. There were a couple times I could get a break, such as some frames just being a single solid color (such as lightning flashes), and I reused the swirling TMNT logo from the beginning for the end.

Hey, the original cartoon reused this animation, why can’t I?

I mentioned earlier that Mario Paint doesn’t offer any layer functionality, so this is a huge problem when animating moving characters over a background. As you can see in the above example, the background is constantly being destroyed by the turtles moving across the screen, and that destroyed information has to be rebulit when the portion of the background comes back into view.

Eagle-eyed readers will probably notice that this scene had to be animated out of sequence and then reassembled, which accounts for the way the background constantly changes shape.

Surprisingly, the shots you would think would be more difficult to do, such as Donatello flying around the city and the background moving around really fast, are about the same difficulty as the shot you see above, because of the lack of background layers. When the background is moving so quickly, redrawing the entire frame isn’t that much worse.

Oh who am I kidding, this was still painful.

Another issue came from the fact that I wasn’t going to use all 1200 frames from the original animation, so I had to pick and choose which frames to use. I was referring to a television off to the side drawing these individual frames, and I tried to pick out individual frames that would convey the most movement. This resulted in a bit of a discontinuity in the framerate, which had to be corrected manually when it came time to edit. This is why you see the framerate fluctuate often during the entire sequence. This is regrettable but… I dunno. Nobody has really complained about it, and if they did I’d just shrug and say Mario Paint isn’t the optimal tool to create animation. I did the best I could, you know?

Recreating an animation sequence in Mario Paint is so ridiculously transformative that it easily meets the requirements for Fair Use, so in order to keep my video from getting taken down, I was going to need a cover version of the music instead of using the original audio. Luckily I was able to get a great one by Epic Game Music that was tailored to match the timing of the video I animated. After that was done, it just needed some editing and it was completed.

So there you have it. How do I feel about this animation more than a year later? I’m glad I did it because it’s something nobody had ever done before. Doing something this elaborate with the drawing section of the game. Sure a lot of people have done a lot with the music portion, and there is a very small limit to what you can do with the in-game animation tool. But to animate something like this with the basic drawing tool, I’d say I did the most elaborate thing anyone ever attempted. If there’s anything else out there even close to as time consuming, I’d love to see it.

I think it was a really good personal exercise for me in diligence and determination. I’m glad that I managed to finish it. Starting a project like this and then abandoning it halfway would have been a gnawing regret I would have had to carry for the rest of my life. The end result wasn’t perfect, but it’s more important to me that I finished it.

“I may lose, but it won’t be because I gave up!”

As for economics… all told, I only made a couple hundred dollars off the video. I’d do the Pat-Math on how much my hourly wage was, but you can guess its low enough to be just about nothing. But hey, that’s the game we play being creatives. You never know what’s going to hit or miss, and you just have to keep consistently applying yourself until something hits. Whenever I get negative feelings about this animation, I have to remind myself that it was more than made up for with a lot of other successes that required far less effort. Not to mention I’m a Let’s Player and a streamer where I record myself playing art that other people made, and standing on the shoulders of giants to do so. I’m grateful for the wonderful life I have, and I hope you guys don’t get the impression that I made this post just to whinge about making cartoons in Mario Paint.

Animation is extraordinarily difficult, but we’re in a strange time where animation is easier to make than ever before, yet independent animators aren’t making the money they probably should. And yet… so many people still animate. There’s so much incredibly good animation being made by individuals on YouTube and all over the internet. Against overwhelming odds and minimal rewards, they still painstakingly download their imaginations into individual frames, one by one. I believe strongly that things will get better for animators in the future.

Just like Lion-o up there, they just need to keep running. Eventually something good will happen.

Source By: https://www.mikematei.com/blog/my-tmnt-mario-paint-animation-a-retrospective-mike-matei-blog/

Update:

Not long after I posted this article, which details my process of creating a full animated sequence in Mario Paint a year and a half ago, my animation was taken down from YouTube due to a copyright complaint.

From the very beginning, I was aware that my video could be taken down, so I purposely designed the video to be as transformative under Fair Use as I possibly could. Everything was manually drawn by hand using a reference offscreen. There’s no way to download images into Mario Paint, nor is there any way to trace anything, and the limitations of Mario Paint actually make it impossible to perfectly recreate the original (the article that follows will explain why in detail). And, a new cover version of the song was recorded specifically for this video. I was under the impression that I was so far ahead of what was required that I would be completely in the clear, and then some.

If the animation I made in Mario Paint doesn’t count as transformative, then I’m not sure what even does. What if I had recreated the intro using claymation? What if I had used actors in costumes? What if I just used a recording of me singing the theme song in the shower? Where is the actual line that got crossed?

I want to know what aspects of my video supposedly don’t qualify as Fair Use. Hopefully I can manage to get that question answered at least. I’m sure other creators could find the information useful as well.

Anyways, the video got reposted by someone already if you didn’t get a chance to watch it. It very well may get deleted again, so save it and if you want and share it on other video players and blogs so half a year of work isn’t tossed out a window forever..

See the video here:

https://www.vidlii.com/watch?v=PlV2cAO9kf1

https://www.bitchute.com/video/bfyvFFHA4Aw5/

Of all the art forms, animation seems to be the one affected by economics the most. Film is another big one for sure, but animation is such an incredibly manual, labor-intensive process that there’s a giant disconnect between creative vision and what can actually be reasonably produced, and what can reasonably make money. Since animators are painstakingly creating moving pictures frame by frame, simple creative decisions can multiply into hours, months or even years of extra work. Concessions always have to be made, and the work doesn’t always pay off.

In 2016, I used the Super Nintendo game Mario Paint to recreate the intro to the 80s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon opening. Here is the original video that was taken down. Use the links above to see the animation.

There were a lot of candidates to choose from (Thundercats, X-Men, Ducktales were also high on my list), but I chose TMNT because it seemed to be the most likely to reach a wide audience. I knew from the outset that this was going to be a big undertaking, and it took me roughly 6 months to complete.

The reasons to animate using Mario Paint are probably what you’d figure. Since I’m known as a commentator on retro video games, it was appropriate to use an art tool from a retro games console. There aren’t really many other choices that fit the bill, and there’s no way I could have used the LJN Video Art console to do it, being the completely useless art tool that it is that’s not even suitable for use by children. Also, there’s the element of the masochistic spectacle of one man going through the grueling process animating a full sequence working within such strange limitations. I thought people would be into it, and thankfully a good amount of people were.

Mario Paint was a wonderful toy for its time, and Nintendo was smart enough to add game elements, humor, and quirky flair to the experience instead of just making it a basic electronic art program. But as an art tool, the limitations are numerous. It’s very strange in that it’s essentially a tool to create pixel art, but offers extremely limited pixel precision (save for the pixel art stamps you can define, which weren’t suitable for my project).

The game came bundled with a mouse, but laser mouse technology didn’t exist in 1992. The Super Nintendo mouse used a rubber ball that rolled along the mousepad to manipulate rollers inside the unit to move the cursor onscreen. Everything grinds to a halt with this mouse if anything gets dirty, and the mouse is in a constant hurry to get as dirty as it possibly can. People reading this who grew up with Mario Paint will remember the cursor snagging over and over and the constant struggle to keep it clean. This was my life for 6 months.

As for other limitations, lines need to be drawn extremely slowly in Mario Paint, because moving the cursor too fast will result in dotted lines streaking across the screen. Not to mention every pen stroke overwrites the color underneath, as there is no layering functionality, so trying to build colored shapes with an outline requires a bit of planning in advance. In Mario Paint, I typically lay down color blobs and then add black outlines around them as the very last step, which is backwards from the way most people draw.

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This is three lines drawn in Mario Paint at different speeds of strokes with the mouse.

There’s a reason why you don’t see actual pixel artists use patterns like this for coloring because the results are usually hideous.

There’s no shortage of eye-melting color patterns to choose from, although these look better using the Spray tool.

This is due to the limitations of the hardware of the SNES. I’m not a programmer and I wasn’t able to find any detailed information on how Mario Paint’s code works, but here’s my best guess of what’s going on: The canvas area of Mario Paint is 248×168 pixels, which means it’s made up of 8×8 tiles, 31 horizontal and 21 vertical. The SNES has 16 colors to work within each 8×8 tile, which means Mario Paint is using the maximum amount of colors the console can support (I’m guessing that one color has to be left unused for transparency, possibly to allow the cursor to hover over the drawing area). Also, the SNES can only display 34 of these tiles per horizontal row, so there are 31 tiles for the canvas, 2 tiles for the border around the screen, and 1 left over that allows for the cursor.

Which means, as much as I lament the poor color choices, I can’t blame the creators of Mario Paint. They squeezed as much functionality out of Mario Paint as the hardware allowed. The checkerboard colors and blob patterns were the only way to extend the colors available. (By the way, if you’re knowledgeable about how Mario Paint or the SNES hardware works and anything I said is incorrect, let me know and I’ll edit this article with the correct information and give you credit).

The color limitations also played a big part in why I chose the TMNT opening. Mario Paint offers two solid shades of green, which would allow me to add shadows to the Turtles’ skin.

The character design of the Turtles just happened to work really well with Mario Paint’s colors, and I could get a bit more mileage out of light and shadow.

There’s also an undo history of exactly one action, which is offered to you by the dog icon. Saving and loading are limited and slow, the flood fill tool is slow (although it can be canceled in the middle to partially fill things), and the animation function is limited to 4 drawable frames… I could go on and on about the limitations of Mario Paint, but I think you get the point.

This process was super nerve-wracking because each completed frame had to be discarded from existence entirely once I was done grabbing them. At least data storage is easy nowadays and I didn’t have to worry about someone in the house overwriting my animation in order to record an episode of Roseanne from the TV.

So, we come back to the concessions I talked about at the beginning. The original animated sequence for the TMNT show totals up to about 1200 individual frames of animation. So if I averaged about an hour per frame drawing in Mario Paint, and I worked 8 hours a day, that would mean I would reasonably get 8 frames done per day. Which means it would take 150 days of nonstop work to get the animation done, which would be okay if I didn’t also have a full-time job and a social life that needs to be taken care of as well.

My animation ended up with about 420 frames total and took me 6 months. So doing 1200 frames would have taken a year and a half, and who knows how much I would slow down from fatigue after a project that long. There were a couple times I could get a break, such as some frames just being a single solid color (such as lightning flashes), and I reused the swirling TMNT logo from the beginning for the end.

Hey, the original cartoon reused this animation, why can’t I?

I mentioned earlier that Mario Paint doesn’t offer any layer functionality, so this is a huge problem when animating moving characters over a background. As you can see in the above example, the background is constantly being destroyed by the turtles moving across the screen, and that destroyed information has to be rebuilt when the portion of the background comes back into view.

Eagle-eyed readers will probably notice that this scene had to be animated out of sequence and then reassembled, which accounts for the way the background constantly changes shape.

Continue Reading: https://www.mikematei.com/blog/my-tmnt-mario-paint-animation-a-retrospective-mike-matei-blog/

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