I like it.  You wouldn't want to stand in front of the horns with the guitar though... imagine the feedback loop!!!! haha. Ok maybe that would be an interesting experiment.   :D

I like how the 4/1 looks too. It seems a little more dynamic than 2/1, though yes a little harder to draw in. The other benefit (and the reason I've chosen it) is that in games with this perspective, the keyboard controls UP, DOWN, LEFT and RIGHT line up just slightly more with the directions of the graphics, making the initial vertigo less irritating. That's the theory anyways.

Well that's probably true, but for rooms obeying reality at least a little, they could look and function something like this demo I just built:

http://www.fenstalker.com/content/pixeljoint/

Your thoughts?

Hard to interact... not really because all objects (even moving ones) can be setup in the isometric engine to be represented by 3D "blocks" which are impenetrable, or doors, or holes, etc.  That's the great thing about being isometric. :D

Well I really like Flash + actionscript but it's kinda like Javascript coding in that there isn't much hardware interaction so in a way it's not REAL programming, whereas in C, etc., you are directly managing memory and ports and junk, which I have no idea how to do. Nice work on the 7 million lines of code though. :)  My next actionscript project is an isometric Landstalker-type game involving isometric sprites, which is how I wound up finding this site. Did you have fun beating the demented squirrel? You beat him like 400 times!! haha

All makes sense. I appreciate your willingness to respond to this even though you've probably done it 1000s of times before. The shadows under the geese is an obvious un-pixely thing to do... that's a screenshot from another project which didn't use pixel shadows, so I agree with you 100% there.  As for the bobber room... I'm not against the color conservation approach, just wasn't aware of it. I will consider revising the bobber room in the future when I find time. It could obviously lose a lot of nearly redundant colors. 

Unrelated to that.... has anyone attempted to build an interactive "world" version of The Joint yet? I'm a Flash developer and I have an isometric engine developed for a previous project. It would be fun (and not that hard) to plop the apartment graphics in and have a character walk around, especially considering the graphics are already layered in such a way that the character(s) could move behind walls, etc. :)

Ah, thanks for the details. (I'm sure it's not the first time you've made this point.)  I'm familiar with pixel-level graphics but I guess I'm new to purist pixel art and didn't realize palette minimalism was such a big deal. I did use translucent layers to build the art in a few places as a method of finding which hues/shades to use, but I can see that if palette minimalism is a goal, I would use colors from other areas of the image. Is the image in "AWAITING APPROVAL" status for this reason alone?