I am in awe of the creators and will be watching their careers with great interest. The amount of work put into this project is mind-boggling.
Even if you only come here to check out the audacity of the project you’ll leave with “A Day in the Life of Red Five” or “Being from a Spaceport in Mos Eisley” (to the tune of “Being for the Benefit of Mister Kite”) or “Luke is in the Desert” (“Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”) stuck in your head. This is one of those great parody concepts where the joke is good and the songs are better.
#Palette swap ninja for free#
The album is available to download for free from their website or you can go to the their YouTube page where Katrin Auch has made lyric videos (along with Star Wars clips) for all the songs which you can watch in a playlist. The amount of work that Palette-Swap Ninja have put into this project is staggering from the rewriting of all the lyrics to the sneaky John Williams riffs they put into the songs. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band to create something brand new and incredibly familiar. It mashes up the plot of Star Wars with the tracks of Sgt. Princess Leia’s Stolen Death Star Plans is an incredible feat of editing, writing, and musical talent. To celebrate Palette-Swap Ninja has created, after five years of toil, the ultimate mash up between the epics from George Lucas and the Lads from Liverpool. Swapping palettes and other tricks are a part of the process, and I’m sure we’ll see more as time goes on.This year sees 40 years since the release of Star Wars and 50 years since the release of Sgt. Creating better-looking assets, filling the screen with objects, and maintaining a steady frame rate with limited load times will always be a challenge. While modern gaming rarely deals with storage issues, there will always be technological limits when trying to push the creative edge. Developers used swapping intelligently to create wonderful gaming moments that are still remembered today. The palette swaps I mentioned were all born of memory limitations. The combination of art with technology presents many challenges that are overcome with skill, ingenuity, and sacrifice. Game development is one of the most grueling art forms around. Reptile was my go-to in MKII and nine-year-old-me didn’t think he was a boring re-use of assets, he thought he was a cool green ninja that could turn invisible. When creating a game, resources are finite. I’d argue that if the special moves are unique, it’s better to have a new swapped character, than none at all. The Mortal Kombat franchise was criticized for relying too heavily on swapping with the introduction of Ermac, Noob Saibot, Reptile, Smoke, and Rain all using the same model. They may look nearly identical, but MK fans would never call these two the same. Changing their special abilities however, makes all the difference when it comes to fighting games. The same actor and costume was photographed in different poses to provide the difference. Sub-Zero and Scorpion were much more literal palette swaps. Minor tweaks to hair, eyebrows, and clothing can go a long way to differentiate the same core model. Street Fighter II: Championship Edition gave Ken a different Shoryuken arc and Ryu’s Hurricane Kick a knockdown.Īkuma and Dan were introduced later as evil and goofy variations respectively. Who can forget the eternal rivalry of Ryu and Ken? They even had identical move-sets when first introduced in the original Street Fighter, but this was a Mario/Luigi situation as players could only control the two main protagonists to face each other, with the winner going to challenge the computer controlled opponents. And of course Luigi was created by swapping the main color of Mario to green, giving the second player an identity.
Red Koopas turned back from ledges but their green counterparts foolishly walked off, even to their own demise. Changing Mario’s clothes to white denoted the fireflower power-up, while making him flash during invincibility. Super Mario Bros. used this technique heavily.
This was so effective, the term Metroid-vania was eventually coined to describe side-scrollers that used this mechanic. This is an integral part of Metroid’s design, locking away parts of the game until a new ability grants access. The ice beam temporarily freezes enemies and allows the player to use them as platforms. Make them red instead of blue and you get a brand new character/item/weapon/level without having to put the hours into creating it, or the memory to store it.Īn ingenious use of palette swapping came from the first Metroid. This was a very ambitious game for the technology at the time, and in order to save space, they created a new weapon (ice beam) by simply changing the color of her gun to blue. swapees (Scorpion, Reptile, and Sub-Zero), Midway ratcheted up the ninja assembly line. The term palette swap originally meant shifting the colors of a created art asset in a game. The 17 most memorable palette-swapped video game characters ever.