Now you can study the legendary Chaos Engine in detail with the Chaos Engine Viewer. Among other things, it allows you to export all of the game graphics, and compare the Amiga 500, Atari ST and Amiga CD32 versions.

The viewer runs on Windows only.

This week we want you to pixel a three-headed creature. Any kind of creature is OK - human(oid)s included.

Canvas Size - Max 180 x 180.
Colours - Max 12.
Transparency - Optional.
Animation - Optional.

The challenge thread will have all the challenge updates. The thread is also a great place to post your WIPs.

Evil forces lurk in the shadows... Pixel Joint is in danger!

Starting April 25th, two enemies are about to face each other in an epic battle of High Definition proportions. The power to protect the innocents or to feast upon them is in the hands of the few brave pixel pushers who want to be the decisive unit in this battle!

In the spirit of a 'maybe-competitive-free-to-participate-in-almost-wannabe-fad event', Metaru wants you to choose your destiny as part of the St George Knights Force and theme your avatar in a Knight-esque way to protect PJ or join the Evil Dragon Horde and theme your avatar in a Dragon-esque way to destroy it!

For example, if you happen to be

Then becoming a Knight turns you into

Or if you decided to be a Dragon instead

The prophecy tells that the battle will last until April 30th, when the side with the biggest army will prevail. The destiny of PJ is in your hands!

Do you like Pink Floyd? Do you like NES music?

If yes... You are going to love this: rainwarrior.thenoos.net/music/moon8.html

This week you are challenged to depict the same scene twice in one submission; both parts should be set on the same day - however, one part will be at night and the other during the day.

You may present this any way you want, as long as both versions of the scene are present in the one submission. Consider how each time of day will affect the scene.

Canvas Size- Unrestricted.
Colours- Max 25.
Transparency- Optional.
Animation- No.

These are 3 very useful bookmarks for all PJ members. The first two were written by Hatch. The third was created by 1ucas. All 3 are must haves.
PJ Challenge Checker- PJ Spec Checker - GIF Animation Viewer

Ever wondered what our heroes have to do after the level ends? Then check "DAN the MAN", a hilarious animation by Studio Joho.

Skipmore.com is a great collection of retro/old school/8bit pixel based games. All games are short, sweet and loads of fun. Perfect! The site is in Japanese but there is no language barrier and most games use English in-game. Start from the homepage (skipmore button) to choose games. The rest of the navigation is mostly galleries of screenshots, development blog, etc.

The following pixel artists produced Pixel Joint's top rated pixel art for March 2010. Many thanks go out to this month's top pixel artists and all the members who took time to rate.
 

Once upon a time [nudity] by Turtlechan

Dancing pyro by Gas 13

WAVeE by Noet

Operation Zombie by junkboy

They Lied. by Badassbill

Kitchen Scene by ThereIsNoCure

zaak The little wiz - remake by Rhamnys

[BJ] Party Crasher by B_j0k3r0

blonde china dress girl by Shawn

Metroid Dread by Badassbill

This week, challenge winner Lawrence wants you to create a walk cycle animation of a Mech sprite using a maximum of 16 frames.

Canvas size - Max 64 x 64.
Colors - Max 16.
Transparency - Optional.
Animation - Required.

This is a great video made by Patrick Jean about retro 8-bit video game characters taking revenge on the modern world.

Check it out here or here or here. Enjoy.

There's always an underwater level. Design a mock-up of a new, original video game showing a level that is set underwater. For this particular game you are restricted to 10 specific colours, these colours are shown below.

Canvas size - Unrestricted.
Colours - Max 10. Must use only the colours from the palette below:



Animation - Optional.
Transparency - No.

The challenge thread will have all the challenge updates. The thread is also a great place to post your WIPs.

Grafx2 is a pixelart drawing program inspired by old classics like Deluxe Paint and Brilliance. It is currently at version 2.2 and features some interesting features:

• Layers 
• Lua scripting to generate and distort your drawings 
• Some bug fixes

The full list of new features is available here. Enjoy!

TinEye is a nifty reverse image search engine that will check images that you feed it and see if it matches any other images in its database. Pretty useful for finding RIPs on PixelJoint.  Despite it still being Beta, it works pretty well.

Check it out here.

Click below for the solution to the April Fool's Day competition.

We have decided to do something a bit more creative for April Fool's Day this year, rather than just another joke (note the 4th link). This year, we have an actual activity that you can get involved in! There will of course be a joke involved, but we'll get to that later.

If it goes well, we will consider making this an annual event (or at least a somewhat regular event). It will hopefully encourage people to discover artwork that they might not have actually seen before and offer a chance to look back at those pieces they've already seen.

What the activity is:

We have hidden a relatively well-known joke somewhere within a gallery piece, your mission if you choose to accept, is to find the correct "answer" to this joke. It's extremely likely that you will know the answer when you see it, but the tricky part is finding it. (Remember, if you work out the code it should be far less difficult)

The first one to find the answer will get a gold star and obviously bragging rights too! If you think you've found it, leave a message in the comment section with the answer. The competition will close once the joke's answer has been found. Good luck, puzzle solvers!