Dude got the Minecraft Steve treatment

@Superstarxalien bruh

@Yawackhary *green during gameplay but yellow during cutscenes

@RonaTheRTD Yeah, it's palette limitations. While there are 512 colors to choose from, for a sprite you can only have 16 colors (well 15 + one for transparency that the developers usually choose black to the annoyance of sprite rippers). Since there is a maximum of 61 colors (64 - transparency) with 4 palette slots, in theory you could have the same sprites with a different palette like beat em ups e.g. Streets of Rage series. It isn't used much because it would mean less options for the background, the best example that I can give is the port of Captain America & the Avengers and notice how limited the background is in terms of color (I think the background is only like 16 colors but not sure, it's very starved anyway). I don't think the trick where some tiles of a sprite use one palette and other tiles use another work like the NES. The bosses being split between sprites and background tiles trick for a larger palette should work though.

On the other hand Sonic 1's palette is very limited because Sonic's palette is also used for the badniks meaning that hacks either have to be creative, change a color but also affects an enemy or reprogram the palette to be like Sonic 2 onwards. The palette restrictions is also why Knuckles' socks can be a different color in Sonic 3&K (think it is yellow during gameplay but green during cutscenes, said green also makes the HUD go green at one point in Angel Island).

There are tricks with the shadow & highlight and the DMA but they have more limited uses.

@TakeTwoAncy Mighty was in SegaSonic. Also Mania and SegaSonic have a LOT more colors to choose from (Mania being a modern game while SegaSonic was on the System 32 arcade board, a lot more advanced than the Genesis).

@TakeTwoAncy if I had to guess, it could likely be because of palette limitations with the Genesis.

I don't exactly know how the palette limits work on the Genesis, but if I were to guess a reason for the limited colors, it'd probably be that.

I could also be completely wrong, but I'm just speculating here.

oh, yeah, that's weird the skin tone doesn't match the tone in mania and segasonic the hedgehog!
same thing on mighty (though mighty's wasn't in segasonic?)
how come?

"Oh my god, Karen. You can't just ask someone why they're white."

why is he white