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Favorite All-Time Videogame Box Art Rated
Thanks to GameSpy for its feature discussing and rating the best videogame box art of all-time. The author cheekily argues: "Video games have indeed been graced with some wonderful covers over the years, art that you'd be proud to put in a frame and hang on your wall for all to enjoy... Except when girls come over, when it must be hidden in the closet", before highlighting game covers including Pinball Construction Set ("Rather than showcase a typical pinball scene like most pinball games have done, this cover is mostly symbolic"), the non-U.S. cover for ICO ("Impressionistic and surreal, as if it's capturing a moment in fantasy or memory rather than reality"), and DOOM ("Bottom line, this is a classic.") What's your favorite game cover art of all time?
I could have pulled better cover art out of my ass. A lot of the "art" is only impressionable due to reminiscence.
There was a pretty good rule of thumb in the early 80s, and to some extents it still holds today: how exciting, fantastic and wonderful the game cover is, is inversely proportional to how good the game actually is. I was lured several times by drawings of vast space battles, with sleek fighter craft attacking horribly beweaponed starcruisers, through a haze of laser fire and explosions... only to find the game has a triangle firing squares at a couple of advancing, um, rectangles with legs.
Of course, in those days, you had to use your imagination, which I think lent to more immersive gameplay. Sometimes, though, the gulf between the expectations raised by the game cover, and the actual game was just that bit too wide...
Once again Gamespy makes a Top X list, and sucks at it. Nowhere did they mention Top Secret - Hitler's Revival, known as Bionic Commando in the states.
The author can justify the biased towards late 80s / early 90s covers. They were a little more artistic(most were drawn by hand not by computer). A lot of cover art in the early days was fairly over the top. The graphics wern't exactly works of art, so they had to sell the game on a (very) touched up image. Also 80's extravagance came into it a lot. The game was a 320X240, blocky looking mess. Suspension of disbelief was in order just to appriciate that the characters on screen really were heros, monsters, ninjas, Arnie, lamposts etc... . Having a more exuberence cover might help aid the
Nowadays games can have relativly boring covers (Halo,GTA Vice City) by comparison to older titles. They can sell the game on its demos and even the screenshots on the back(although these aren'y usually as representative as they could be). A lot of the stuff is pretty minimalistic as they've all moved to glossy plastic, rather than laminated cardboard. Remember when they came in those big cardboard boxes.
I don't really miss 'Pop art' covers. Might be nice to have one or too, but ultimatly, they were a bit too corney.
May the Maths Be with you!
Are you shitting me? The very section you post in used to hold the title for "Worst Color Scheme" in the major website category. It only recently lost the title when they came out with something even uglier!