“Food JPEGs” in Super Smash Bros. and Kirby Air Riders

[rmunn]

> 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".

[recursivecaveat]

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

[rererereferred]

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.

[rmunn]

> 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.

[Klonoar]

(Disc, not cartridge)

[PLenz]

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

[ronsor]

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

[echelon]

> 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...

[embedding-shape]

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

[AJRF]

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

[SethMLarson]

Maybe I'll do a follow up on this!

[Cpoll]

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

[SethMLarson]

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

[yreg]

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

[Proofread0592]

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

[msephton]

FYI they're supposed to "pop" or look out of place in the game so that you can easily see them amongst the mayhem

[cheunste]

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

[mock-possum]

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.

[lynguist]

Also hugely popular in German speaking Switzerland under the name of Vermicelles.

[ksymph]

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!

[SethMLarson]

Great eye to detail! Thank you: ill fix this when I get home :)

[citizenkeen]

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

[SethMLarson]

Great suggestion, I'll add an example!

[bjt12345]

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

[smokel]

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

[AshamedCaptain]

And (Kirby's) Gourmet Race with its food sprites, the clear ancestor of all the Kirby racing games... and from the same designer.

Even if its sprites are not photo-realistic, I am bit surprised it was excluded from TFA.

[SethMLarson]

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.

[manytimesaway]

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

[Y_Y]

That "cabbage" is clearly a lettuce.

[rmunn]

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

[slmjkdbtl]

article contains the best chart in the world

[Retr0id]

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

What do they mean by this?

[SethMLarson]

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!

[jsheard]

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

See also: Ace Combat 7s infamous JPEG dog.

https://youtu.be/IXB1W8va3eg

[efilife]

Isn't it about compression artifacts?

[MasterScrat]

> 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.

[opan]

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

[vunderba]

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.