Tuesday, February 27th, 2001 #319
A Bad Time One Slightly Fuzzy Megaman
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Let me take just a moment to comment on just how much I hate that X sprite. Actually, I hate all of his 16-bit game sprites. Unlike Mega Man's 16-bit sprites, there are no good sprites of X just standing there. No, he's always hunched over, ready for battle, which I'm sure is fine for a video game where you're going to be blasting things left and right, but it really doesn't work for a comic where most of your time is spent standing around talking.

In fact, I think I can safely say that my unhappiness with the selection of X sprites is one of the reasons it took me so long to get around to doing that X-origin storyline later in the comic. Luckily, by that time, DisgruntledFerret had made some lovely X sprites that worked quite well. But even so, there was still that distortion problem.

You see, when I first decided to include X in the comic, I noticed that his sprites were all a little shorter than the regular Megaman 7 sprites. I found this a little odd, since, as far as I knew, X was supposed to be quite a bit taller than Dr. Light's previous creations, being the next generation of robot and all. I realized Capcom must have adjusted the sizes of all the Megaman X sprites, so I knew I would have to resize X's sprites to get everything to match up with the rest of the comic.

To figure out the exact size ratio, I took a Megaman 7 Dr. Light sprite and compared it to his Megaman X holographic counterpart. It turns out the aspect ration is just about 4:5. In other words, all of the X-era sprites would need to be enlarged by 125% to match the Megaman 7 sprites I was already using. Unfortunately, you simply can't do that in Paint without completely mangling the sprite, and even Photoshop ruins the sprite a little. And while that might not be that noticeable with a complicated background, it shows up with a simple background like in these comics.

In the end, then, I had to choose between X being too short or X being slightly blurry. And I just couldn't bring myself to have X be too short. Of course, you don't really notice how tall X is, since all of his sprites are hunched over!
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