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Guess the Video Game from the Screenshot

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Fool's Requiem

Anyone want a popsicle?
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GW Elder
Wolf Players
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Aight, I'm gonna drop some NES palette and sprite limitation lore:

One thing that's kind of unique about the NES palettes and sprites is that each sprite typically only has 4 colors (2 of which are usually black and transparent). There are workarounds involving layering sprites so that more than 3 colors can show at once (like Mega Man's eyes being their own sprite that sits on top of Mega Man's face sprite).

Tiles also have only 4 colors, and usually (not always) forego transparency as an option. There can also only be, I think, 7 different palettes on screen at once (maybe less? I don't remember the exact number). The rope ladder on the left consists of two different tiles and palettes: black, brown, light brown, dark blue; and black, brown, light brown, and light blue. You can tell because the rope of the ladder is flush with the horizon, making it easy to change from one tile set to the other without any visual weirdness.

It's not entirely strange to have two different palettes like this that are almost identical, but what's weird is that the rope ladder on the right doesn't respect the above form. It isn't flush with the horizon. So, it looks like 5 colors are displaying at once: light blue, dark blue, brown, light brown, and black. That means it's probably a sprite, with transparency instead of the two blues (so, black, brown, light brown, transparent). It's also bigger than the standard 8x8 size of a NES sprite, so it's probably made up of two horizontal sprites.

And finally, the NES can only render so many sprites on one horizontal "line" of the screen at once. If there's too many, they start flickering.

All of this tells me that that part of the game probably doesn't see much, if any, action. There would probably be too many sprites on screen if there were more than one enemy, and the flickering would probably get pretty intense.

...I still have no idea what the game is.
so, I checked the Famicom footage (it never got an actual NES release), the game CHUGS when more than 2 enemies are on screen.
 
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