'Splatoon 2' is already a treasure trove of dank meme art
What's that saying about giving a man a fish vs. teaching him to fish?
Yeah, well... Nintendo taught gamers how fun it could be to draw pictures in the Wii U's Miiverse social platform. Now, in Splatoon 2 -- which includes a similar doodle feature -- many of those same players are running with the art tools in new, hilarious, and occasionally alarming ways.
There's no preamble that can do this bizarre lineup of amateur art proper justice. Some pieces will delight you, others will offend you. Just about all of them will make you nod in approval, because holy crap how is this level of detail even possible??
I could legit keep going forever. There are so many good ones. Go explore and see for yourself.
You might think some of the more detailed ones are just the work of superhuman art wizards, but there's a good chance the ones that replicate popular internet JPGs are in fact automated recreations.
The process, which Kotaku explains here, uses a custom piece of software and a homebrew Switch hack that fools the console into thinking a custom device is actually one of Hori's Pokken Tournament Pro Pad controllers.
If you can get your hands on everything you'd need to set this up, converting, say, a JPG into pixel art recognizable in Splatoon 2 takes about an hour. It works sort of like a virtual version of one of those old dot matrix printers.
It's no simple task, of course. But that's why Splatoon's subreddit is such a treat. All the eye candy with none of the setup headaches.
Adam Rosenberg is a Senior Games Reporter for Mashable, where he plays all the games. Every single one. From AAA blockbusters to indie darlings to mobile favorites and browser-based oddities, he consumes as much as he can, whenever he can.Adam brings more than a decade of experience working in the space to the Mashable Games team. He previously headed up all games coverage at Digital Trends, and prior to that was a long-time, full-time freelancer, writing for a diverse lineup of outlets that includes Rolling Stone, MTV, G4, Joystiq, IGN, Official Xbox Magazine, EGM, 1UP, UGO and others.Born and raised in the beautiful suburbs of New York, Adam has spent his life in and around the city. He's a New York University graduate with a double major in Journalism and Cinema Studios. He's also a certified audio engineer. Currently, Adam resides in Crown Heights with his dog and his partner's two cats. He's a lover of fine food, adorable animals, video games, all things geeky and shiny gadgets.
