I used to have the crappy Tiger LCD game with this artwork. I actually think it looks cool, like the cover of an old pulp sci-fi publication or something.

>>319 I forgot this one.

>>318 Mega's ankle is broken but otherwise it's definitely a step up from the cover of the first game. Anyway have Arnie/Arnie 2 for the Commodore 64.

Meanwhile this may be the "best" game cover I've ever seen. Pity none of the "shitty game (cover) review" shows seem to be aware of it.

>>324 Is that real? Pretty funny, yet neat, if so.

>>325 Real enough to be on MobyGames, at least.

Heretic and MageSlayer cover illustrations by Gerald Brom.

Witchaven / Witchaven 2 by Ken Kelly. Though as I understand it these weren't created for the games, just (presumably) licensed out.

>>328 I like the Frank Frazetta-like look of these ones.

>>330 Ken Kelly studied under Frazetta so it makes sense. Too bad the games didn't quite live up to the badassery the covers suggested. A lot of potential with not enough QA/polish.

>>331 No wonder then. Not to knock Boris Vallejo and Julie Bell too much (although they clearly aren't on the same level), but their work has been compared to Frank Frazetta's while that guy does a much better job of capturing the look.

Speaking of Frazetta, I found this by coincidence some time ago.

A magazine article reviewing the original WarCraft misleadingly featuring a few rare screenshots of the alpha version.

>>340 I screwed up with that post, I guess. It's really not actually art. Here's some actual artwork taken from the manual.

I suppose it was often done at least partly as a cost-saving measure in printing, but there's something uniquely cool about those black & white ink style illustrations. I have a bunch of neat ones but they're mostly from tabletop RPG books and gamebooks like Fighting Fantasy and such so not quite on topic for this thread I guess.

>>344 I agree completely. I don't have much experience with tabletop games, but I've always pictured them as having artwork in this kind of vein. WarCraft was a Warhammer knockoff in the first place, so I guess it shouldn't be too surprising. I might have to look into Fighting Fantasy if its artwork is similar to these. Here's the full manual if anyone's interested: https://archive.org/details/Warcraft_I_-_Manual_-_PC/mode/2up One of the things I've always thought was neat was how they have a separate manual section for both humans and orcs. You not only get background information on the story from their perspective and a description of their own units and buildings, but both parts feature a section describing the same hostile brigands and creatures. I played WarCraft II first and still like it, but I find the aesthetics of the first game so much cooler. Some of the manual artwork in WarCraft looks good, I guess, but on the whole I find it way less charming. A lot of it has more complex shading and lacks the starkness I like from the original's manual. The fruity pseudo-steampunk stuff they started adding in WarCraft II doesn't help anything either in my opinion. I've always loved thumbing through the manual since I was a kid and still have a copy to this day.

Moonstone manual cover. I enjoy both the illustration and the "so much fun you'll die" tagline - the game was both quite gory for its day (and was possibly one of the earliest games to have a gore on/off option), and also the sort of game where certain enemies could instantly kill you if you didn't do the right counter to their moves.

I think if I ever learned to draw properly, then I'd be aiming for this style.

Clash at Demonhead is one of my favorite NES games. While the in-game art is done in anime style, the box art that got released in America was completely Westernized. I know a lot of people don't like it when that happens, but I've always found it interesting when games do things like that. The US manual still kept some Japanese illustrations too.

I just looked through a crappy PDF scan of the American manual, and this is the only image out of the Japanese ones I've been posting that doesn't appear in there. The American box art does appear at the beginning of the manual (and in full color too, unlike anything else but Nintendo's Seal of Quality), so I imagine they replaced this with that one. As much as I like seeing different portrayals of a game's art, I think that sucks when they could have included it in there to fit in with the look of the rest of the manual.

I've never played this game, but I remember seeing this ad in a comic book around the time it came out.

>>374 The Contra one is great. I know Europe had weird censorship that resulted in the "Probotector" branding, but why does the alien seem to be robotic in that illustration? The text describes mutants and stuff so it's not trying to claim "the enemies are all robots so it's ok to shoot them" or any crap like that. Also the level titles are fantastic. I wonder if they had area names in the Japanese version too and if they were as colorful?

>>376 >I know Europe had weird censorship that resulted in the "Probotector" branding, but why does the alien seem to be robotic in that illustration? The text describes mutants and stuff so it's not trying to claim "the enemies are all robots so it's ok to shoot them" or any crap like that. I never made that connection. I don't think they censored aliens being killed, but if they did I suppose they could have carried over art like that into multiple regions. >Also the level titles are fantastic. I wonder if they had area names in the Japanese version too and if they were as colorful? I wonder if they even call them that in-game. I've actually never played that Operation C and haven't spent much time with Super C either. My uncle did have the Game Boy version of Contra III when I was a kid though. I actually played that before I ever played any of the other Contra games. Rygar is an interesting game. I watched my brother play through it, and there were some crazy glitches. I don't remember trying the arcade version (which I know is different), but I played the NES version for a bit when I first got a flash cart but never got all that far into it. I know the music was done by the guy who also did the music for Clash at Demonhead, and one of the tracks was even used for the title music in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

>>377 NES Rygar is one of those cases where a console "port" was pretty much its own distinct game with similar theming/mechanics. It had a bunch of Zelda 2 type adventure/RPG stuff going on whereas the arcade version and all the direct ports thereof were pretty basic run-to-the-right slayfests. There were definitely some exploitable bugs in the NES version, like despawning certain monsters or glitching through a wall into a whole different area as a shortcut. Not so much a bug but there was also an exploit where you could go to an area earlier than you were supposed to and farm an enemy that was worth lots of XP (or whatever weird term was used in place of XP) but was pretty easy to kill without taking damage if you knew how to dodge his beam. Vixen vaguely related, as it seemed to me to be, maybe not quite a clone but probably at least inspired by arcade Rygar.

>>378 >glitching through a wall into a whole different area as a shortcut Something along those lines was what I remember seeing. I think my brother accidentally fell through the bottom of the screen and ended up in another location. Later he showed me a trick that he ended up learning where he did something similar. I think those kind of glitches add charm to the game. I wonder how many people called the Vixen hotline expecting something dirty.

Seems to be one of those covers that looks very little like the actual game, but it is amusing at least.

>>339 Here's a clearer image of the map.

I don't know where it came from though. It's not quite the same, so I guess it might not even be official for all I know.

I knew it was pretty clear that Bayou Billy was inspired by Mick Dundee, but I had no idea how blatant it was in the art for the Japanese version of the game.

This is more related to Taco Bell than anything, but I still figured it would be worth posting.

>>400 first thought was "oh so he drives fast because he's racing against diarrhoea"

I love the art style Cotton had during the 5th gen, it's my personal favorite of the series.

This is an early image of Age of Empires II. The art looks so different from the finished product that it must be an alpha version. >>401 That would make sense.