I absolutely love the pixel style.
But character sprite rotation, are you sure it's a good idea to have players become flat to the screen?
Basically the only sprites that do rotate are the players, since they have weapons this allows you to see their direction easily.
Every other entity in the game just faces forward, this also allows you to instantly detect who's a player and who's a monster... unless you just ate a mushroom that turned everyone into mushrooms, in which case you're SOL.
-- Insert relevant image here if I end up making that --
Unrelated images, here are the screen shots I put on that banner. They came out pretty nice.
Wish I could have gotten a lower angle shot of all the characters, but it was hard to get a good looking shot that had most characters legible.
Bonus: There's one character who doesn't belong in the second image, find him and win a prize.
Pro Tip: If you're ever making a banner or some type of printed out CMYK image, make stuff bright as forget.