Enlarge/Star Wars: Luke’s Awakening imagines a Game Boy Color game that never was.
Shoehead
Just in time for Star Wars Day, Irish pixel artist and indie game developer Shoehead debuted nine delightful mock-up images of a non-existent Game Boy Color game called Star Wars: Luke’s Awakening. It’s a fan tribute that melds the design sensibilities of the 1993 Game Boy classic Zelda: Link’s Awakening with the storyline of the original Star Wars trilogy.
In the pixel art, Shoehead depicts a title screen and eight key scenes that reflect important events in A New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi. The scenes include watching the “Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi” sequence with the Jedi master, an encounter with a Wampa on Hoth, a Darth Vader boss battle, evading the Rancor monster, getting zapped by the Emperor, and seeing the Force ghosts of Anakin, Yoda, and Obi-Wan at the end of Return of the Jedi.
Fan-made mock-up title screen artwork for a fantasy Star Wars: Luke’s Awakening game.
Shoehead
Watching the “Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi” at old Ben Kenobi’s place.
Shoehead
Facing stormtroopers in the Death Star.
Shoehead
An encounter with a Wampa on Hoth.
Shoehead
A boss battle with Darth Vader.
Shoehead
Fighting the guards at Jabba’s palace.
Shoehead
Evading the Rancor monster.
Shoehead
Getting zapped by Emperor Palpatine.
Shoehead
Seeing the Force ghosts of Anakin Skywalker, Yoda, and Obi-Wan Kenobi.
Shoehead
The images abound with delightful details, such as choices of weapons appropriate for each scene and how Shoehead perfectly adapted the “chibi” style of Zelda’s Game Boy adventures to Star Wars.
Shoehead’s artwork borrows the palette restrictions of Nintendo’s 1998 Game Boy Color handheld, which hosted a color-upgraded version of The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening DX, as well as Oracle of Ages and Oracle of Seasons.
“Link’s Awakening DX was the first game I ever bought with my own money,” Shoehead told Ars. “I got it the year it came out so I could finally play a Zelda game by myself instead of at a friend’s house. So I have a lot of nostalgia for that, as well as the Oracle games.”
Shoehead’s love for the Game Boy Color’s visual aesthetic runs deep. In 2022, he created several “demake” scenes inspired by Elden Ring. “The way a lot of sprites will share a light tone and black and usually only one unique color makes everything mesh together so well. It’s a really unique style, and I think it might only exist because of the jump from the original Game Boy’s palette to the Game Boy Color’s.”
Tools of the trade
Shoehead says he learned to edit sprites in RPG Maker 2003 as a kid around 20 years ago. Today, he uses Aseprite to draw pixel-art images. “I grabbed it back when it was super cheap in the early days because I couldn’t find a program that clicked with me and I was trying everything,” he says. “I usually use both a mouse and an XPPen tablet to pixel, but this one was 100 percent drawn with a mouse.”
Enlarge/ 1998’s Game Boy Color offered handheld Nintendo games in color for the first time and also played host to three Zelda adventures.
Nintendo
Shoehead says he started working on the Luke’s Awakening artwork on April 6, so the nine-image set took less than a month to complete. “I was originally going to reskin a Zelda-like game I’m working on and try to cut a trailer from some scenes for fun,” he says. “But I got some bad news like immediately after planning it out, so I settled for pixelling some screenshots and taking it easy.”
While Luke’s Awakening exists only in the artist’s mind (and these nine images), surely Shoehead, an indie game developer, has been tempted to turn it into a real game? “Oh, no way, I don’t want to deal with Nintendo lawyers AND Disney lawyers,” he said. “I have my own Western Zelda-like I’m working on, so this is more like practice for making more of that.”
LONDON (AP) — With a few daubs of a paintbrush, the Brontë sisters have got their dots back.
More than eight decades after it was installed, a memorial to the three 19th-century sibling novelists in London’s Westminster Abbey was amended Thursday to restore the diaereses – the two dots over the e in their surname.
The dots — which indicate that the name is pronounced “brontay” rather than “bront” — were omitted when the stone tablet commemorating Charlotte, Emily and Anne was erected in the abbey’s Poets’ Corner in October 1939, just after the outbreak of World War II.
They were restored after Brontë historian Sharon Wright, editor of the Brontë Society Gazette, raised the issue with Dean of Westminster David Hoyle. The abbey asked its stonemason to tap in the dots and its conservator to paint them.
“There’s no paper record for anyone complaining about this or mentioning this, so I just wanted to put it right, really,” Wright said. “These three Yorkshire women deserve their place here, but they also deserve to have their name spelled correctly.”
It’s believed the writers’ Irish father Patrick changed the spelling of his surname from Brunty or Prunty when he went to university in England.
Raised on the wild Yorkshire moors, all three sisters died before they were 40, leaving enduring novels including Charlotte’s “Jane Eyre,” Emily’s “Wuthering Heights” and Anne’s “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.”
Rebecca Yorke, director of the Brontë Society, welcomed the restoration.
“As the Brontës and their work are loved and respected all over the world, it’s entirely appropriate that their name is spelled correctly on their memorial,” she said.
