Did any games use background tiles for "sprites"?

Several GameBoy games like Primal Rage and Mortal Kombat 1 & II used background tiles instead of sprites for the playable characters. Did any NES games use this approach?

An advantage of this is there is no sprite limit, since they aren't sprites. The disadvantage is it takes time to merge the character graphics with the background tiles, and that the characters cannot use a palette separate from the background.

Gauntlet uses background tiles for enemies. It has CHR-ROM and doesn't do any merging though.

Merging with complex backgrounds probably wouldn't work very well on the NES since the background palette is set per 2x2 tiles.

I remember an old game console (can't remember which one; might've been a home computer too) where sprites changed color when they crossed into some background areas. I wonder if it was doing software sprites along with a lower-resolution grid for some of the palette bits like on the NES...

That would be the ZX Spectrum.

Some games are pretty hardcore with the use of backgrounds to render sprites. This MSX game for example even has a second background layer scrolling at a different speed.

This technique is less popular on the NES because of the low amount of colors per palette and attributes per 2x2 tiles. You can find several GB games that use this trick, but I can't think of a single one for the GBC, even though it has higher attribute resolution and more palettes than the NES.

On the SMS (which has 16 colors per tile) there are fighting games like Street Fighter II that render fighters using background tiles.

I remember finding one NES game, some vaguely action-adventurey thing, where the boss battles did this—they'd fade out the background, and scroll the boss around while using sprites for the player and everything else.

Unfortunately, I can't remember which game this was.

There are LOTS of games that do that, from Totally Rad to the Megaman series.

But the original question was about playable characters, which compared to bosses, is almost unheard of. The only example I can think of is Way of the Exploding Fist. The NES version wasn't officially released, but there are at least a couple prototype ROMs out there. The background behind the player-accessible area is just a solid color, but it still looks alright.

Kung Fu used a background for the player sprite.

Yes. These objects are rippable with my tool "NES Explorer".

Of course many games did this. The ones I can think of right now are :
- Punch Out
- Door Door
- Donkey Kong
- Fire Emblem (both on maps and during battles)
- Mega Man games (minibosses like the Dragon of Dr. Wily 2)


Sounds like Blaster Master. However I think it handles background bosses in a very lame way as opposed to the games I mentionned above (it just fades the backgrounds and display the boss only, this is too easy and looks ugly).
Gradius games does this as well.

Also you'd want to take a look at this demo I wrote some time ago.

Bucky O'Hare does lots of neat tricks with background tiles.

This scene combines bg-based enemies with parallax scrolling for example (and the boss throws rocks made of bg tiles). Here the large green ball is part of the background (and the scene before that does parallax scrolling by rewriting bg tiles).

And yeah, most of those are not unique to Bucky O'Hare (it seems to have borrowed a lot of stuff from Battletoads for example), but I can't think of any other game that uses so many different bg-based effects (Battletoads might be a contender).

Here is another well-executed one, though it's kinda drifting from the topic.

I seem to remember Cabal using big background bosses.

Here's one from Mega Man 5.

IMO, Bucky O'Hare and Battletoads are the absolute kings of NES tricks. Both games use a lot of graphical effects to create visuals that can't be ordinarily achieved on the NES. One interesting fact is that while Bucky O'Hare uses CHR-ROM, Battletoads uses CHR-RAM, so even though both games have effects in common, some of them are unique to the type of CHR memory used.

The water animation, which appears to be done with palette cycling, looks pretty bad and distracting.

Ah, hadn't realized Bucky O'Hare used CHR-ROM. Guessing it actually stores the shifted versions of the bg tiles for the "rewriting" parallax scroll effect and uses bank switching to replace them instead then.

It's too bad you don't fight rabbits in Battletoads. Would've made it nicely symmetric (both games have you rescue kidnapped partners too).

A lot of games use the background layer as large bosses. This is especially popular in shooting games. Fantasy Zone is one good example.

A background plane isn't too different from one huge sprite, really.

Some systems didn't even bother to distinguish sprites from bg layers, such as the Neo-Geo.

http://wiki.neogeodev.org differs:

I don't see how that "differs" from what I said.

Oh, I thought you meant that the Neo Geo just had a bunch of tile layers that could be used as backgrounds or sprites.

Apparently it has a bunch of sprites that can be used as sprites or backgrounds!

I think it's a great idea to have it done like this. I'm surprised the "Modern" 2D systems such as GBA didn't do it like this either. Instead of having hardware for background or sprites it makes sense to improve hardware for sprites and toss hardware for background completely, it'll still use less chip space than having rendering for BG and sprites.

At the one extreme, there's Atari's Tetris hardware, which is all tiled background. At the other extreme, there are Sega's Pengo hardware and the Neo-Geo MVS/AES, which are all sprites.

For one thing, Neo Geo treats everything as columns of 16x16 sprites. That's fine for games using 16x16 grids, but a lot of games (such as Tetris Worlds and Dr. Mario) need 8x8 precision, and there are tricks that can be done with HDMA scrolling and two tile layers to get 12x12 tiles (as seen in Puyo Pop). For another, if your CPU is (relatively) slow, it might be hard to move everything around at full speed if your level map is made out of sprites. And finally, I don't remember Neo Geo allowing anything like Mode 7 rotation. The GBA allows sprite rotation, but moving a bunch of sprites relative to each other to create a rotated playfield (as one would have to do to simulate the rotation in Super NES racing games like On the Ball and Super Mario Kart) often causes cracks when sines and cosines aren't perfect multiples of a pixel.

I think the Neo Geo allows you to staple the sprite columns together, so a large group of pixels can be controlled with one set of H\V offsets. I'm not sure though; the documents I read were rather confusing.

Yep, the Neo Geo allowed you to chain strips so you could move large amount of columns with a single set of coordinates.

On the Neo Geo, how many strips can be on one screen and one scanline?

Metal Slug on NeoGeo constructs something that looks like a normal background layer and I suspect other games may do the same.

I've seen numbers being up to 380 sprites on screen and up to 96 per scanline. One thing that should be noted is that the NeoGeo does have a static layer, usually used for overlays such as health bars, Credit Counters, and current Difficulty Level. These things appear to be 8x8 tiles.

I always wondered how much money it really took to produce a Neo Geo AES.