Hey! I’m wanting to take a dive back into pixelart lately beyond my normal hobbyist stuff that I’ve been doing and I wanted to muck around with some other palettes from older games to give me some color theory ideas.
SB would be the perfect place to ask I guess - what 2D games can you think of (indie or otherwise too!) that have really grimy or dirty looking graphics or palettes. I’m looking for whole pixelart ideas and paletes too so anything you can think of that sems dusty/grimy/filthy
off the top of my head
daraku tenshi (arcade)
gunforce 2 (arcade)
undercover cops (arcade)
wild guns (snes/ps4)
the ooze (mega drive)
nuclear throne (tons of stuff)
Crude Busters (Arcade)
Chakan, Front Mission, and Shadowrun (both SNES and Genesis, but Genesis a bit more so) are the first things popping in my head.
the godfather, amiga
For STGs, the original palette of Battle Garegga is grimy as heck. Later versions where the bullets can have their colors changed mess with this a little bit (but make it a much more easily enjoyable game, so it’s a good change, and the M2 port just letting you change them to original or all sorts of variants rules), but the original version is grimy as hell. Even with the brighter color bullets, the underlying game has a lot of decay and grime.
I just remembered, Abuse is fairly grungy, and also aided by the general darkness of everything.
Herzog Zwei (GEN)
beneath a steel sky comes to mind
This bizarre and terrible game has a dirty ass palette
