Design & Color: Pu·Li·Ru·La

Let's talk about a beautiful game.

Taito's Pu·Li·Ru·La is an arcade beat 'em up known mostly for its bizarre imagery and badly-translated dialogue. It's well-known as having great graphics, but discussion of those graphics tends to begin and end with "look at how wacky this is! Oh, Japan!" Pu·Li·Ru·La has been one of my favorite arcade games for years, so I'd like to make it the focus of its very own Design & Color post: there are a lot of beautiful details that can get lost when you're zooming through this short and easy game.

Screenshots taken mostly by myself, although I did nab some (noted below) from the Hardcore Gaming 101 article too.

Design & Color: Sonic the Hedgehog (Part 1 of 3 & Knuckles)

Design & Color, this time about the Sonic series! Part 1 of 3 (& Knuckles), unless we decide to go further and do CD or something, but I never did play that very much. Brought to you by myself and the ever-wonderful gsilverfish, and aided by The Sonic Scene's amazing screenshots section.

Design & Color: Deadly Towers

(Originally posted on February 28, 2011 at my personal blog.)
 
[Note: about half of these screenshots are taken from Youtube, with others taken from StrategyWiki and the game itself. If you have higher quality screenshots of those, I'd really love it if you could throw them my way!]

As a followup to my last Design & Color post about Kirby's Adventure, I'd like to examine a game which is just about the polar opposite of it. Kirby's Adventure was almost universally beloved and propelled a still-running, successful franchise; Deadly Towers is almost unanimously reviled, with many people first learning of it as Seanbaby's Worst Nintendo Game of All Time. There are a lot of reasons for this, but they aren't important: I come here not to bury Deadly Towers, but to praise it.

Kirby's Adventure: Design and Color

(Originally posted on November 2nd, 2010, at my personal blog.)

[FYI, this article was written before Kirby's Epic Yarn was released. Also, big thanks to Kirby's Rainbow Resort for having such an amazing selection of Kirby's Adventure screenshots, and to Mobygames for a couple others.]

 

I spent an evening playing Kirby's Adventure on Virtual Console recently. I grew up with the game on an NES cartridge; I'd played Kirby's Dream Land first and wasn't too enthralled, but Kirby's Adventure was one of the games that dominated my childhood. I didn't realize it at the time, but this game's design sticks out like a black sheep from the rest of the series: not only does it have a sophisticated and evocative color palette different from anything else on the NES, but many of the level motifs (such as the many buildings and castles) are surprisingly detailed and concrete--not exactly what you expect from a series that is now defined by marshmallowy, candy-colored vistas.