[HN Gopher] "Food JPEGs" in Super Smash Bros. & Kirby Air Riders
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"Food JPEGs" in Super Smash Bros. & Kirby Air Riders
Author : SethMLarson
Score : 248 points
Date : 2026-01-06 18:57 UTC (5 days ago)
(HTM) web link (sethmlarson.dev)
(TXT) w3m dump (sethmlarson.dev)
| yreg wrote:
| As someone who has never played these games I would be interested
| in screenshots of how these assets look in context in-game.
| Proofread0592 wrote:
| https://x.com/Render96VGTP/status/1835797146555293989/photo/...
| for example
| mock-possum wrote:
| 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.
| Y_Y wrote:
| That "cabbage" is clearly a lettuce.
| rmunn wrote:
| Looks like iceberg lettuce to me, which I (facetiously) argue
| isn't really lettuce, so... _shrug_. :-)
| Y_Y wrote:
| I would be interested in hearing such an argument
| rmunn wrote:
| I grew up with lettuce purchased from a local farmer's
| market, so when I first tried iceberg I was all, "What?
| This isn't lettuce! It has no taste!" Restaurants love it,
| though: any time I get a side salad at a restaurant it's
| 75% likely to be iceberg lettuce, unless the salad is a
| kind that specifically calls for something else (e.g.
| caesar salad requires romaine lettuce). But give me butter
| lettuce (which is what I grew up eating), romaine, or even
| red oak (my least favorite variety but at least it has
| flavor) over iceberg.
|
| Iceberg does have some things going for it: it's got
| crunch, and I suspect it keeps rather well without wilting.
| (It's never around my house so I can't speak from personal
| experience). Those qualities, I'm sure, endear it to
| restaurants as a lettuce they can keep around for that one
| customer in ten who orders a side salad, and it's probably
| also why all the "salad mix" packages I've had the
| misfortune to consume (usually at someone else's house)
| seem to be iceberg-based (with a mix of other types too,
| but I can always tell the non-taste of iceberg lettuce).
| But there's just so much flavor in other lettuce varieties
| that I would say "Iceberg lettuce isn't really lettuce, so
| if you've only had iceberg then you don't yet know what
| _real_ lettuce can taste like. Try butter lettuce, or even
| romaine hearts, and then you 'll know what lettuce is. If,
| after that point, you still prefer iceberg, then go ahead,
| I won't argue with your taste. But don't think that you
| hate lettuce if all you've ever had is iceberg; it's like
| thinking you hate apples because all you've ever had is Red
| Delicious."
| Y_Y wrote:
| Better answer than expected. Biologically it cannot be
| denied it's a lettuce, but compared to butterhead it's
| utterly flavourless. Instead of calling plain unmodified
| things "vanilla" (a super tasty plant) we should be
| calling them "iceberg".
| zokier wrote:
| But red delicious is still definitely apple. I can
| definitely understand why someone would not prefer red
| delicious apples or iceberg lettuce, but that is quite
| different from claiming that iceberg lettuce isn't really
| a lettuce.
| tom_ wrote:
| 1. Place iceberg lettuce in mouth
|
| 2. Use mouth to attempt to detect lettuce taste
| koolba wrote:
| The two word description for iceberg lettuce is "crunchy
| water". Works great when you want the crunch and nothing
| else. So perfect for sandwiches or a classic wedge salad
| where you are tasting the bacon and blue cheese.
|
| People who think it can be used for a "real" salad are
| usually same ones that think that tomatoes are supposed to
| be tasteless too.
| manytimesaway wrote:
| This is the same for Tomodachi games, isn't it?
| PLenz wrote:
| This kinda of article is exactly what the internet was made for.
| More of this, less AI
| echelon wrote:
| > 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...
| ericd wrote:
| Thanks for sharing. I'm really looking forward to a Cambrian
| explosion of weird little movies like Kung Fury as the costs
| of VFX shrink. I'm sure that there will be a ton of garbage,
| but that also means more gems that would've never been made
| if they had to raise money from bean counters.
| echelon wrote:
| > Kung Fury
|
| Kung Fury is one of my favorite films!
|
| Did you see the "trailer" for the sequel? [1] It looks so
| good! It's a shame that legal shenanigans are all that are
| holding it up [2].
|
| You're absolutely right about this. We're going to see so
| many different kinds of small-studio films. Everything from
| Yorgos Lanthimos to Charlie Kaufman to Denis Villeneuve and
| back.
|
| I expect lots of things we've never even seen before.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQRuka2aJy4 (warning,
| it's 10 minutes and full of HUGE spoilers revealing the
| entire plot and twists.)
|
| [2] https://variety.com/2025/film/global/kung-fury-
| director-lega...
| fenwick67 wrote:
| To act like you can't make a film on a budget without AI is
| absurd
| echelon wrote:
| I want to make films that look like Denis Villeneuve's
| Dune. (Just to cite one example, not that I'm interested in
| replicating his style.) How am I supposed to do that?
|
| You know what my sci-fi films look like? This is one of my
| productions, and it cost over $10,000 -
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-24s-AmqR5k (I don't even
| have a real link to the finished film, apparently. I don't
| typically do sci-fi because it's so inaccessible to do the
| things we want to do.)
|
| We actually did a bunch of rotoscoping and VFX work for
| this. It was not bad for our budget, but I'm so tired of
| this. I have always dreamed of having my films look exactly
| like what I see in my mind's eye.
|
| Why should I have constraints, and why should my audience
| dictate my constraints? It's my life, and I have a desire
| for my own creative output. My number one judge is myself,
| not you or anyone else. I make things to satisfy me.
|
| I'm especially disheartened (?) angered (?) by non-artists
| stepping in to tell me this. People who haven't spent ten
| thousand hours on it.
| fenwick67 wrote:
| > I want to make films that look like Denis Villeneuve's
| Dune. (Just to cite one example, not that I'm interested
| in replicating his style.) How am I supposed to do that?
|
| As an artist you should know that being able to achieve
| whatever you want with whatever level of effort you want
| and get the reception you want is often not achievable
| echelon wrote:
| > As an artist you should know that being able to achieve
| whatever you want with whatever level of effort you want
| and get the reception you want is often not achievable
|
| I love being told this over and over.
|
| > the reception you want
|
| I'm doing this for me. I live my life for me.
|
| I'm lucky that I get to make friends and meet amazing
| collaborators in this journey.
| fenwick67 wrote:
| Then what is your objection. You're doing it
| parasti wrote:
| The tech that you are defending is going to put your
| profession out of work. If you can write a prompt that
| gets you exactly what you have imagined for your movie,
| then your entire craft has been obsoleted and can now be
| achieved by anyone with an imagination (or even without).
| jsheard wrote:
| > Sakurai, director of the game, is bullish on AI for game
| development [2]
|
| Your source is based on machine translation, and professional
| translators pushed back on the interpretation that he is
| enthusiastic about genAI. Apparently it came across more as
| resignation that AAA developers may be _forced_ to resort to
| genAI in order to sustain the endless scope creep and content
| bloat endemic in the AAA space, which has led to the current
| absurdity of it taking an entire decade to make a new GTA
| game.
|
| https://kotaku.com/ai-translation-of-smash-bros-directors-
| co...
| ronsor wrote:
| It's funny how people are compelled to virtue signal about AI
| in almost every thread. It's not even on-topic.
| TechSquidTV wrote:
| Has to be a condition of some kind
| squigz wrote:
| Downvote/flag and move on.
| undeveloper wrote:
| half of HN is ai related, people can be fed up
| moralestapia wrote:
| I agree, it's the tech equivalent of "I'm vegan".
| embedding-shape wrote:
| Unfortunately for you, this sort of comment is exactly what HN
| was not made for. Less of that, more thoughtful and substantive
| comments.
| bjt12345 wrote:
| I've always thought this was inspired by the depiction of food in
| earlier arcade games like Bubble Bobble.
| smokel wrote:
| 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
| lelandfe wrote:
| Wall chicken is obliquely referenced in the article
| SethMLarson wrote:
| 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.
| Retr0id wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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!
| novov wrote:
| Also that they use a more realistic style compared to much of
| the in-game art assets.
| jezzamon wrote:
| I can also be used for derogatory connotations; Another
| example is for Smash Brothers specifically, the Byleth
| character's ultra move has a flat image of a character in
| their game and people call it "png sothis" (character name)
| to suggest that it's low-effort or not well made
| jsheard wrote:
| JPEG has morphed into a synonym for photo, I guess.
|
| See also: Ace Combat 7s infamous JPEG dog.
|
| https://youtu.be/IXB1W8va3eg
| hamdingers wrote:
| Huh, Ace Combat sure has changed since I last played it in
| the 90s.
| Cpoll wrote:
| The article misses the "Super-spicy curry" item that appeared in
| Brawl (and maybe Air Ride?). I think that's also a billboard.
| SethMLarson wrote:
| Oooh! I need to look into this... thanks for the tip.
| rmunn wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| (Disc, not cartridge)
| rmunn wrote:
| > 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".
| rererereferred wrote:
| 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.
| Uvix wrote:
| Japan got both versions - kid on PS3 (Replicant), old man on
| 360 (Gestalt).
| recursivecaveat wrote:
| 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
| Sardtok wrote:
| The PAL, JP and US versions are soooo different. Here's the
| PAL cover: https://i.redd.it/1sra7fk3bsgb1.jpg
|
| That was the first video game I bought myself.
| MasterScrat wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eEQBB2Li5aQ
| citizenkeen wrote:
| A few screen shots of the sprites in the game would be helpful.
| Did I miss any links in OP?
| SethMLarson wrote:
| Great suggestion, I'll add an example!
| vunderba wrote:
| 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.
| AJRF wrote:
| The food in Mario Kart World is very scrumptious looking
| https://www.mariowiki.com/Dash_Food
| SethMLarson wrote:
| Maybe I'll do a follow up on this!
| cheunste wrote:
| Relevant Sakurai https://youtu.be/_o29OOOarPY?si=vqvw9-nlrTKEFuKx
| ksymph wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Great eye to detail! Thank you: ill fix this when I get home :)
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