That is an awesome Samus.

Awesome, thanks for the tips eishiya! :)

I see! It probably is just a saving issue. Try saving your work as an indexed PNG rather than an RGB PNG. That avoids the weird colour issues, and it usually makes smaller files, especially if the palette is small. The down side is that you get a max of 256 colours, but if you chose all your colours by hand, then most likely you'll be well within that limit.

I see; I was not aware, really. This was just intended as me taking advantage of my day off work and having some fun 
I'll keep that in mind and try a more conservative palette on my next attempt.  also, no features other than the pencil and marque tools were used for this piece. On the color noise; I intended to use a large palette but there are hundreds of odd tones that I believe are a format saving issue...again it's my first attempt so I'm pretty oblivious to all this.
 

Pseudo-painterly doesn't tend to go over well on PJ xP This community stresses pixel-level control, which this piece lacks in some areas. In particular though, here it seems like you just did extra work that isn't noticeable in the final result D:!

Photoshop is fine for pixel art and it's my preferred program for pixel art, but it might require some additional willpower not to use its fancier features and stick to the ones that let you maintain control over your colours and placement.

I was sort of winging it and using photoshop(which I know isn't the most effective pixel art program), so I'm sure there's lots of issues here and there. This is my first real attempt at pixel art, coming from an illustration/concept art backround so I wanted to challenge myself and take a pseudo-painterly approach to it :)

It looks like you did something with the colours that exploded the colour count (to thousands of colours!) with very little discernible effect - I just see some odd colour noise here and there, like on the blue bit behind Samus, and some specks in the dark parts of the background. Is that intentional or is it an error in saving the image?