Hello all, did you miss me? ... no? Okay, well that's neither here nor there. Welcome to this week's update, and what an update it is! For reasons unknown, this week we have little over 1,000 submissions! I know, I'm surprised as well. On that note, let's not waste any more time and just get right into it!

To start things off, Nazta brings us a bevy of rips from Final Fantasy: Brave Exvius, from the dark knight Garland to... well, is there anyone more important to Final Fantasy than Garland? Next, a relatively new face (or at least I've never seen him before) named eldomtom2 decided to submit a whole trove of sprites from Chris Sawyer's Locomotion, of all things! I'm not entirely certain what drives a man to rip this many sprites from a train simulator (aside from the train), but I'm certainly not complaining!

Recently, the Nintendo Wii U and 3DS eShops have begun to stop accepting credit cards, essentially meaning the service has now completely shut down. While the games that were available on there are now mostly lost to the sands of time (Unless you emulate them... or buy used copies... or play their rereleases on newer consoles), at the very least the menu assets for them have been safely ripped by TeridaxXD001, so if you want to take a nice long gander that the Japanese menu icons for Ocarina of Time... erm, you can do that...

On the customs side, we have a decent little bundle of sheets of varying quality and styles... most of which are from the Mario and Sonic series for some reason. Particular standouts are the Zelda 2 Stalfos expansion sprites by MisterMike, the Ocarina of Time Early Stalfos in the Zelda 2 Style by MisterMike, and the Sonic in Zelda 2 sprites by, wait for it... MisterMike! Okay but in all seriousness, the REAL standouts this week are the Syobon Action-styled Mario sprites by TarkanDragon, and the downright adorable Geno sprites by Omega. Absolutely loving these interesting takes on our classic gaming fundamentals! I'm also a bit partial to the SMAS-Styled Luigi SMW Overworld sprites which, while they complicate things by making him a tad taller, look very good for what they're trying to be.

And that, as far as submissions go, is only the tip of the iceberg. There are so many wonderful sheets we've received this week, you really owe it to yourself to give the full list a nice look, a long lick, maybe even a little sniff! Either way, a big thank you to all our wonderful submitters this week, great stuff all around!

And now, before I let you go, I'd like to give you all another tip with this little segment I call "MisterMike's Spriting Tip of the Week"!
Today's tip is all about thumbnails. Thumbnails are an important part of any submission, as they're the first thing people see when they look for it. Now while it's not necessary to have a thumbnail on your submissions when you submit them, it does save the staff from having to spend time to make one... or 15... or 200.

What constitutes a good thumbnail largely depends on the kind of submission you have. Naturally you want to include the most important or central thing to your thumbnail to help people more easily distinguish it from the others, as well as center the sprite onto the image. The biggest hurdle I often see is making the background transparent. Many people tend to use Microsoft Paint for their sheets and while that's perfectly fine in most cases, it means that they can't make the icons transparent because it simply doesn't support that.

As such, I would highly recommend switching over to a different image-editing program. Kolourpaint is my image editing software of choice, as it's basically Microsoft Paint but with a whole lot of extra features that, while mostly superfluous, can greatly help in making some incredible sheets, and it supports transparency which will allow you to make better thumbnails. Paint.NET also allows transparency, but unlike Kolourpaint it also support layers... not sure why you'd need layers for sprite sheets... but you can do that. Now I'm not saying all this because you guys don't make great thumbnails, far from it. I just think it's worth it to always think about what you can do to improve your output, because while your current tools might be more familiar to you, there could always be something better out there.

Alright, that's the end of my weekly(?) lecture. Again, a big thanks to all our contributors this week, you guys have done a wonderful job, and I'll see you all whenever I see you!