i dont see what the big deal is about the gradient bashing. sure i could go back and redo all of my old gfx, but i have more important things to do than reduce the filesizes by infinitesimal amounts to make you (Nullify) happy. I actually plan on finishing the job.
and for the record it is a blurred layer of black with reduced opacity.
i think the word i was looking for last time was masking. there is the image layer, then the mask layer which is a grayscale picture where white would be 100% opacity and black would be fully transparent. I am pretty sure this is the way other games do it.