Hey, thanks!  I haven't posted anything new in forever, so I figured I'd upload this, even though it's just a simple mockup

The lighting on the rocks is A+.  really love this.  :)

 Love the background!  Looks Toaplan-y as hell.  :)

Love this!  Raphael was always my favorite in the original arcade game.  :)

 Uhh, this is brilliant.  No joke.

 This looks like the Arch Vile from DOOM II  :D

 Blazing mecha action!  :D

 Love it!

The "muzzle flash" sprite is the same for all the game's weapons across the board.  Its sole purpose is to hide the hard boundary between the weapon and the front of the ship.  The concept was pulled straight out of other 16-bit era shmups like Thunderforce IV, etc.

 I can't really spare any VRAM in the game for explosion frames.  :/

This piece is so good it borders on the absurd.    Also, the style kind of strikes me as a cross between Fool and St0ven.  Excellent work.  5/5 and faved, easily.

Incredible piece, but yea the unfinished water fountain bugs me.  <Y U NO GUY>

I still swear to this day, this is the best piece of pixel art on this site.  *drops to knees and worships*

I love the rocks!

Reminds me of Hagane on the Super NES!  5/5 & Faved.  :)

Good conveyance of loud noise!  :)

All your work is incredible and nearly beyond belief.  This is no exception.  5/5 and faved, no brainer.  ;)

I've always loved your art style.  Very game appropriate.  Faved!

This is great!  The only minor crit i can see is the thumb on the hand holding the spear sticks out like... well... a sore thumb.  lol.  Maybe if you darkened up the right side of the thumb with a couple darker skin pixels, it would appear to curve back into the wrist a bit more.

I think the black space could use something to tie it all together, but for the time constraints of the weekly challeng, this is fantastic.  great work!

The amount of detail for using double pixels is impressive!  :)

Not at all, feel free.  :)

Absolutely beautiful work here.  5/5 + faved.  :)

Yep.  It's just a 64x64 repeating tile i made.  I took the tile and scrolled it frame-by-frame with the colors changed slightly each frame, then shifted each horizontal line left/right in a sine wave pattern.  It's essentially the same method I used to animate the wiggly tiles in my 9-bit Lava Level piece (http://www.pixeljoint.com/pixelart/41481.htm), only much more exaggerated.  Then i did the stars and scrolled them frame-by-frame as well.  pasted the star frames in front of the wavy frames (and a few at the end so it looped correctly) and added the fade in/out.  Then i finally added the ship in there.

It's pixel art, alright.  The GIF uses so many colors because of all the frames (meant to show the scrolling).