Nope.

Do you have any favorite games — specifically retro titles — that you have played over and over and over again? Probably so. Is there anything in those games that irks you every single time you see it? Me too! Oh my god, we have so much in common! We should get coffee sometime…

Anyway, check out this screenshot from Battletoads for the NES. 

Just. Fucking. Look at it. 

This is taken from the very first stage of the game, during the fight with the level boss. He shoots you and yada yada yada, you beat him. Cool. 

After dispatching the giant bot thingy, your toad runs and jumps into a hole to complete the level as pieces of the boss fall down around him. Cool.

Only it’s not. It’s not cool at all. You know why? I’ll tell you why. Because the while three of the pieces that fall are nicely-drawn representations of bent and broken bot bits, the art director (did they even have these back then?) decided to just fucking toss in the exact same gun sprite that is used during the fight itself.

What?! Ugh. 

I don’t know why this annoys me so much, and I could go on to cite how the scale is way off since from the bot’s first-person perspective the gun would actually be much smaller when compared directly with your character, and how they just left it with the weird right angle cuts on the ends which makes it stand out like a sore thumb in a… normal… thumb contest? Nevermind. Forget I said that. 

It just seems so lazy to me. Granted, I’m an extremely lazy person to begin with, but this is just an entirely new level of dont-give-a-fuck that I can’t even begin to understand.

Regardless, every single time I play Battletoads, I notice this unfortunate inclusion and wish I could point it out to everyone else. 

Done. 

To hopefully calm my never-ending fascination with regional box art changes, I’m going to start highlighting some of the more interesting swaps I come across.

I’m not going to try to fully explain or investigate why the changes might have been made — since it could be anything from territory-specific focus groups to licensing woes — but I may offer a few theories depending on the game. In all honesty, by showcasing them I just hope to hook one or two of you on my strange, strange obsession for comparing box art from around the world. 

Today’s examples are the US and Japanese versions of Uncharted: Golden Abyss for PS Vita.

This one might actually have a fairly simple explanation: the Japanese and domestic releases took place months apart. Lots of things can change over a time period like that, and for all we know the artist’s contract ran out at the end of 2011 and Sony couldn’t use the same image for the US version released in 2012.

Still, the change is quite drastic, and I’d be happy to hear your theories. Enjoy! 

Game music has come a long way from the 8-bit days, there’s no doubt about it. Modern games regularly come with a suite of licensed tracks, which is something the consoles of yesteryear simply couldn’t accommodate.

Still, with all the WUB-WUB lighting up 2012’s action titles, I think we need to take a moment and appreciate some good old-fashioned pause music.

That’s right. Please enjoy a few minutes of the closest thing to Dubstep that an 8-bit console could produce, courtesy of Battletoads. 

Being a nerd who grew up with a Nintendo controller embedded firmly in my sweaty palms, I’ve grown a bit of a savant’s brain around the games I spent so many hours with. And, being a nerd in general, I am also a big fan of the Angry Video Game Nerd show, which I decided to catch up on recently.

I started with the episode 85, Street Fighter 2010. In the episode, the Nerd makes several references to the game being nothing like the box art, and flashes the image on the screen for a few seconds. My Mega Man gland quickly became agitated and it hit me; Capcom recycled the Street Fighter 2010 box art for the release of Mega Man 3.

Sure, the direction the characters are facing is flipped, but once you mirror one of the boxes to the other, the similarities are too numerous to miss. They both have the main character firing a white energy weapon, over a gap, and into an enemy whose leg is stretched out of the picture. The main character’s non-weaponized arm is stuck out to his side, fingers spread. There is a green enemy over the main character’s shoulder, and even the colors of the backgrounds are similar. 

These games weren’t released all that far apart back in 1990. In fact, they were released within a month of each other in both the US and Japan. This means that either of the pictures could have been created first, or perhaps at the same time. 

I attempted to track down the artists of both pieces of box art, but as game credits of the period are limited to just a few people, this can be difficult. For example, Mega Man 3 credits the various boss character designers as well as programmers, but no mention of “art” at all. SF2010 does a slightly better job, citing three “Art Creators” by the names of Bengi, Lucky M, and Tama, but those names don’t really bring up much in a Google search.

So, as I have no idea how this strange coincidence came to be, I can only assume it was a product of a tired artist who needed to crank out a couple of action-themed game covers and decided to take a little shortcut. Alas, unless the person(s) responsible for these two lovely pieces of NES gold comes forward, we may never really know. 

This is a bit what the experience of setting up your own tumblr (picking a theme, altering the HTML, previewing, previewing, previewing) is like. It seems like it’ll be fun at first, but by about half-way through, you just want it to be over.