BortiiS, The
11-17-2003, 01:33 AM
So, I got a couple games today, and one, was Galactic Civilizations.
This has to be some of the more ugly box-cover artwork for a title.
First of all, the box is a a grey color, with some abstract art design.
I don't even like the shades of grey they use, it looks to "light" and "pukey".
Add to that the title written in gold, looking very uninteresting.
The grey acts like borders above and below a picture of a pea-greenish/blue colored space with stars (I never knew space could be that color), and the planet is an Earth-like planet in the background, and the colors look depleted, drained, muted a bit, giving it also that "puke"-look. Nothing vibrant or lush, that stands out, but rather sickly and wanting to be left alone.
Fair enough, because in the foreground, is a near grey-only space-station with a few lights on it, and the only other color being a pointlessly faint purple in window-rings or something of some kind on it.
The station, you cannot make its shape out, you think you're suppose to be seeing a "normal" space-station, but the way its turned, it has the left side and its modules, coming out at you, creating on off-set.
Okay, fine, but this is made worse by the fact that part of those grey borders, have these grey rectangles sprout out of it, and one is a small stub of one, diagonal on the bottom, going up and left from the center about 1 inch.
The OTHER, from the top, goes diagonal and down, and to the right, about 2 and a half inches(!) until it hits the space station and overlaps it as far as just under a centimeter.
Not a good way to be "stylish".
Some sneakly placed logos in the center of the picture, some red letters of review-related stuff (bad mix: grey, puke-turquoise, and red), in white at the bottom: "The Fate of the Galaxy is in Your Hands".
Really? All I see is a lonely space station orbiting a planet.
In any case, it doesn't seem to work, it makes the game look like a "cheapy-game", some value-ware, half-arse title...which it almost actually is, by the way.
If you look at the screen shots, you see pictures of the game, which aren't much better looking than MOO2, some poor, ray-traced-looking sprites shown in a way as if they were trying to "show off" the "great graphics", and a couple CGI-movie related screenshots...which are nothing to show off either.
They are pictures of very generic looking sci-fi ships (all light-grey, no other colors, no lights or anything either).
They look like "CGI", from some uber-poor quality early-1990s sci-fi TV show pilot that never became a series or for some episode on some sci-fi show like "The Outer Limits" which has a very limited budget for some of its sci-fi stories and has to use cheap-looking CGI...it looks like that in these pictures.
(Yet, in the actual game, there are some pretty decent CGI animations, however, they are not consistent in their quality).
Over all, a somewhat ugly box cover.
Know of any others that are just lame?
Here are some others I'll mention:
-Freespace 2 (a giant picture of a space ship firing a beam through another ship, and it doesn't even look right, it looks "forced". I mean, did they just get lazy or what???)
-Uprising 2: Lead and Destroy (a picture of some poorly drawn generated computer soldier, who you never see in the game, wearing a winter-commando Command&Conquer-type outfit---which no one in the game wears, btw. He looks pissed, he looks awkward and out of proportion like a bad GI-JOE action figure, and holds a big smoking gun with a plume of fire rising from a battle behind him. Now, it actually doesn't look THAT bad, but it shouts:"DORKY".He's also got a big "cup" which totally stands out, almost like Derek Smalls from in "This is Spinal Tap" or something, heheheh.)
-Wargasm (this innovative game, had a terrible picture of a woman with big boobs in a dirty T-shirt, wearing a complex military helmet and holding a gun, looking pissed with some orange-fire colors in the background or something. I looked like a badly drawn comic-book character, her proportions were not right, and the character didn't even look convincing as a soldier, almost as if it was a picture for another game, and someone erased somethings and drew in the helmet and the gun, and stuff. DOH! And the game's name didn't help it much either. Probably partly why the game bombed.)
-Dungeon Keeper 2 (an all-white box with some demon standing sideways, and looking "smug". I still can't figure out what they were trying to do.)
-Neverwinter Nights (an unimpressive painting/illustration, that isn't even reflective of the game, and it looks weak too, is behind the fold, of the main cover, which is just a black cover with a paganish eye in a blue-purplish type of cover. What makes it bad, is that its highlighted by the font (or vice-versa), which has an Arabic-look too it, making you think it's somehow related to "Arabian Nights", and not some hardcore fantasy-medieval-dungeons&dragons game.)
-Tachyon:The Fringe (a sci-fi sim with beautiful graphics and immersive galaxy, with the voice-acting of Bruce Campbell........the cover: the face of an Asian guy on fire. Real good job Novalogic, real good job.)
-Blade of Darkness (I don't know about the European version called "Severance", but here in the US, as "Blade of Darkness", it features a black box a slightly red background behind a butt-ugly, bloody, and overly tattooed barbarian, in horribly crappy pseudo-CGI or something, that looks "plastic-y", and has his lips furreled to show is nasty, gnashing teeth...oh, and he has a low, ape-man-like brow. And guess what: this is one of the main characters of the game you can play as. Who would want to play a game as this hairless gorilla with a broadsword???)
-Messiah (a silver/greyish box with some cheesy-funky texture art work, the letters "Messiah" in small, wide, black font...and the main character, a Cherub, which is a baby-with-wings-and-diapers. What were they smoking?)
-Homeworld 2 (reddish box, with close-up of the head/face of some bald lady, like that lady in Star Trek: The Motion Picture, but with blind-looking eyes and a series of tubes and wires sticking into her head all over, in almost all the colors of the rainbow. "Homeworld 2" written in light-blue font on deep, reddish-orange background and this cartoonish freak-wire-head medusa. Bad. It just doesn't make me take the game seriously as a "serious" game, to go walk over and go,"Hmm, this looks interesting, what is this one?"---in fact, it's one of those bad covers that would make you AFRAID to go pick it up and look at it, out of fear that other people in the store might look at you funny. I would feel embarrassed to pick this box up in the store and look at anything on it, that "What the heck game is that guy looking at? HAHAHAH. Ewww."-syndrome.)
-War of the Ring (this game just came out, the box cover art? A picture of copperish-resdish-orange battle-mayhem in the background, like after a battle or something...but prominent, in the foreground: a victorious-looking orc holding a decapited elf's head---gee, I'll bet alot of parents will want to buy their kids that game after looking at that...NOT! Whoever approved of this cover should be hunted down by the cast of the movies, and beat and tossed into the Cracks of Doom. This cover not only does a total disservice, near injustice to the Tolkien books, and not just cuz its tasteless, but because it's just bad for LOTR, in that, you'll think,"They couldn't come up with anything better than this?" Maybe if this was some crappy Warhammer game, then that's okay, but apparently, some fool got confused with Warhammer and LOTR, and thought it would be okay to put a Warhammer-ish picture on the cover of a LOTR game. Idiots. The artwork itself, is not bad, but this was the wrong way to use it. I wouldn't be surprised if this game bombed just from people being turned off by it, because of the box art.
NOW, that's the artwork I saw, apparently, there is another version, with an elf...but I think he's holding an orc's head. In anycase, when I went to the computer store, all I recall seeing is the one with the orc with the elf's head, and no, it wasn' t the back of the box, because I picked it up and looked at it, opened the front part and all, to see the screenshots, summary's, etc. On some websites, they only show the one with the elf, and I think he's holding an orc head. Hmm, well, at the store, it was the other way around.)
This has to be some of the more ugly box-cover artwork for a title.
First of all, the box is a a grey color, with some abstract art design.
I don't even like the shades of grey they use, it looks to "light" and "pukey".
Add to that the title written in gold, looking very uninteresting.
The grey acts like borders above and below a picture of a pea-greenish/blue colored space with stars (I never knew space could be that color), and the planet is an Earth-like planet in the background, and the colors look depleted, drained, muted a bit, giving it also that "puke"-look. Nothing vibrant or lush, that stands out, but rather sickly and wanting to be left alone.
Fair enough, because in the foreground, is a near grey-only space-station with a few lights on it, and the only other color being a pointlessly faint purple in window-rings or something of some kind on it.
The station, you cannot make its shape out, you think you're suppose to be seeing a "normal" space-station, but the way its turned, it has the left side and its modules, coming out at you, creating on off-set.
Okay, fine, but this is made worse by the fact that part of those grey borders, have these grey rectangles sprout out of it, and one is a small stub of one, diagonal on the bottom, going up and left from the center about 1 inch.
The OTHER, from the top, goes diagonal and down, and to the right, about 2 and a half inches(!) until it hits the space station and overlaps it as far as just under a centimeter.
Not a good way to be "stylish".
Some sneakly placed logos in the center of the picture, some red letters of review-related stuff (bad mix: grey, puke-turquoise, and red), in white at the bottom: "The Fate of the Galaxy is in Your Hands".
Really? All I see is a lonely space station orbiting a planet.
In any case, it doesn't seem to work, it makes the game look like a "cheapy-game", some value-ware, half-arse title...which it almost actually is, by the way.
If you look at the screen shots, you see pictures of the game, which aren't much better looking than MOO2, some poor, ray-traced-looking sprites shown in a way as if they were trying to "show off" the "great graphics", and a couple CGI-movie related screenshots...which are nothing to show off either.
They are pictures of very generic looking sci-fi ships (all light-grey, no other colors, no lights or anything either).
They look like "CGI", from some uber-poor quality early-1990s sci-fi TV show pilot that never became a series or for some episode on some sci-fi show like "The Outer Limits" which has a very limited budget for some of its sci-fi stories and has to use cheap-looking CGI...it looks like that in these pictures.
(Yet, in the actual game, there are some pretty decent CGI animations, however, they are not consistent in their quality).
Over all, a somewhat ugly box cover.
Know of any others that are just lame?
Here are some others I'll mention:
-Freespace 2 (a giant picture of a space ship firing a beam through another ship, and it doesn't even look right, it looks "forced". I mean, did they just get lazy or what???)
-Uprising 2: Lead and Destroy (a picture of some poorly drawn generated computer soldier, who you never see in the game, wearing a winter-commando Command&Conquer-type outfit---which no one in the game wears, btw. He looks pissed, he looks awkward and out of proportion like a bad GI-JOE action figure, and holds a big smoking gun with a plume of fire rising from a battle behind him. Now, it actually doesn't look THAT bad, but it shouts:"DORKY".He's also got a big "cup" which totally stands out, almost like Derek Smalls from in "This is Spinal Tap" or something, heheheh.)
-Wargasm (this innovative game, had a terrible picture of a woman with big boobs in a dirty T-shirt, wearing a complex military helmet and holding a gun, looking pissed with some orange-fire colors in the background or something. I looked like a badly drawn comic-book character, her proportions were not right, and the character didn't even look convincing as a soldier, almost as if it was a picture for another game, and someone erased somethings and drew in the helmet and the gun, and stuff. DOH! And the game's name didn't help it much either. Probably partly why the game bombed.)
-Dungeon Keeper 2 (an all-white box with some demon standing sideways, and looking "smug". I still can't figure out what they were trying to do.)
-Neverwinter Nights (an unimpressive painting/illustration, that isn't even reflective of the game, and it looks weak too, is behind the fold, of the main cover, which is just a black cover with a paganish eye in a blue-purplish type of cover. What makes it bad, is that its highlighted by the font (or vice-versa), which has an Arabic-look too it, making you think it's somehow related to "Arabian Nights", and not some hardcore fantasy-medieval-dungeons&dragons game.)
-Tachyon:The Fringe (a sci-fi sim with beautiful graphics and immersive galaxy, with the voice-acting of Bruce Campbell........the cover: the face of an Asian guy on fire. Real good job Novalogic, real good job.)
-Blade of Darkness (I don't know about the European version called "Severance", but here in the US, as "Blade of Darkness", it features a black box a slightly red background behind a butt-ugly, bloody, and overly tattooed barbarian, in horribly crappy pseudo-CGI or something, that looks "plastic-y", and has his lips furreled to show is nasty, gnashing teeth...oh, and he has a low, ape-man-like brow. And guess what: this is one of the main characters of the game you can play as. Who would want to play a game as this hairless gorilla with a broadsword???)
-Messiah (a silver/greyish box with some cheesy-funky texture art work, the letters "Messiah" in small, wide, black font...and the main character, a Cherub, which is a baby-with-wings-and-diapers. What were they smoking?)
-Homeworld 2 (reddish box, with close-up of the head/face of some bald lady, like that lady in Star Trek: The Motion Picture, but with blind-looking eyes and a series of tubes and wires sticking into her head all over, in almost all the colors of the rainbow. "Homeworld 2" written in light-blue font on deep, reddish-orange background and this cartoonish freak-wire-head medusa. Bad. It just doesn't make me take the game seriously as a "serious" game, to go walk over and go,"Hmm, this looks interesting, what is this one?"---in fact, it's one of those bad covers that would make you AFRAID to go pick it up and look at it, out of fear that other people in the store might look at you funny. I would feel embarrassed to pick this box up in the store and look at anything on it, that "What the heck game is that guy looking at? HAHAHAH. Ewww."-syndrome.)
-War of the Ring (this game just came out, the box cover art? A picture of copperish-resdish-orange battle-mayhem in the background, like after a battle or something...but prominent, in the foreground: a victorious-looking orc holding a decapited elf's head---gee, I'll bet alot of parents will want to buy their kids that game after looking at that...NOT! Whoever approved of this cover should be hunted down by the cast of the movies, and beat and tossed into the Cracks of Doom. This cover not only does a total disservice, near injustice to the Tolkien books, and not just cuz its tasteless, but because it's just bad for LOTR, in that, you'll think,"They couldn't come up with anything better than this?" Maybe if this was some crappy Warhammer game, then that's okay, but apparently, some fool got confused with Warhammer and LOTR, and thought it would be okay to put a Warhammer-ish picture on the cover of a LOTR game. Idiots. The artwork itself, is not bad, but this was the wrong way to use it. I wouldn't be surprised if this game bombed just from people being turned off by it, because of the box art.
NOW, that's the artwork I saw, apparently, there is another version, with an elf...but I think he's holding an orc's head. In anycase, when I went to the computer store, all I recall seeing is the one with the orc with the elf's head, and no, it wasn' t the back of the box, because I picked it up and looked at it, opened the front part and all, to see the screenshots, summary's, etc. On some websites, they only show the one with the elf, and I think he's holding an orc head. Hmm, well, at the store, it was the other way around.)