Megadrive Box art, my love of the Japanese art: Teenage Mutant Ninja/Hero Turtles Tournament Fighters

So I figured I would keep on pumping out posts about Box art mostly because I love it, its a cool mix of art and advertising which I think often does not get the credit it deserves. Now the thing you need to remember is that back when these MegaDrive games were coming out there wasnt the internet like there is today, sure there were a few magazines which you could get information from and the odd TV programme now and then but the front Cover of a game was arguably much more important when it came to selling games.

Recently I have been watching a lot of a programme called Cake Wars with my girlfriend, now you might be wondering how thats relevent but hear me out. In cake wars four teams will be given a topic and they have to make a cake which fits this topic, now as you watch these cakes being made and decorated then even before the judges go near them you will have decided which one you like, which one you hate, which should win, why it should win. You get used to seeing certain things though and hearing certain terms. One of the things you always hear is that the cake must tell a story and there must be a sense of movement (They also say it must be obvious what the cake is made for). This is one of the things that made me think about Video game box art again, I wonderd if the stuff I liekd the most told a story and/or contained a sense of movment.

Well the cover is very obviously for Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles Tournament Fighter, what with the words being on the cover, in fact to my knowledge no game has been released without its title being on the box so thats kind of a given. There is a large Turtle face in this case Raphiel and there is also an image of him clearly fighting with an enemy and the fight does have a good sense of movement. Yet despite all of this 9I find it rather dissapointing, there are after all 4 Turtles and a number of other characters, if something is Turtles related then you kind of expect to see the 4 of them. One more thing I have to add bonus points for though is the Turtle on show being shown with the pure white more serious and dangerous looking eyes I think this being a fighting game thats the kind of right way to go  with the characters as apposed to the more comical cartoon varients.

The American case has the same basic art work but with a red border piece and a white back, it has a few more screenshots but thats because it doesnt have to have the same information on it again and again like the European one does with there being mutliple languages. I basically see these two cases as more or less equal though, there basically slight varients on the same theme. I dont have much to say that I havent said above so lets leave this one here.

Ok so I will off the bat just straight up admit that this cover the Japense one is my favourate cover, it has all 4 Turtles on it and 4 other fighters, you can see the action of Leanardo slashing with his sword and other characters brandisdhing there weapons, its almost like they are going to rush out of the cover and towards you and I think that makes it feel epic. It is not without fault though, the main thing being that the turtles have actual human style cartoon eyes so look a little less menacing than they could, also when you look at the Turtles skin theyve been given these spots of diffrent coloured skin which almost makes them look a bit like little old bald green men.

So I figured that I wanted to do my own Custom cover, basically it is what I would have liked to see be the European cover if it had been up to me. I kept the originals back and spine as I didnt have any issues with either of them, to me they were both classic MegaDrive. I then took the Japanese front cover and made a few alterations, for one I removed the Japense writing but then I made two stylistic changes, for one I gave the Turtles the plain white Styles eyes, but I also smoothed out there skin to remove the ''liver'' spots. So what does everyone think, which is the best cover for this game, which one would have had you pulling it down off the store shelves and taking it to the counter?