nesdev.org

At first I found it weird that Arnold would be rendered with background tiles, isntead of the Predator, who's larger, but after thinking about it for a while, it actually makes sense: the Predator is controlled by the game, so it can be programmed to not share scanlines with other sprites (platforms and such), avoiding flicker, but Arnold, being controlled by the player, can go anywhere at any time.

As a whole, Predator is a weirdly designed game. It seems like it was developed by people who knew what they were doing tech-wise, but had no idea regarding gameplay.

Here is my attempt at making an NES version of the Gunforce 2 guy.

Any criticism on my sprite?

It looks fine. It seems me and you had different opinions though: I went for more different colors and less gradients, and you went the other way around. I personally think that you overdid it a little though, as the gun is a brownish tinted gray and the armor is blue, which are a bit tricky to try and merge together. I'm also not to crazy about the orange in the skin. I know that it's the middle color between the brown and the pale, but I'd rather more contrast. Plus, it frees you a color for something else.

Here's a comparison: (One neat thing to mention is that the character's arm's are actually seperate sprites. Obviously, that wouldn't work on the NES...)

It looks decent...but it also nearly hits the sprite limit by itself. And I suspect it'd look better in-place rather than in a [green] void; stylized characters seem to do better on spritesheets than realistic ones.