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I think I've seen some Genesis games that overlay tiles or overlap sprites in order to fake objects with more than 16 colors.

I don't think I've seen this in NES games. Why not? Or, am I missing the instances where they do?

I could at least see tile/sprite combinations happening as coarse movement was more acceptable back then.

Did you ever play Mega Man? It's considered the poster child for this technique.

Contra splits sprites into a top and bottom half.

The title screen of Tetris 2 uses a very coarse tile/sprite combination to make the block edges jagged.

NES can't do it with the background because it only has 1 layer.

But several games do it with sprites. The most well known of which is Megaman, which uses a different colored sprite for megaman's face. The portraits in the stage select screen are also often combinations of sprites and the BG in order to get more color usage.

Just Breed does this for the currently "active" players. When active, your players are a combination of blue and red colored sprites which makes them look very colorful, but when inactive it drops the red sprites and they have an overall blue tint.

EDIT: ninja'd!

Mighty Final Fight, another Capcom game, also uses overlapping sprites for more colors.

tepples wrote:Contra splits sprites into a top and bottom half.

Final Fantasy does this too, for the player sprite on the maps.

Thanks guys. I missed alot of those games that had overlayed tiles/sprites. I never got into MegaMan. Contra may have used two seperate sprites but it didn't seem to be overlapping them. I'll have to look harder.

SMB2(USA) had added sprite overlap to create a effect for white eyes.

the USA version of Journey to Silius uses another sprite color for the Player's head just like Megaman!

The main character in Gargoyle's Quest II looks too colorful for the NES, so there's probably some sprite layering going on.

Many games use part of the background as a huge "sprite." Blaster Master, Super C, and Crystalis do this, among many others. It's pretty typical for these games to place sprites with additional colors on top of the background sprite.

I just fought a boss in Crystalis that used a green palette, with eye sprites on top that used a red palette. May not technically be layered sprites, but it's the same principle.

As far as I remember, Double Dragon 2 (possibly 1 as well) uses this technique a lot for its characters too, which IMO opinion is more noticeable than the Rockman games.

SMB2US (but not the original FDS Doki Doki Panic) may have done this with the characters' eyes too.

The disadvantages with this method are that having overlapping sprites could give more flickers to a game as you can only display 8 sprites each of 8-pixel wide on each line, and that the system only has 4 subpalettes for sprites (and 4 for the background layer; this is in some sense worse in the case of the Mega Drive though), so using more than 1 subpalettes for 1 objects would need the other objects to share colours more often.

The Dragon Warrior games use this technique extensively for the monster graphics. With the larger monsters in DW3 and DW4, the tile and sprite "layers" noticeably desynchronize when the monsters flash when taking damage.

Battletoads does that for cutscenes(Sprites layered on BG).
Fantastic Dizzy also uses sprite layering. The body ("Egg") is Pal0 while Dizzy's hands and legs are Pal1.

Denine wrote:Battletoads does that for cutscenes(Sprites layered on BG).

The toads obviously use some layering to combine green and yellow parts in game too.

I'd imagine contra does.

3gengames wrote:I'd imagine contra does.

Contra has been mentioned in the first reply, but apparently it doesn't overlap the sprites, it just uses different palettes for different parts of the sprite.