As Gavralcraw said, it's a little hard to read. The piece is overly dark and the contrast between shades (usually the lightest and second lightest) are too weak. The purple on the bat comes off as obnoxious as it stands out the most from the whole piece.

Another thing to note is this is a good example of 'bad dithering'. You're using one style of dithering consistently when you should be mixing it up (usually around three different levels of dithering).

Overall, the piece itself isn't bad, but it has quite a few issues holding it back.

Incredible run cycle! I'd argue that it could work just fine, but I think you're right, especially if there's any overlapping sprites.

My main concern is the sprite looks fairly rough, mostly in the colouring, although it's perfectly readable, it seems like it could use some clean-up. As far as the animation quality goes, it's really well done and I have no complaints.

@Manupix: Heh, yeah. This is the first time I actually had to make one (a preview), but I guess I didn't succeed there. . .

@eliris I'm not sure if I'm understanding your question. Obviously I  make sprites like these, since I made them? If you're asking whether I normally do stuff like this, then that's a no. This was sort of a test in sidescrolling sprites, along with sprites that don't have real outlines. I usually stick to RPG style sprites (with outlines) and any type of tiles.

@eliris: As long as it's just used for a test (engine test, playing around with programming, etc) I have no problem with you (or anyone) using it. Thanks for asking.

As ptoing said, there's some banding going on and there's pretty poor anti-aliasing done on the front of the bike which just looks like stray pixels laying around. Vespa Girl is cute though, so I'm still waiting on you to make a game or a short pixel movie about her.

@Pyrogoth: Making it smooth just takes a bit of fairy dust and magic. But seriously, Piet gave me a great piece of advice on the run, and it's that you can get away with a lot of stuff on small sprites. Even if it doesn't look good in a still frame, it can look really good in motion, so experiment with stuff.

@Spherical Ice: Haha, I completely agree with the pelvic thrust comment. This is one of the first few times I've done a sprite with no actual outline, so I think the pelvic thrusting stance problem stems from that. Glad you like it though.

There's a lot of issues with the lineart (or rather, lack of lineart?) in this piece. Looking through your other works, it seems to be a recurring issue. I'm assuming you're trying to do some anti-aliasing, but it's so poorly done that it just looks like there are stray pixels all over the place (hair, thigh, ass, etc). I've never been a fan of AA to begin with, so I can't really recommend any techniques to fix the problem, hopefully someone else can though.

Yeah, it's definitely possible with the NES specs as you mentioned (the megaman example), but I'm fairly certain it can't be done with the GameBoy for one reason or another (if it can, someone please correct me on this).

If the shade on the chest was supposed to be transparency, it would still look a bit awkward in the first and last mock. Not to say it can't work, if the whole game uses a solid light gray shade like the ground in the 2nd mock, you can definitely get away with it. Otherwise, it's a no go. Of course, this is just me nitpicking, I mean, the gameboy effect is still there, so if it was for a flash game or something, you'd be cool with breaking a few rules, but as far as working on a gameboy homebrew, it might become an issue.

EDIT: I just talked it over with a programmer I'm working with for some homebrew, and he thinks it might indeed be possible, but just not worth the effort since a real screen could blur the line between the two shades anyway. So yeah, I stand corrected.

The Player/Enemy sprites wouldn't work in the GameBoy restrictions, as sprites can only use three colours + transparency, where as yours use all four colours + transparency. You seem to have done it correctly with the rocks, so I don't know if this was an honest mistake or intended.

In any case, it looks like it'd make for a pretty fun game.

It's fairly hard to justify giving these criticism as they're really just NGP based stuff. I'm assuming you used a lot of bases, the hair for example looks like a slightly more detailed version of the GBC's Legendary Super Warriors Vegeta. 

With that out of the way, I'll move on to actual criticisms. The contrast between shades blends too smoothly, giving off a gradient/pillow shading effect. As well, some of the outlines seem a bit rough, for example, where the hair meets the forehead. I'm assuming you kept the outlines because it looked good on the NGP counterparts, and granted that's true, it also only worked because of the low resolution. When you're dealing with sprites of this res, the outlines just come off as thick and unneeded.

For now, that's all I really have. I'd just suggest working on the actual shading style first, and fix the outlines later on after you get some more practice there.

My appologies for not getting back to you about the idle animation. I usually only check for replies in my mailbox. After reading through your post, it would probably look better with the jet effect, yeah.

As for how I'd fix it, again, this is without seeing it with the jet effect, so take it with a grain of salt, but adding more life to the arms and legs during the idle. Right now they look sort of static just bobbing up and down. For example, I'd suggest having the arms move back a bit into the background when they go down. The same could go for the legs.

Anyway, sorry if I didn't explain that too well, the bottom line for me is that it's just too bland and could use some oomph. My previous points still stand though, as it's an amazing peace otherwise.

@Randommonkies: Technically it does have 4 colours, but in my mind, I don't really count transparency, that's why I say 3 colours + trans. The background for the game will be white, so that's where the lightest colour comes from.

@Jeremy: The only reason it's animated is to show both frames. In the game, it'll either be open or closed, it will never loop.

As Stickman said, looks like a chibi version of Kula Diamond. The colour choice especially. In any case, it's a great piece of art. I love the palette you used and art style. My only gripe is that the two fingers on the girls left hand look like one at 1x size.

The preview was tricky. I came in expecting a GB mock, but instead, I got an NES one.

I do like the mock, but the characters seem hard to read. Don't get me wrong, I'm well aware of how hard it is to make readable detailed characters in NES restrictions, but they could still use some work, Deoxys more than Geovonni though. I'm liking the colour choice for the background, but I feel Red -> Purple would've worked better, so that might be worth a shot.

I look forward to seeing more NES stuff, as I'm an avid fan of the restrictions.

One thing I noticed is that one of the frames has an extra two blue colours in the thruster effect. With that said though, this is amazing, and as someone who holds a deep love of 8-bit restrictions, I can safely say I'm envious.

Pretty nice character design, but the animation is way too static.  Try actually adding different frames to the pieces instead of just moving them around, that would definitely help a lot.

Looks like Koopa's, Kirby's, Donkey Kong banana's, and Pietepiets work. You really need to come up with some original designs man.

I'd offer worthwhile criticism, but everything is so different in style that I'm having a hard time believing it's not all ripped from different sources.

Haha, fantastic reference. Looks good for something that's supposed to be so god awful.

Not digging the idle animation as it looks a bit rough, animation wise, compared to the rest of the moves. Perhaps you were just going for a robotic motion effect, but I feel there's more that could be done to improve it.

None the less, amazing colours and animation.

Nice colours and an interesting character. My only concern is that he seems like he's going to fall forward if he leans ahead any more.