box-art! where's the love nowadays?

[Zubiac666]

Am I the only one who thinks that 95% of the box-art for x-box,ps2 and gc sucks?
I was going through my NES and SNES collection yesterday and I was amazed of the boxart of several titles.
They were nearly all "hand-drawn" and have a huge amount of details.
Just look at "Battle of Olympus","Guardian Legend" etc etc.
and now take a good look at new games' boxart........BAH!
Stupid photos and rendered modells and hardly any drawn art(exept maybe Zelda WW and some japanese only titles).
It seems that all has to be"super-trendy" and "hyper-cool"(see EA games).
that's kinda sad iMO

What do you think?
Do u agree with me or not?

Tell me your opinion!

[NE146]

I agree

[Parodius]

To be fair, a lot of the US NES/SNES boxart was terrible.

Mega Man NES for instance is certainly one of the worst ever.

[Daniel Thomas]

It's funny that box art has learned to suck in new ways. How did it get to the point where we would become nostalgic for the artwork from the 8/16-bit era?

Of course, this isn't just a gmaing thing; far too many DVD's in the US are packaged terribly. Some great stuff, to be sure (Criterion Collection, for example), but the average Studio-produced product just looks lame. And have you noticed how everything has that creepy sameness to it? Is this what corporate consolidation leaves us?

As for the games, the Japanese artwork has always been superior, even now. Just look at any of the Treasure games.

[Zubiac666]

As for the games, the Japanese artwork has always been superior, even now. Just look at any of the Treasure games.

yeah that's strange
I don't know a single person who thinks that the western boxart is better than the japanese one.
BUT why do they change it though?
I don't get it!

@Parodius
Indeed,megaman's face is just ridiculous
the worst ever? I don't know
"Bignoes-the caveman"(NES) is also terrible
x_x

[Isometric_Bacon]

I think nowadays videogames are sold more on hype, than how attractive the box art is. The backs of videogame covers also hardly ever show much of the game or give a really good indication of what it's about nowadays either.

And today's design ethics is that minimalistic images are better. The more complex the image, the uglier it is, and harder to focus on one particular part. So simpler box art is more attractive to the eyes.

Besides, hand drawn art is very retro to look at nowadays. Look at the original Star Wars image, or National Lampoons "Vacation" videos, to see what I mean.

[Jasoco]

I'll have to agree. I prefer the nice hand drawn look of many older boxes over what they pass off on us today.

One of my favorites, the original DOOM artwork. Shown on many DOOM boxes (Jaguar DOOM) and the Ultimate DOOM Poster.

Super Mario 2 and 3 had some nice simplistic cartoony looks. And I absolutely adore the original NES "pixellated" boxes and labels.

Also, I do afree that the original MegaMan does look pretty freaky.

I also like Tengen's little logo crosshairs they put on their older releases on the boxes and carts.

At least I can admire the packaging for Serious Sam. I wish THAT came with a nice big poster of the cover art.

[GaijinPunch]

I think box art is definitely where our Japanese friends excel... well, coding the games too. There's a lot of things where they don't --- magazine layouts tend to be a mess some times, and advertising in general is sometimes just too "in your face" but the box art... that's where they excel.

Maybe it's just me --- I've always thought so though.

I think the Japanese vs. US Dreamcast hardware boxes is a great example. The japanese side definitely used the simplicity of things... and then it sold like shit, but that's another story.

[Sotenga]

As long as we don't have to observe art along the lines of THIS again...



I cannot complain with box art today. Seriously, does that guy even remotely resemble Hiryu?!? x_x

(Thanks to one of our board members for that photo... *coughKidFenriscough*)

[Darth Sensei]

Well, Japanese society has always been about process. They love to focus on the process rather than the result. This is a place where you can go to the market and buy some crackers or cookies and the product is wrapped in 5 different layers. The outside graphics, modern plastic to seal, and 3 layers of rice paper just to look good.

I think the old time games used box art to hide the fact that they didn't want to show you screen shots. Remember buying Atari games and you had no idea what the game looked like or what it was even about? They didn't put screen shots on them, IMHO, because the graphics were so bad. If you don't have screen shots, you must have some image to sell the product.

Feel free to disagree,

D

[Zubiac666]

I think the old time games used box art to hide the fact that they didn't want to show you screen shots. Remember buying Atari games and you had no idea what the game looked like or what it was even about? They didn't put screen shots on them, IMHO, because the graphics were so bad. If you don't have screen shots, you must have some image to sell the product.

Feel free to disagree,

D

Nintendo just did it the other way:
Remember the boxart of their own games for NES?
One series(of excitebike,march rider etc) had a completly pixelated cover-art of the charactersprite itself.

looked horrible though

[Bratwurst]

Hand drawn art is a thing of the past, driven extinct by the ease and use of computer illustration. It's cheaper, faster and when used right -can- look more polished than the traditional method. Unfortunately it doesn't always happen. I would wager that even Japanese packaging (anime-style illustrations and such) are mostly done through Photoshop or some other program these days.

It has been a transition in effect since the late 80s when magazines and print advertising were slowly immersing themselves into the use of computers. By the mid-90s it had become so prevalent that it was most apparent on PSX titles. Simply a matter of all the freelance illustrators, in-house layout guys and anyone else the company might have had the box art done through, catching up with the times and getting new equipment.

It seems to be unquestioned that Japanese box art is always best but I don't feel that way. You look at the market at Japan and everything is packed close together on the shelf in close competition with one another. The need for flash and extraordinary, zany graphics is necessary if it's going to be catching anyone's eye. It's a style that doesn't carry over well in their magazines because I suspect it's hard for them to break out of the figurative mold of what's been established, just as I hear complaints about design aesthetics being too similar over 'here.'

[Solid Snake]

A good example in the whole US vs Japanese cover art is present in the current box art for The Twin Snakes. The Japanese cover has Shinkawa art of Snake and Liquid on a red backdrop, while the US gets two crappily rendered models of Snake and Liquid, with a fuzzy Metal Gear Rex backdrop.

Also, consider what it means when the soundtrack for SOTN had better box art than the game itself.

[Flack]

Just to elaborate on what CueWarrior said ...

Way back when, games needed box art to sell their games. Back in the TRS-80 days, you would pick up a game with a beautiful spaceship on the front of a box, only to find out that the game was written in basic, and that wonderful spaceship was now represented by this: <O>

Another early trick was for games to show screenshots of the arcade version on the back of the box instead of the version you were buying. After playing the game for the first time, you knew why. When we just had our Apple II, I can't tell you how sick I was of seeing "Commodore 64 version shown" on the back of every game I bought.

[Ed Oscuro]

A good example in the whole US vs Japanese cover art is present in the current box art for The Twin Snakes. The Japanese cover has Shinkawa art of Snake and Liquid on a red backdrop, while the US gets two crappily rendered models of Snake and Liquid, with a fuzzy Metal Gear Rex backdrop.

Heh, that sucks.

I like most of the art on US produced games more than I like the (usually awful) stuff found on translated games for the SNES and Genesis. The Phantasy Star series come to mind (Boris Vallejo art creeps me out). On the other hand, some of the originals aren't too great either.

Now for the Atari VCS...well, I don't like the box designs that much, but the artwork for big releases seems by and large very good, and better than a lot of the generic crap we get today. Yeah, the stuff for the old Atari systems was sometimes generic as well, but it has a soul to it...today's clean-cut figures often don't seem to.

[Kejoriv]

I really dont mind the new box art for some reason.

~Kejoriv

[Jasoco]

As long as we don't have to observe art along the lines of THIS again...

<Picture>

I cannot complain with box art today. Seriously, does that guy even remotely resemble Hiryu?!? x_x

(Thanks to one of our board members for that photo... *coughKidFenriscough*)

I dunno.. I kinda like Kuros as a Barbarian instead of a Knight.


Look, Kids! It's Fabio!

Seriously, I went into a GameStop a year and a half ago and they had an Ironsword cart hanging on the wall with a sign that said "Look, Kids! It's Fabio!" I didn't even REALIZE it was him until I saw that sign.
And I had that game since it came out!

[Jasoco]

[Damn. Site froze this afternoon. Triple Post.]

[Jasoco]

[Damn. Site froze this afternoon. Triple Post.]

[Daniel Thomas]

If I didn't know better, I'd think you were a Fabio fan or something.

And, yeah, the Strider artwork barely resembled the actual game, but the hero on the box had a certian Flash Gordon quality. Sega probably felt that American consumers wouldn't buy something with an obviously Asian (or non-Anglo) bent.