Super Haste is the best ability.

Great animation, you seem to be quite good at it.
Might want to consider adding in some mid-explosion frames, though. The transition is kind of jarring.

Lovely. Your style stays as true to your name as ever.
That is an excellent job you've done shading the thing, especially the bone helm. I really dig the hue shifting going on and way the earthy brown and bone white work together, and how soft the thing looks overall.

The thickness on the stomach outline is kind of distracting though.
Have you considered breaking the edges with a lighter color to soften the curves out some
Edit: Something like this?

It's like being punched in the face with everything that was good and fun about my childhood!
Love the style, love your taste in games, love how well you've matched the characters, hate the fact that Whoopee Camp disbanded and will thus never make a Tomba! 3. (It wouldn't be as cool as this anyway)

I hadn't known about that guy and his project, but I'm really glad you directed me to him, because the dude's got a seriously fantastic style going on. What I wouldn't give to be able to do what he does with dynamic outlines...
Also I found this: http://www.pixeljoint.com/pixelart/40636.htm in his gallery, which pretty much cements him into the awesome category forever. That was my absolute favorite game as a kid (Mother 3's pretty cool too).

I definitely agree with you on the saturation/contrast front. When (and if) ever I finish all of these from gen 3 (hopefully I'll have accrued some color knowledge by then) I'll definitely go back through and tweak their pallettes so that their colors aren't quite so bland looking. For now, though, I'm content to use the D/P/Pt pallettes, because they save me a huge amount of headache over trying to pick colors that don't look like ass.

Thanks for the input!

Awesome, I really dig the Murkrow line. I like the way you've smoothed out the outline, it reminds me of what they used to do with the outlines on the first gen sprites. That and the colors you used give it a retro Pokemon feeling without actually looking like the old sprites (except they looked goofy as hell, this doesn't though).

Is the preview really that big of a deal? I just wanted to use Surskit as an avatar (he's my favorite from 3rd gen), but if it's really that much of a problem I could upload it separately and slap together a different preview for this.
Fixed preview.

Also, would you guys be interested in the Wip dump of these sprites? I kept all the different steps saved in one file so I could study them later and find out what I was doing wrong, or right. I could upload it to Photobucket or something.

Thanks for all the comments and input, and if you have any criticisms on the sprites I'd like to hear them too.

@Sai: It is Shiftry, yeah. He came out probably the best of the batch, at least from a technical standpoint.

I'm surprised no one has commented on this yet.

Anyway, the answer to your question is particle effects, my boy!
All you need to do is animate the ice cracking, then switch this sprite with a sprite of the caveman in a "breaking out" pose, and have the game generate a bunch of "chunk of broken ice" sprites around the new one, making it look like he smashed out and saving you a lot of headache. It might sound kind of weird at first, but lots and lots of games use it as a timesaver and a practical visual effect.

Take the Castlevania games, for example. Whenever you break a lamp or candle for cash or a subweapon or whatever, it looks like whatever you whipped got smashed into a bunch of smaller pieces. But what's really happening is, upon the candle recieving damage, the game removes the sprite from the screen and generates a bunch of sprites that look like broken chunks of the original one in its place! This way, they can make it seem like it broke without having to animate a buttload of additional frames. It actually has significant advantages over hand-animating a break, in that while an animation will always be the same, the "chunk" particles can spawn in different places, making it seem like a different effect each time.

You could probably adapt this to a traditional animation too, if you just switched from cracked frame to caveman frame and added a bunch of ice chunks in that fell out of view afterwards. It'd have pretty much the same effect while, again, saving you a ton of trouble.

Hopefully this explanation isn't too obfuscated and you can make out what I'm trying to say, I'm not very good at explaining things. Your NES-style sprites are some of my favorites sprites on the site, and it would suck if you got stuck on something that could be solved easily enough with the right workaround. I hope this helps you avoid 500 frames of spinning ice-chunks.

I'm impressed, you've done very well for the readability of this piece!

You've done a good job simplifying the shading and using color to suggest shape, they're waaay easier to make out than they were before, even at 1x zoom (especially the green guy with the big gun, great improvement!). You also did a great job simplifying the level of detail while keeping true to the original designs.

The only thing I would take another look at would be the one with the wings on his back, who seems to be turning away from the viewer (I think?). The pose he's making makes it kind of hard to see what he's doing, and some of the shading on him looks a bit smudgy, particularly the wings and shoulderpads.

Other than that (and including that, too,) you've done a fantastic job improving this piece, and I hope to see more from you in the future. Keep up the good work!

I'm gonna disagree with most folk and say that the amount of colors per sprite isn't what's holding this piece back, but rather your style of shading. This type of shading with the highlight and colors radiating outwards from it is really better used on larger sprites, because they have more room for the radiation to spread out. On small sprites, though, you want to simplify shapes and blobs of color as much as possible to improve readability, and avoid unessecary noise as much as you can. The style of shading you're using is, by nature, a bit noisy (although it's less noticeable on larger sprites). So what I would suggest to do is try to bring the level of detail down a little and avoid those radiating highlights, and it ought to help clarify your sprite's shapes a bit.

I made an edit of the orange dude to try and show what I mean:
http://i1108.photobucket.com/albums/h409/AnotherPhotobucketUser/RoboEdit.png

Am I too late to the party?