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Subject: Playing with Yoshi's Island
I've been playing Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island a lot lately, and I think I spend equal amounts of time enjoying the game and marvelling at the incredible graphics. It's still, 14 years later, one of the best looking games I've ever seen.
The technical wizardry behind it all is no less impressive. The SNES had only four layers of background to work with, but Nintendo managed to trick the hardware into an extra couple of layers by re-arranging their stacking priority part-way down the screen.
Anyway, I was playing the game and wondered how I could simulate the layered effect in a screenshot. It's tricky to do screenshots that really do it justice, since when it's frozen, the game looks very flat.
So I added blur.
Here's the original:
![[Image: /grafx/games/Yoshi-Layers.png]](/grafx/games/Yoshi-Layers.png "/grafx/games/Yoshi-Layers.png")
and here's the blur version:
![[Image: /grafx/games/Yoshi-Layers-blur.png]](/grafx/games/Yoshi-Layers-blur.png "/grafx/games/Yoshi-Layers-blur.png")
Each blurred layer is slightly more or less blurred than the next one, though the effect is often too subtle to notice the difference.
I like it, but it's too much work to do it for every screenshot. =(
The technical wizardry behind it all is no less impressive. The SNES had only four layers of background to work with, but Nintendo managed to trick the hardware into an extra couple of layers by re-arranging their stacking priority part-way down the screen.
Anyway, I was playing the game and wondered how I could simulate the layered effect in a screenshot. It's tricky to do screenshots that really do it justice, since when it's frozen, the game looks very flat.
So I added blur.
Here's the original:
and here's the blur version:
Each blurred layer is slightly more or less blurred than the next one, though the effect is often too subtle to notice the difference.
I like it, but it's too much work to do it for every screenshot. =(
![[Image: http://nfggames.com/system/arcade/special.php/b-d/bp-5/y-kof97/z-10/x-40C%20is%20too%20hot%20for%20humans./.png]](http://nfggames.com/system/arcade/special.php/b-d/bp-5/y-kof97/z-10/x-40C%20is%20too%20hot%20for%20humans./.png "http://nfggames.com/system/arcade/special.php/b-d/bp-5/y-kof97/z-10/x-40C%20is%20too%20hot%20for%20humans./.png")
![[Image: /grafx/games/yoshi-layers-3.png]](/grafx/games/yoshi-layers-3.png "/grafx/games/yoshi-layers-3.png")
![[Image: /grafx/games/yoshi-layers-2.png]](/grafx/games/yoshi-layers-2.png "/grafx/games/yoshi-layers-2.png")
![[Image: http://nfgworld.com/grafx/games/Yoshi-Layers-iso.png]](http://nfgworld.com/grafx/games/Yoshi-Layers-iso.png "http://nfgworld.com/grafx/games/Yoshi-Layers-iso.png")