Nice demo! We need more of this approach. You really can achieve amazing stuff with just plain e.g. OpenGL optimized for your rendering needs. With todays GPU acceleration capabilities we could have town-building games with huge map resolutions and millions of entities. Instead its mostly only used to make fancy graphics. Actually I am currently trying to build something like that [1]. A big big world with hundreds o…
What made it of course was the art. An army of digital illustrators working by hand to create bitmaps that pop.
One pseudo 2.5d game I'm playing now is Iridion 2 GBA (2003). You can see the care taken with the art design team, pure lovers of the genre ;)