Megadrive Box art, my love of the Japanese art and an example

I have to be honest and admit that when I was younger and I had a Megadrive a lot of my games were Japanese, the main reason for this was that although when newly imported Japanese games were very expensive older titles which had since been released in the UK tended to be ridiculously cheap in comparison to there UK equivalents, so far example rather than spending £15 on a British second hand copy of Eswat I would instead buy a second hand Japanese copy for £5. I dont have many Japanese Megadrive games now though despite actually having a Japanese Megadrive. You see I lent 40 games to a friend of the family and well he sold them for drug money, this really sucked as I was like 15 or something at the time and I really deeply trusted the person because his parents were best friends with my parents, in hindsight lending someone so many games was dumb but well sometimes when your young your overly trusting and well a little stupid.

Despite proberbly only having like 4 boxed Japanese games in my collection now days I still love the artwork for the games, I think a good 7 out of 10 times it tottally trumps the European and American artwork. I could show eamples and talk about this in depth but it has been done before really well by various sites and by another bloger who I think did a really good job of it.

Here is a link to DS90's posts on box art http://ds90gamer.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/Box%20Art, I recomend you have a look at it.

I guess I am going to be sort of stealing his idea a little bit here because I want to show you the covers for Eswat on the megadrive

First here is the Japanese Box art.

Ok so I really like this art I really like the main picture and I also like the bold title. I do have one slight issue with it however and that is that I am not very keen on the guys face, if his face was less visable or heck even if there was a darkend visor in front of it I would enjoy this piece of art even more.

This is the American box art

So what do I like about the American cover? Not much really, I see how making the image the central thing on the box is possibly a goood move but I just find the image itself to not really work for me personally. I dont like the look of the guys face, I dont really find his robot side very cool either also the fact there is a bunch of lines in the background of the picture and then theres your usual lines on the case makes it all so well for want of a real word liney.

That leaves the European box 

This is basically the same as the US one but with the Genesis logo swapped for the megadrive and the usual sort of European stuff thrown on.

Ok so here goes something a little Diffrent here is my own personal custom cover 

Ok so I am not going to claim that its perfect or that I spent a great deal of time on it or that there is anything here that wasnt ripped, alterd and repositioned from the above covers. So what did I do. Well I took the Japanese main art and the title in the red box and then I added all of the typical European text and symbals to the game. I made the Japanese art a little darker and went out of my way to darken the face area of the main character. I am not about to claim that this is the greatest cover art ever but I do actually think it beats the official European case and that with a little bit more work it wouldnt be half bad. I would be very intrested in hearing what people think about my cover and my coments on the above covers.