Richard Cobbett Mar 09, 2015
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My eyes, my beautiful eyes!
Box art images taken from Mobygames.com, the best information repository for games around. Visit them, love them, they do sterling work.
It's hard not to judge a book by its cover when that cover looks like... this. The PC has never been quite as artistically cursed as some platforms, as anyone who's ever seen the NES Mega Man box or just about every Sega Master System game will know, but that doesn't mean it's been an artistic home-run. Here's twelve of the bitterest failings, plus a few bonuses. Remember, in every case, someone thought this would make you buy it. With money .
Mystery of the Druids
Hehehehe. Truly, the face that launched a thousand Photoshop memes. This screaming horror show isn't even the game's villain ( and what a dreadful, dreadful game it is), but it doesn't matter. Nothing could give this pop-eyed screamer the sense of beardy menace it's obviously going for.
Druid: Daemons of the Mind
If there's anything that gives Mystery of the Druids a pass, it's that nobody else seems to have worked out how to make druids look scary either.
Street Sports Baseball
"Wait, I'm on the cover of WHAT?!"
Virtuoso
Two terrible covers! I don't know which one to pick—the appallingly drawn US version, or the UK one where the rockstar version of Mr. Magoo doesn't seem to know where his enemies are! Luckily, both were wrapped around the same game—a truly wretched third person shooter with all the mastery of a piano player with sledgehammers instead of fingers.
Rollerblade Racer
Ouch! You just got punched in the face by both the 80s and the 90s! It doesn't get much more extreme—nay, XTREME—than this. The actual game of course was considerably less colourful, because it had no choice.
Toonstruck
You'd think that if you were creating a game with the hook "Christopher Lloyd interacts with toons like in Roger Rabbit", the first job would be convincing people that you could actually, well, draw. But no! Far better to serve up this glorious exercise from How To Not Entirely Suck At Photoshop In 28 Days and help guarantee a great adventure languish in obscurity for years. Hurrah for GOG finally bringing it back to the marketso more can play it.
This of course was just the horrible US cover. The UK got a very different box. It wasn't exactly attractive , but it was definitely eye-catching...
Beyond The Black Hole
That's a sink. You're falling into a dirty sink. Or possibly the Ubisoft logo. If this was the world's welcome to stereoscopic 3D, it's no wonder it died on its arse. "With your GrenoVision goggles locked in place, the entire computer comes alive!" it promised back in 1989. You're probably wondering if this claim was a little over-ambitious. You will not be surprised to hear that yes, yes it was.
Tongue of the Fatman
I guess with a name like "Tongue of the Fatman", it could have been worse. Maybe. Still, when your cover consists of a face with eyes shoved up the nostrils to make an alien face, I'm going to say you've just defined the exact opposite of 'special' effect. When even Red Dwarf is willing to take the piss out of a technique... yeah, you've failed.
Ken's Labyrinth
Back when Epic Games was Epic Megagames, the standard way of buying the full version was to send a cheque through the mail and get disks back in return. Still, a few of them did get boxed releases, and... yeah. Ken's Labyrinth wasn't exactly the grittiest shooter ever made, but it still deserved something with a bit more oomph than this hastily thrown together mass of shaded shapes. This is the worst of them, but don't think Epic's other characters got off much easier...
Jill of the Jungle
...Pity poor Jill of the Junglein particular. You know you've got a bad bit of box art when even the main character is looking around and thinking "What the shit?"
Sorcerer Lord
Ed. Note: You know those classic film posters with illustrated character montages? This isn't how you do that.
Jones In The Fast Lane
No, it's not a desktop toy to kill some time at work. It's a light-hearted life simulation board gamefrom Sierra, the makers of games like King's Quest, Gabriel Knight, Space Quest, and Quest for Glory. How could such a prestigious company release something so dull that it could be filed next to Microsoft Excel and still look like the more boring product? Only with incredible effort. And to think, it always felt like nothing would ever top Wheel of Fortune.
Circle of Blood
Adventure players will know this better as "Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templars". The Broken Sword name kinda hung over the series after it lost all relevance, but at least beats Circle of Blood. Meanwhile, absolutely anything beats this hilarious gargoyle that seems to be shouting "Hey! Hey you! Buy another game! ANY other game!"
Zeddas: Servant of Sheol
Sometimes a developer or publisher will realise it has a turkey on its hands and try and compensate by putting boobs on the cover. In the case of Zeddas, I think we can safely picture someone staring miserably at the game in progress, picking up a megaphone and just yelling "More boobs!"
Dream Zone
"You know what will hook players? Some guy's taint."
Bad Cat
Bad Cat! The quite craptacular Bad Cat! Whose ineffectual cover art made folks laugh and clamour to see, some of the worst art on IBM PC...
Lollypop
AAARGH! KILL IT WITH FIRE! WITH FIRE!
Low Blow
I can't decide if this is one of the worst... or one of the best.
Either way, goodness what a lot of terrible art! But is there a big stinker we've missed? Pop it in a comment, ideally with a link to its pic page over on Moby. PC only though! As terrible as, say, Phalanx absolutely was on SNES, we've got plenty of failures on our own platform to both enjoy and endure.
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