Didn't really read into the article earlier - it seems there was a #LOWREZJAM 2016 competition and there was quite a lot of entries: https://itch.io/jam/lowrezjam2016 . So if someone likes the blocky look...;P

The animation doesn't use much more than 8 colors (or so I think) so there wouldn't be really much difference in the look between 256-pixel and 16-lpixel modes in this case. Well the scrolling would be more jerky with the 16c, however - half the amount of data to draw and store.

Oh, right... I forgot that with half-bytes you would need to store the same amount of data as for whole bytes because of shifting... Also there's the need to mask the pixels in 16c mode... So yeah, the 256-mode should be better in nearly every way I guess.