Worst Box Art?

[JadeETC]

 

I couldn't even tell it was a Batman game at first.

[BillyHW]

 

Reminds me of this:

 

[JadeETC]

How did I not notice this?

[retrorussell]

Sorry if this was shown already, but this looks more like a game about foot odor power!

[TheGameCollector]

I found one. What does a baby have to do with Super Bust-A-Move?

 

There is actually a baby sound effect used in one of the music tracks in the game (the same one used at the end of Ludacris' song Phat Rabbit), but that's the closest you get. I'd rather not pretend all those cool looking bubbles in the game are baby spit though. eww

Edited December 15, 2013 by TheGameCollector

[Jess Ragan]

Bust-A-Move 2 had an even worse cover, with screaming 1990s youths keeping their eyelids propped open with toothpicks. Acclaim was (in)famous for that kind of marketing... they were, after all, the same folks who paid parents to name their newborns Turok and wanted to advertise on tombstones.

 

(Don't let the box art dissuade you from buying the game, though! It's probably the best in the series, rivaled only by Bust-A-Move on the original Nintendo DS.)

 

One of the worst video game box illustrations was from Mega Man 2 in European territories. For reasons beyond my comprehension, Mega Man was not drawn as a small blue robot boy, but rather the Silverhawks' proctologist.

Oh yeah, and all the box art for Emerson Arcadia games is pure cack. The artwork for Cat Trax was just a bunch of sloppily watercolored cartoon characters lifted straight from a Preston Blair animation book. The artwork on the 2600 box was a whole lot better.

[godslabrat]

I really like "standardized" art... but the SMS games are a horrible example of it.

[retrorussell]

Yeah, here's another one:

Dig my cool-looking hand! I just got stung by a nest of hornets!

[mbd30]

It's safe to say that the SMS had the worst box art ever.

[7800Lover]

How about Phantom Fighter for the NES?

 

 

This was the same art used for the ads too; I saw it years ago in a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles graphic novel.

 

It looks like a cheesy VHS cover!

[retrorussell]

 

It looks like a cheesy VHS cover!

Hey, that's another thread we should consider..

[108 Stars]

It's safe to say that the SMS had the worst box art ever.

It's kind of puzzling really. Sega had the great idea to make the boxes look alike, so they are easily recognizable and look good in a collection. Yet on the other hand they did obviously not spend a few hundred bucks per cover to hire some art student or someone, you have street artists everywhere that will paint for food. It's beyond comprehension for me.

 

They did it right on the MD. Still many artworks were terrible, but they at least looked like there was some work put into them. AND they kept the standardized look of the SMS games. This is how it should have been done in the first place.

[retrorussell]

Another one I hope wasn't used so far, but.. wow, that's bad!

"Check me out! I just RADIATE coolness! ...Hey, get back here and buy my game! Where are you going?!"

[mbd30]

Another one I hope wasn't used so far, but.. wow, that's bad!

"Check me out! I just RADIATE coolness! ...Hey, get back here and buy my game! Where are you going?!"

[108 Stars]

The I have no mouth cover I find rather cool actually.

[+boxpressed]

Another one I hope wasn't used so far, but.. wow, that's bad!

"Check me out! I just RADIATE coolness! ...Hey, get back here and buy my game! Where are you going?!"

Wow, that one is terrible. Caillou meets Rambo.

[Jess Ragan]

How about Phantom Fighter for the NES?

 

 

This was the same art used for the ads too; I saw it years ago in a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles graphic novel.

 

It looks like a cheesy VHS cover!

 

There's a reason for that, actually. The game is based on a series of kung fu films called "Mr. Vampire," where the lead character fights kyonshies. They're those weird floating zombie guys on the right hand side of the box.

 

I find kyonshies (jiang-shis) fascinating. They're kind of like zombies and kind of like vampires, but there's really no close Western equivalent.

 

Someone claimed earlier that the NES box artwork sucked, and I couldn't disagree more. It's stylish, yet an honest reflection of the content inside, which is something you can't say for the systems that came before it. NES graphics were so good at the time that Nintendo could show them on the front of the box with little embellishment and still sell millions of cartridges. The Master System boxes, on the other hand, were awful by any objective standard. It was like Sega waved the white flag in the console wars almost immediately after they started!

 

(The Genesis black grid boxes were pretty fucking ace, though. It helped that Sega used REAL box art instead of hastily scribbled out crap, and kept the black grid on the edges instead of making it dominate the box.)

[108 Stars]

Hey, Europeans and South Americans still saw the inner values of the SMS games and bought them rather than NES games.

[7800Lover]

Menace Beach from the notorious company, Color Dreams, comes to mind.

 

 

FYI, Color Dreams was a short-lived company that put out NES titles in the late 1980s and early 1990s. But these weren't licensed games; they were released without the official Nintendo seal of approval and had a special chip to bypass the NES lockout appartus.

 

Anyway, that is just a ridiculous cover. That dopey looking kid is squaring off against a sumo wrestler and some sort of black...blob thing? Of course, it would get worse...Color Dreams later rereleased the game under a different title (with a Christian theme) called Sunday Funday.

 

 

I don't know about you, but these characters invoke the Uncanny Valley!

[108 Stars]

Menace Beach from the notorious company, Color Dreams, comes to mind.

 

FYI, Color Dreams was a short-lived company that put out NES titles in the late 1980s and early 1990s. But these weren't licensed games; they were released without the official Nintendo seal of approval and had a special chip to bypass the NES lockout appartus.

 

Anyway, that is just a ridiculous cover. That dopey looking kid is squaring off against a sumo wrestler and some sort of black...blob thing? Of course, it would get worse...Color Dreams later rereleased the game under a different title (with a Christian theme) called Sunday Funday.

Yeah, Color Dreams later formed the Wisdom Tree label notorious for crappy bible-themed games too.

Ironically this much ridiculed company actually ended up releasing arguably one of the best Lynx games ever: Crystal Mines II.

 

But yes, uncanny valley fits the covers well. It's like someone tried to make something cartoonish cute without really understanding. The line between cute or funny and scary is slim.

[AtariLeaf]

Don't know if it's been mentioned but Xenophobe on the 7800 has horrible box art. Looks like they hired a 4th grader to draw and color a picture for the box art.

 

[retrorussell]

Pretty unnatural look there.. looks less like a kick and more like he slipped on something.

[7800Lover]

How about the Commodore 64 port of the Codemasters platform game, CJ's Elephant Antics?

 

 

Compare it to the NES port's cover. To be honest, the cartoon style cover used for the NES doesn't look bad at all. It's the above cover that's freaky - once more, it steps into the uncanny valley territory.

[Rex Dart]

 

 

Forty-one percent?? That's gotta be 95% alien-infested at least.

[fdurso224]

Hi guys,

 

First Mega Man box art! That was terrible!

 

Anthony...