Forum Avatars - RIP

[Binjovi]

I don't know if you really want this, but I was messing around with an icon editor last night and tried to recreate the OCR logo from memory:

It didn't look quite right do I did a couple revisions:

Is this worth pursuing? (I can mess with the colo(u)rs some more if you want.)

???

I had my old Mario Kart DS emblem lying around. They're supposed to be 32x32, right?

Where was that? Well if you don't want them, fine. I didn't see that one so I wanted to try one myself.

I'm sorry. I made it around the time Mario Kart DS came out to use as my kart emblem and figured I'd save you the trouble of getting it right since it was a pain in the ass for me. Oh, and this was the first time I posted it, I believe.

[Gollgagh]

I'm sorry. I made it around the time Mario Kart DS came out to use as my kart emblem and figured I'd save you the trouble of getting it right since it was a pain in ass for me. Oh, and this was the first time I posted it, I believe.

Do you mind if I mess with it and try to put the Arkanoid font in it?

[Binjovi]

I'm sorry. I made it around the time Mario Kart DS came out to use as my kart emblem and figured I'd save you the trouble of getting it right since it was a pain in the ass for me. Oh, and this was the first time I posted it, I believe.

Do you mind if I mess with it and try to put the Arkanoid font in it?

Not at all. You can mess with it to your heart's content.

[Gollgagh]

Okay, I stretched the head phones so the the font would fit, and I redid the controller:

or

Thanks for the headphone base Bean.

LT: Hey, very nice on that second one, thanks. That's good teamwork! I might be selfish and suggest that we use that as an OCR Judge badge, since it sums up what we do. Otherwise, we'll make it a general avatar. Anyone wanna make a bigger (roughly 50x37) transparent thing like the pretzel logo djp uses? No big deal if not. I was just floating an idea out there.

[Goodnight]

Everybody's covered the good ideas, so here are two from Mario Paint:

LT: No animated GIFs (plus the pic is lame anyway), but give yourself a hand, cuz we'll be using that.

[WesPip]

Everybody's covered the good ideas, so here are two from Mario Paint:

I like that one, actually. Seems like a good avatar/idea to me, and the picture seems pretty high quality, so far as I can tell.

[watkinzez]

Asterix:

Okay.. now I only need a Tintin avatar before I'll kill myself trying to choose.

[SoloGamer]

Nick (or Tom, I forget which one's which) from Snow Brothers

LT: Uglyz.

One of those bats that always shows up in every Mega Man game

LT: Uglyz, but better. Taken.

Heidern from KoF

LT: Too small, too pixelated, not nearly enough detail on the face. Go for more of a face picture or side profile, like your Terry avatar.

Some enemy found in Gravity Man's (and Gyro Man's) stage in Mega Man 5

LT: Ha. Pink. But anyway, we'll take that. Thank you.

[Nineko]

Indiana Jones:

LT: Indiana Jones just needs some stray pixels removed.

. Better?

LT: Still a stray white pixel on the right side of his face near his neck. Yep.

mmmmh, it doesn't seem a stray pixel to me, I think it's part of his face.

anyway:

Pick the one you like better, or ask me for more edits.

LT: I'll see what I can do myself to put the finishing touches on it.

All your Sega Genesis screen captures/sprites are too dark.

sorry, it's probably an issue of the Genesis palette

LT: Yeah, it's definitely the Genesis itself. I noticed looking at our screen cap for Sonic & Knuckles with Lover Reef that the title screen is dark. It's certainly not your fault. I didn't take the Knuckles one, because that sprite only works when he's attached to some sort of border/wall. It doesn't look right otherwise.

Monitor (object)

LT: Too dark. All of them. I'm guessing we'll only use some of them, since there are so many.

Which ones? I tried to pick some, let me know if you prefer some others (like the shields, or whatever).

LT: Now that I think of it, let's just do the shields, reverse S, and invincibility. The character/1-up ones don't look as good, but I took the 10 rings and the fast foot ones. Thanks a lot.

Thanks for all the hard work here. Once you get the Genesis sprites brighter, we can add most of them.

edit...

New avatars!!!

By request:

LT: Hahaha! They're old school, but they don't look good at all, sorry.

not really a request, but Bonk is cool:

LT: Why's he upside-down? I suppose that's a move he does in the game, but it just looks he needs to be flipped right-side up. Flip it please.

request:

Commander Keen

LT: Too small. Really needs detail. Go for more of a facial picture instead.

[kitty]

We need Commander Keen.

[Kaleb.G]

Why don't you just allow 80x80 sized avatars and get rid of the huge-ass signatures instead?

Okay, I'm not going to leave it at that. Forgive me while I hijack this thread, but you guys are defeating the purpose of an avatar. An avatar is supposed to define yourself uniquely in picture form. It's used for immediate recognition of a poster. Allowing people to only choose from a pre-defined set of avatars is essentially pointless.

Now you might think you can do the same with signatures, but why bother? They take up WAY more space than a custom avatar. Furthermore, thanks to no apparent signature limits at OCR, they tend to clutter the flow of posts and add unnecessarily to the page length.

I could go on, but I know this won't change anything anyway. Four years I've been on the forums, and it's all the same.

[Powerlord]

I know I don't post on OCR much, but I have to agree with Kaleb. I tend to identify posters first by their avatar, rather than by their nick.

I know on certain other boards, people see and know it's me.

[Liontamer]

I'm gonna sum this up really quickly. Just like the game characters in the top right corner emphasizing the interests of this site, we use mostly VG avatars because that's the kind of fansite this is. We don't really care about uniqueness or the principle behind the avatar. It doesn't stop a fair amount of people from being recognized that way to begin with.

We have this system so the avatars don't look big, clunky and ugly with people using 80 different dimensions or animated GIFs cluttering up the look of the forum. If we used GFF's system, we'd just be copying GFF, which is ultimately a lame idea.

AFAIK, there will be sig limits under vB as well. But once we switch to vB, you know as well as I do that you can turn off viewing signatures entirely just like at GamingForce or any other vB-based forum, so why you're even complaining about them is beyond me.

[Navi]

by the way, points to nineko for the muthafuckin CHIP'S CHALLENGE avatar. if i wasn't deadset on my own little baby, i'd switch to that pronto

[Gollgagh]

Okay, I've been going through all of the old games on my hard drive but most of them won't give me good screenshots, Here's the best I could find:

Major Stryker:

Castle of the Winds:

Two kinds of Bomberman bombs:

Secret Agent 006:

Raptor Call of the Shadows:

Megaman shooting:

Hocus Pocus:

Gradius III:

Clyde somthing-or-other:

Abuse (I'm sorry, it's hard to get a good screencap, the guy has, like, 40 different frames just for breathing):

Descent:

These are from a couple of my old favorites, they are just a little over the limit but here they are any way (they are still smaller than fusion Samus):

Cosmo:

Duke Nukem II:

LT: Man, most of these are just ugly, unphotogenic sprites. Hell, it looks like Cosmo is holding some sort of cone-shaped condom. Took Megaman shooting and that's it.

[shpladoink]

LT: Looks MS Paint quality. Get an actual scan of a face and scale it down.

[Evilhead]

Working on a set of avatars but MS Paint at work is being a real pain... Won't let me save with transparencies. I'll post some soon once I can use Photoshop at home tonight.

[Kaleb.G]

so why you're even complaining about them is beyond me.

It's because I judge-hate.

[Evilhead]

Okay here they are as promised!

Bomberman:

LT: Coo.

Castlevania (I really like the first ghost one!):

LT: The last two are too shrunken down to look good (aw man, that skull was badass too). I took the hunchback facing to the right. Kind of odd how the pixels of the two aren't exact mirrors of each other.

Phantasy Star:

Lassic

Dr. Mad

Evilhead

(did all three color swaps for the hell of it)

LT: Dr. Mad and Evilhead are ugly, but I had pity on your plight. The others look badass. djp will be happy for Phantasy Star.

River City Ransom:

LT: Long overdue it seems.

Super Mario Bros:

LT: Well, I see what you were trying to do with Bowser. Since the transparency didn't look good, you went for a solid background. But Bowser looks out of place with a blue, Overworld-style background. He's a Castle guy, so make it black. Lakitu and Phobo are good.

Space Harrier:

LT: The Genesis sprites always seem to be dark. Brighten the first one. Forget the second.

Tetris:

LT: Being picky, but it just looks like a square with a piece missing. How about seperate I, T, O, L, J, S, and Z pieces?

[Dhsu]

Wow.

Although I'm thinking the CV avatars might be too dark, especially the SotN ones.

[Evilhead]

Wow.

Although I'm thinking the CV avatars might be too dark, especially the SotN ones.

Well, the zombie is a little dark, but I think the first few are okay. I could brighten them, but I like leaving the game's original colors. I'll see what Liontamer has to say!

[Dhsu]

He says "I'm moving to to Washington D.C. and will never have time for OCR again. Ever. Also, I smell."

[Kaleb.G]

Well, if you can't beat 'em, join 'em.

Here's my submission of Koopa Troopa from Mario Golf: Toadstool Tour. The first one uses transparency with a white matte, the second one has the standard white background that was on the original image. If you need a different color matte, let me know.

LT: The transparent one has a bunch of stray white pixels around the edges, so it's too rough. I leave it to your web design-influenced judgement to choose a better color for the background.

[Synth]

We need a avatar of Steve Vai.

[SoloGamer]

Found some from Samurai Shodown that just happen to be the right size.

Haohmaru

Charlotte

Cham Cham

Galford

Earthquake

And the Dr. Wily logo from Mega Man 2

LT: Now these are just badass. Nice work.