Fx3 wrote:
Here's a better picture just in case...
I'm counting the bright orange blocks on the bottom, and I'm assuming that each visual "square" is 8x8, and I counted 19, from left to right (that black gap is tricky though)
19 * 8 = 152. The colors are too bright, in my opinion, to be Gameboy Color graphics, and status bars on the gameboy tend to be white, instead of black, especially on games that are compatible with the classic gameboy, due to the effect that too much "dark" on a scanline tends to shift the entire scanline dark on the original LCD.
Now, for TIME being so small, I'd imagine that the status bar up there doesn't need to have the whole alphabet loaded, since this game doesn't look like the kind of game that'd have dialog in-level. As such, there's nothing stopping the graphic artist from just cramming "TIME" in as few tiles as possible. If you look at Donkey Kong for NES, you can see an example of this. "BONUS" and "TOP" are squeezed in fewer tiles to save screen estate, so this isn't unusual.
Lastly, the character portrait in the status bar. This is more of a style observation, but I think SEGA had the most spikey blue hair of everyone, not just because of Sonic, but because of games like Phantasy Star and Zillion. This probably has no real logic to back it up, but it's what got me thinking out of the box, at least. *shrug*