What a challenge! How do you turn some of the most iconic and well-designed videogame characters of all time into 3D equivalents without compromising the style?

Capcom show us how:

Stylish!

Facial Animation!

Dramatic!

Yep, it all just goes to prove that it’s not the size of the tool it’s how you wield it. All we’ve got here are polygons, normal maps, some textures, and lighting - just like every other PS3 and XBox360 game - but with an added extra pinch of talent. Actually, lots of talent.

Source: Eurogamer

Aaaah… Rick Dangerous - there was a cracking (if frequently horrendously unfair) game. Fire button + Up to shoot, fire button + Down to set a bomb and accidentally blow yourself up while trying to go down a ladder.

But enough of the game, this is all about the character. And whilst he’s been squidged horribly into a square - his shoulders up by his ears and his hat pulled so far down that it rather implies that Rick has literally no forehead, he’s clearly supposed to be a sort of Indiana Jones type. Which would make him ripe for fan art…

But, no. It would appear that the artist behind the sprite, and the artist who drew the box art had rather different ideas about Rick’s character as I think this comparison rather neatly shows:

Box Art on left, Title Screen on right

Er, indeed. You thought you were buying a game with a hunky action hero in it, but when the game loaded you realised that actually it stars a very poorly drawn thug. Not so much Rick Dangerous as Biffa Bacon with a fedora hat on.

Still, if you owned the game on C64 you didn’t get that picture on the title screen, so we can live in denial and pretend it never happened.

Well it looks like Cinemaware have done it again, in their stylish 1950’s b-movie homage ‘It Came from the Desert’. Unfortunately, as was the case with most floppy disk based games, the limited storage space doesn’t really allow for much in the way of variation. The upshot being that each character was pretty much represented by one portrait (albeit with overlayed lip wobbles and blinking eyes for those super-realistic talking animations). So basically, this picture of the nurse (whom you meet right at the start) is basically it for the entire game.

Which is a bit of a shame really.

There was one other woman in the game which I suppose you could say was “slightly tasty”, although to be perfectly honest…

…she looks a bit slutty if you ask me. Look - she’s even got a bit of bra showing. This is the 50’s! What would the neighbours think?

Maybe it’s just that all blokes are genetically programmed to slightly fancy nurses. Maybe it’s the uniform of authority. Maybe it’s just that dithering doesn’t look very nice on pixel characters. Who knows?

Good Lord, Fox News would have a field day if this kind of filth was released nowadays! Look! She might be an alien, have yellow skin, and a funny shaped head but those are actual woman-ey bits there! Disgusting!

And it gets worse! You see, this might be how Torka appears when you meet her on the planet, but as it transpires she’s actually an ‘Ondoyante’ and those are shape-changey aliens (like Odo, but significantly cuter). So beam her onto your ship and prepare yourself for the ultra-rude filthy disgusting ending:

She doesn’t even look alien-ney there (apart from her having strange blue hair)! Bless the French, eh? If the game’s been developed by Frenchmen then that’s pretty much a sure-fire guarantee of it featuring random rudeness.

Okay, shockingly this is about as much of Jill as you ever saw. No nice close ups (apart from an extremely pixellated face on the UI), and not much in the way of sprite animation either but you do kind of get the idea.

She’s clearly some kind of cute Amazonian girly with black boots (possibly leather). We’ll never know what that costume she’s wearing looks like close-up - unlike Tarzan it’s not some sort of animal fur unless there’s a kind of weird green-haired animal living in Jill’s Jungle. And speaking of Jill’s Jungle, it’s not like any sort of jungle I’ve ever seen. There are some weird giant mushroom and some killer jumping frogs peppering the place, but not much in the way of trees or shrubbery.

Okay, so there were at least a few trees and the odd vine to climb but you know, it does say jungle very clearly on the title screen so a token gesture’s not really cutting the mustard.

The less said about the portrait, the better.

Amusingly the game featured some of the most alarmingly inappropriate sound effects used in any videogame ever. Like using an electric guitar chord for jumping or something equally ridiculous. I think someone at Epic was playing with their new SoundBlaster.

Capcom, creators of some of the least overlooked videogame characters of all time, seemed to have gone out of their way to make forgettable characters in this one.

In the not-at-all ironically named Forgotten Worlds, the designers obviously couldn’t be bothered coming up with character names for the blue one and the red one referring to them just as “Superior Warriors” during the ending sequence.

And they didn’t stop the amazingly creative names with the player characters either. No, the final boss was named “Evil one” (wow!) except in some of the manuals where the guy printing it correctly figured that “Evil one” is a stupid name, and called him “Bios” instead. Although that could also just be a typo of “Boss”.

Funnily enough one of the few named characters is this girl from the shop screens:

Sheesh, the Japanese eh? Don’t give a monkeys about all the blokes in the game, but they’ve gotta name the girl! (She’s called Sylphie by the way, but she doesn’t really do much except stand there looking at you with a weird blue thing on her forehead)

Ah, good old cheeky chappie Foster from Beneath a Steel Sky. With his trusty sidekick Joey, a little mechanised droid with a welding fetish, as far as likable player characters from adventure games went Foster was up there with the greatest (and less overlooked) of them - even if they did get an American to say the clearly British dialogue in the talkie version.

Yep, all in all quite a cracking adventure game (it even had a naughty word in it - you wouldn’t see THAT in Monkey Island) and some of the dialogue was great…

Foster I need a Schriebmann port.
Burke Really? Do you have SUFFICIENT CREDIT?
Foster All I’ve got are the CLOTHES I’m WEARING.
Burke In that case you require the EASY-PAY scheme…
Foster Yes - that sounds PERFECT.
Burke Kidney, lung or TESTICLES?

Ahahahaha! Hmmm… it works better in context really. Anyhoo, the great thing is that marvelous Revolution Software (now more famous for the Broken Sword games) made Beneath a Steel Sky freeware aaaages ago. Hooray! Here’s the LINC (ahahaha! That was an amazing in-joke for anyone who’s played it)

Ah bless those talented pixel artists over at Cinemaware. If we’re going to be rescuing some sort of damsel in distress repeatedly in the game, then this is the sort of damsel I want to be rescuing.

They seem to have gone a little overkill with the old R component in the palette, but we’ll scratch that down to there probably being a fire or something behind the camera. Other than that, it’s a lovely piece of pixel art - the detail in the hair is nice, she’s pretty (always a bonus) and there’s a good sense of material to the fabric.

In 2003 (or something), Cinemaware brought out a pseudo-remake for PC, PS2, and XBox, Robin Hood: Defender of the Crown. The damsels were back, but this time in soft-focus-o-vision 3D renders:

It’s nice and all - they’ve even raised the rudeness factor by lowering the temperature of the dungeon slightly, but in all honesty you can’t beat a lovely bit of pixel art.

Well, I promised a guy version didn’t I? So here it is, the first installment - hold on to your hats!

Conrad was a bit of a spiritual successor to ‘Guy from Myth: History in the Making’ who would himself have been a contender for this first post if I could remember his name (did he ever have one?). Also, I did a post about Myth not so long ago.

Proving that you don’t have to be 6ft 2 and built like Hercules to be a cool videogame character, Conrad (yeah, nice name Delphine) simply relied on a trusty leather jacket and slightly iffy coloured jeans to get him through. Oh, and he was rather good with a pistol to boot. But what really made Conrad stand out was the utterly fab sprite animations which were rotoscoped in a similar way to those in Prince of Persia.

However, in my ‘extensive’ research for this post I did make one or two startling discoveries. Firstly, there is the tagline “The Queeeeeest for Idennnnnntity” which sounds completely stupid (it needs to be read in ‘Pigs in Space’ style for full effect) and secondly, upon discovering that the reason that I’d never heard of the tagline was because it was U.S. only, I found this box art…

European version on the left, awful U.S. version on the right

…which might go some way to explain why there’s no fan art of Conrad. I mean if that’s what you were picturing in your head whenever you looked at the sprite then, well I’m not surprised.

Nada was a bit of a wasted beauty in all honesty. She’s quite clearly a bit of a looker with her piercing green eyes and lovely long (and slightly transparent) dress, but even though she’s supposed to be your companion you only ever get to see her in this image during conversations, as an actress in a cheap outfit in a couple of dodgily compressed FMVs, and in one more scene (which I will come to in a moment).

Companions of Xanth even featured a slightly more risque-looking girly dressed in an extremely revealing red demon outfit (plus tail). Although in a bid to irritate 13 year-olds around the world, even though you had the choice to have her as your companion at the start of the game, if you chose anyone except Nada you almost immediately died.

So, back to Nada… what of this one more scene that I mentioned earlier, eh? Well, it turns out that a Naga is some sort of shape-changey snakey-woman, and in one scene towards the end of the game we’re treated to some topless with long flowing hair preserving dignity action. Briefly. It fades in and fades out in about 3 seconds, so blink and you’ll miss it. Except you won’t because I’ve screengrabbed it and uploaded it here…

Hmmm… actually it’s quite a lot muddier than I remember - maybe only seeing it for a fleeting moment added to its mystique, and your imagination filled in the details later. Or maybe I was just younger and more easily pleased…