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> In the process I also learned that the cover of Kirby Air Ride changed between the Japanese and international releases. The Japanese cover art features a smiling happy Kirby where the international cover has Kirby with a furrowed brow and serious look.

This is not the first Kirby game to have its cover art changed to look more serious and "gritty" for the US release; in fact, TV Tropes named a page after this phenomenon, and Kirby Air Ride is currently the featured page art at https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AmericanKirbyIsH... (caution, TV Tropes will consume your free time, only click when you have a few hours to spare).

P.S. Since the link chopped off half way through the name of the wiki page, I'll just mention that the page is titled "American Kirby is Hardcore".

The American Mega/RockMan NES box art is what always comes to mind for me. All 6(!) of the games got pretty bad box arts, but the 1st is an iconic rush-job attempt to make him more mature and badass: https://gaming.stackexchange.com/q/238841

The PAL, JP and US versions are soooo different. Here's the PAL cover: https://i.redd.it/1sra7fk3bsgb1.jpg

That was the first video game I bought myself.

The extreme version of this is the game Nier where they completely replaced the protagonist. The Japanese version had a kid trying to save his sister while the western version had a old man trying to save his daughter.

Japan got both versions - kid on PS3 (Replicant), old man on 360 (Gestalt).

> I paid $50 plus shipping on eBay for this PNG. This is the closest I'll get to NFTs.

Buying a cartridge of an old game just to preserve a non-blurry copy of the sprite. Now THAT's dedication.

(Disc, not cartridge)

The article misses the "Super-spicy curry" item that appeared in Brawl (and maybe Air Ride?). I think that's also a billboard.

Oooh! I need to look into this... thanks for the tip.

The food in Mario Kart World is very scrumptious looking https://www.mariowiki.com/Dash_Food

Maybe I'll do a follow up on this!

This kinda of article is exactly what the internet was made for. More of this, less AI

It's funny how people are compelled to virtue signal about AI in almost every thread. It's not even on-topic.

half of HN is ai related, people can be fed up

I agree, it's the tech equivalent of "I'm vegan".

Downvote/flag and move on.

Has to be a condition of some kind

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> More of this, less AI

The comment was great without this part.

I'm sorry I'm going to go on a rant, but seeing this day in and day out really gets to me.

I'm a filmmaker. AI is an incredible tool that is making VFX affordable to those of us with budgets.

My friends and I are already using it in roto/comp workflows:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tii9uF0nAx4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tj-dJvGVb-w

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1m6eUR5V55QXA9p6SLuCM8LdFMBq... (NSFW, bloody/gory - the effects look bad because we did this for a "film hackathon" and had an extremely short amount of time with no chance to fix the editing, script, lack of locations, etc. Under four hours for the VFX work.)

Corridor Crew are making incredible stuff and teaching people how to do it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DSRrSO7QhXY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GVT3WUa-48Y

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iq5JaG53dho

There's so much use by actual artists. I don't have a list in front of me, but I'll start compiling that to share next time this comes up.

I am really salty about this because I am receiving hate and death threats because of this. I've had a film of mine booed in a live theater because I worked on a Blender + Mocap + AnimateDiff short film. I'm deep in the Atlanta film scene. I know a lot of the people that were in the audience personally. This was fresh off of the strikes, and the looming AI fears had people worried, so I understood the apprehension. But it still sucks to have your hard work and labor shunned like that in person. In any case, I won an award for that film. A year later, I did the same thing and everyone clapped. (It's not in my portfolio. I left a link in one of my previous comments if you care to dig.)

It's super easy to say "AI sucks", "AI bros", "kill AI artist", etc., but it misses all of the hard work being done by those using the tools.

I one day hope to have our small studio making high fantasy and science fiction films. I covet the art direction of Denis Villeneuve and Peter Jackson. I always have. My director friends that went to film school hoped to make films like that when they were younger, as I did I. The industry is very pyramid shaped, and unless you get really lucky or have nepo baby connections, you'll never get the chance to helm a project like that.

Tens of thousands of students go to film school every year, yet most of their dreams wither on the vine. That's incredibly sad. We only get a small slice of human creativity, and what we do see is usually pretty generic.

We have our Arris - that part has been democratized for a while. We have distribution. But we could never afford a $100 million VFX budget. AI changes the game and gives us so much hope that we can finally tell the stories we really want to tell in the way that we want to tell them.

Instead of thinking of AI as "just prompting", think of it as an exoskeleton for practitioners. One analogy is that cameras can be used by anyone to make all kinds of junk - selfies, food pics, "butt dialed" accidental shots. Yet professional photographers are capable of making incredibly captivating art and immortalizing Pulitzer Prize winning moments.

There are AI coding assistants for people who can't code (and I think this is awesome for accessibility and letting people act on their dreams - it's a gateway!), and there are AI coding models for full-time engineers. It's a lot like that.

I've made a lot of experiments in this space. Huge ComfyUI workflows, custom trained models frankensteined from stitched together modules, a lot of Unreal and Blender-inspired work.

I'm currently working on this [1] to enhance my own work. My desire right now is making it really fast to visually mold starting frames (which are like a director and DP blocking out scenes before shooting) and to precisely get the image you want before generating it.

This year I'm going to make full AI animations as well as a bunch of rotoscoped human + AI films this year. This stuff is going to be amazing for horror, sci-fi, and fantasy with live human actors. Those low-budget Blumhouse films are about to get real, and we're going to start seeing Lovecraftian horrors and actually good dinosaur movies soon. I'm really excited for this.

So I guess to return to my point, please please please don't hate all AI or especially insult people using it. This technology isn't distributed evenly, and in some pockets it's literally the most magical thing to have happened to the space. I wish I had this when I was much younger - my career would have looked a lot different. I'm really happy for the kids that get to grow up using this.

--

Anyway, I came to this article because I love Smash. It's a fantastic article and the author did an amazing job compiling this. I mostly play "no items", but I did see these on rare occasions. It's funny how nostalgia can be triggered by low resolution billboard textures from Melee.

Sakurai, director of the game, is bullish on AI for game development [2]. I think he's thinking the same way we are - this is a creative exoskeleton letting us do more and achieve more of our vision against the friction of constraints.

Invariably the comments (probably from non-artist consumers?) is full of hate. Many artists want to use this, yet we're bullied and hated for it.

This one, jeez:

> Dude's a hack and hasn't made a good game since Melee.

This is the same bullshit I'm getting on a daily basis. The hate we get online is unreal. You have to see it to believe it. I'm talking death threats on a regularly recurring basis. I should blog about it.

So please internalize this plea. Whenever you see attacks like this, please say something to remind the other person that we're all human and that real artists are using these tools to make real art.

[1] https://github.com/storytold/artcraft

[2] https://www.resetera.com/threads/masahiro-sakurai-believes-g...

To act like you can't make a film on a budget without AI is absurd

I want to make films that look like Denis Villeneuve's Dune. (Just to cite one example, not that I'm interested in replicating his style.) How am I supposed to do that?

You know what my sci-fi films look like? This is one of my productions, and it cost over $10,000 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-24s-AmqR5k (I don't even have a real link to the finished film, apparently. I don't typically do sci-fi because it's so inaccessible to do the things we want to do.)

We actually did a bunch of rotoscoping and VFX work for this. It was not bad for our budget, but I'm so tired of this. I have always dreamed of having my films look exactly like what I see in my mind's eye.

Why should I have constraints, and why should my audience dictate my constraints? It's my life, and I have a desire for my own creative output. My number one judge is myself, not you or anyone else. I make things to satisfy me.

I'm especially disheartened (?) angered (?) by non-artists stepping in to tell me this. People who haven't spent ten thousand hours on it.

> I want to make films that look like Denis Villeneuve's Dune. (Just to cite one example, not that I'm interested in replicating his style.) How am I supposed to do that?

As an artist you should know that being able to achieve whatever you want with whatever level of effort you want and get the reception you want is often not achievable

> As an artist you should know that being able to achieve whatever you want with whatever level of effort you want and get the reception you want is often not achievable

I love being told this over and over.

> the reception you want

I'm doing this for me. I live my life for me.

I'm lucky that I get to make friends and meet amazing collaborators in this journey.

Then what is your objection. You're doing it

The tech that you are defending is going to put your profession out of work. If you can write a prompt that gets you exactly what you have imagined for your movie, then your entire craft has been obsoleted and can now be achieved by anyone with an imagination (or even without).

Thanks for sharing. I’m really looking forward to a Cambrian explosion of weird little movies like Kung Fury as the costs of VFX shrink. I’m sure that there will be a ton of garbage, but that also means more gems that would’ve never been made if they had to raise money from bean counters.

> Kung Fury

Kung Fury is one of my favorite films!

Did you see the "trailer" for the sequel? [1] It looks so good! It's a shame that legal shenanigans are all that are holding it up [2].

You're absolutely right about this. We're going to see so many different kinds of small-studio films. Everything from Yorgos Lanthimos to Charlie Kaufman to Denis Villeneuve and back.

I expect lots of things we've never even seen before.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQRuka2aJy4 (warning, it's 10 minutes and full of HUGE spoilers revealing the entire plot and twists.)

[2] https://variety.com/2025/film/global/kung-fury-director-lega...

> Sakurai, director of the game, is bullish on AI for game development [2]

Your source is based on machine translation, and professional translators pushed back on the interpretation that he is enthusiastic about genAI. Apparently it came across more as resignation that AAA developers may be forced to resort to genAI in order to sustain the endless scope creep and content bloat endemic in the AAA space, which has led to the current absurdity of it taking an entire decade to make a new GTA game.

https://kotaku.com/ai-translation-of-smash-bros-directors-co...

Unfortunately for you, this sort of comment is exactly what HN was not made for. Less of that, more thoughtful and substantive comments.

Small error: the "Large foods" image section has steak but no fruit basket, while the list includes fruit basket but no steak.

Great article though!

As someone who has never played these games I would be interested in screenshots of how these assets look in context in-game.

https://x.com/Render96VGTP/status/1835797146555293989/photo/... for example

Relevant Sakurai https://youtu.be/_o29OOOarPY?si=vqvw9-nlrTKEFuKx

I've always thought this was inspired by the depiction of food in earlier arcade games like Bubble Bobble.

And Castlevania [1] (also from 1986) and don't forget about Pac-man, who probably started it all :)

[1] https://castlevania.fandom.com/wiki/Food

Wall chicken is obliquely referenced in the article

I would love to see a list of inspirations for keeping the food 2D even in a 3D environment! Pacman or Bubble Bobble seem like good places to start.

This is the same for Tomodachi games, isn't it?

That "cabbage" is clearly a lettuce.

Looks like iceberg lettuce to me, which I (facetiously) argue isn't really lettuce, so... shrug. :-)

I would be interested in hearing such an argument

I grew up with lettuce purchased from a local farmer's market, so when I first tried iceberg I was all, "What? This isn't lettuce! It has no taste!" Restaurants love it, though: any time I get a side salad at a restaurant it's 75% likely to be iceberg lettuce, unless the salad is a kind that specifically calls for something else (e.g. caesar salad requires romaine lettuce). But give me butter lettuce (which is what I grew up eating), romaine, or even red oak (my least favorite variety but at least it has flavor) over iceberg.

Iceberg does have some things going for it: it's got crunch, and I suspect it keeps rather well without wilting. (It's never around my house so I can't speak from personal experience). Those qualities, I'm sure, endear it to restaurants as a lettuce they can keep around for that one customer in ten who orders a side salad, and it's probably also why all the "salad mix" packages I've had the misfortune to consume (usually at someone else's house) seem to be iceberg-based (with a mix of other types too, but I can always tell the non-taste of iceberg lettuce). But there's just so much flavor in other lettuce varieties that I would say "Iceberg lettuce isn't really lettuce, so if you've only had iceberg then you don't yet know what real lettuce can taste like. Try butter lettuce, or even romaine hearts, and then you'll know what lettuce is. If, after that point, you still prefer iceberg, then go ahead, I won't argue with your taste. But don't think that you hate lettuce if all you've ever had is iceberg; it's like thinking you hate apples because all you've ever had is Red Delicious."

But red delicious is still definitely apple. I can definitely understand why someone would not prefer red delicious apples or iceberg lettuce, but that is quite different from claiming that iceberg lettuce isn't really a lettuce.

Better answer than expected. Biologically it cannot be denied it's a lettuce, but compared to butterhead it's utterly flavourless. Instead of calling plain unmodified things "vanilla" (a super tasty plant) we should be calling them "iceberg".

The two word description for iceberg lettuce is “crunchy water”. Works great when you want the crunch and nothing else. So perfect for sandwiches or a classic wedge salad where you are tasting the bacon and blue cheese.

People who think it can be used for a “real” salad are usually same ones that think that tomatoes are supposed to be tasteless too.

1. Place iceberg lettuce in mouth

2. Use mouth to attempt to detect lettuce taste

Wow TIL about Mont Blanc and about Tempura Soba. Both are delicious prospects.

Also I’m very entertained by the ‘big bonus foods’ - that hamburger is ridiculous.

> I've seen a few folks online remarking about the “JPEG” or “PNG”-like quality of the images

What do they mean by this?

Players that don't know the technical term "billboarding" might use this as a way to say that the images of the food are "flat" unlike the rest of the 3D modeled environment. Just a suspicion!

I can also be used for derogatory connotations; Another example is for Smash Brothers specifically, the Byleth character's ultra move has a flat image of a character in their game and people call it "png sothis" (character name) to suggest that it's low-effort or not well made

Also that they use a more realistic style compared to much of the in-game art assets.

JPEG has morphed into a synonym for photo, I guess.

See also: Ace Combat 7s infamous JPEG dog.

https://youtu.be/IXB1W8va3eg

Huh, Ace Combat sure has changed since I last played it in the 90s.

A few screen shots of the sprites in the game would be helpful. Did I miss any links in OP?

> Have you ever noticed that the food graphics in Super Smash Bros. and Kirby Air Riders is flat “billboarded” stock images of food?

I have not... A video showing what it's talking about would have been a good addition to this article.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eEQBB2Li5aQ

As an avid Smash player since the N64 days, I love how specifically niche this piece is. Please write a follow-up article about the health benefits of eating nothing but a Super Smash Bros based diet broken down by version.

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