Why didn’t we ever see non doctored image of the gameplay?

There is not in the whole WWW, a single image of Paprium gameplay that is not obscured by some kind of editing, filter or intervention.

In other words, we have never seen a “pure” screenshot of the game.

Take Tanglewood for example. This screenshot has a reasonable number of colors, you can see each pixel individually (not blurry or out of focus). And the size is consistent with the dimensions of a Genesis game.

23 colors and 944 by 670 pixels

670/224 -the standard vertical resolution for Sega Mega Drive- is almost 3. This is a screenshot, from an emulator probably, blown up 3 times to make a decent press material.

You can do an interesting experiment. Download the large image of Tanglewood, open it in Photoshop or Gimp, and reduce it to the actual size. Use a height of 224 pixels. Preserve the aspect ratio, and use “Nearest Neighbor (hard edges)” resampling.
Zoom in on the image and you will see that it is virtually identical to the large image. There’s no trick.

Paprium on the other hand…

For starters, the image is 300% heavier if you save it as PNG. Jpeg 382 kB, PNG 1.136 kB!!!! :O

This should not happen in an image with a limited palette, and large areas of flat color.

But no, the image is full of noise, strange shades. Almost like an Instagram filter.

Of course that gives us a ridiculous color count.

284k colors! Take that SNES!

If you manage to isolate a pixel (there is always an overlap with the surrounding pixels), you will see that it is 4×4 pixels in size. I mean, the press image has a 4:1 ratio with the screenshot.

So 1024×682 is… 256×170.
No words.

That blurriness causes a lot of information to be lost by resampling it, like I did with Tanglewood’s image. And it shows. Paprium’s press images were not made for a TV plugged into a Sega. They’re visual candy.

Left: Image resampled to its estimated native resolution. Right:”Screenshot” spread by Watermelon Games.

To be continued….