Bouncing Sprites

Before you get all excited, I'm talking about video games today.

I was watching a trailer for some game starring some sort of blue fox guy with a cloak and sword and something was bothering me about it. I mean, it looked nice enough- the sprite art was pretty good, if kind of shiny and bland, and it seemed to be competent brawling platformer, but then it hit me.

The little dude (I'll call him Blox, short for Blue Fox, from now on) was swinging his sword into a mass of enemies, with a predictably flashy "super cool swordsman" technique that seems to be popular when I realized that what I was seeing was complete artistic wankery. Maybe it's understandable, seeing as how it was from a professional animator and it was his hobby game, but then I realized that it had the greatest crime of them all- the main character's idle animation was bouncing.

You know what I'm talking about. It's like this. Or http://snk.wikia.com/wiki/File:Annie_idle.gif. I mean, look. I've seen a good bit of fighting- some of it was on TV, and some of it was in real life. Never have I ever seen anybody literally stand there and bounce around on their toes. Never have I seen somebody exaggerate their breathing, either, before you give me that. It's an artifact of really bad spriting, and it's really, really annoying. The worst part is that the guy I'm talking about otherwise has some really well-done animations, as cheesy and overblown and cliche as they might be. The guy knows how to animate, although he apparently isn't too solid on what makes a game visually attractive.

For contrast, have a Metal Slug gif. I know it's not really fair, since Metal Slug has some of the best sprite art period, but it's still annoying to have people ripping off people ripping off sprites from the 80s when greatness is right there, waiting to be learned from.