Something For The Eye, Something for the Mind

June 20, 2011 7:20 PM

Box Art showcases awesome and artistic videogame box art. Eastern Mind writes about obscure Japanese videogames, with a focus on adventures and music games.
posted by Lovecraft In Brooklyn (11 comments total)

Neat. I didn't know that Amano did Front Mission. A quick Google search brought me to this and this.
posted by MrFTBN at 7:47 PM on June 20, 2011

Man, absolutely nothing beats the utter Seventies-ness of old Atari 2600 box art, particularly on the first-party games.
posted by Strange Interlude at 7:56 PM on June 20, 2011 [1 favorite]

How have I managed to miss a game called "Advanced Busterhawk Gley Lancer"??
posted by A Thousand Baited Hooks at 8:20 PM on June 20, 2011

I was really expecting it, but I browsed the whole thing and saw no Phalanx box art.
posted by MrFTBN at 8:21 PM on June 20, 2011 [2 favorites]

nothing beats the utter Seventies-ness of old Atari 2600 box art

Is it just me, or did the Pitfall II one hold up really well?
posted by Hoopo at 8:28 PM on June 20, 2011

Eastern Mind is one of I guess two videogame sites which still routinely introduces me to really fascinating stuff. The other is Hardcore Gaming 101 (Cosmology of Kyoto is worthy of its own FPP, I think).

Some highlights:

"In Laughter, the Spirituous Dream/In Lunacy, the Savage Dream" (the LSD book)

Beautiful, exclusive concept art for Rez

Surreal, enthralling concept art for Panzer Dragoon Zwei

"From glorious artwork to the woeful grade of a lesser videogame" (concept art for Majin and the Forsaken Kingdom, and a digression about the common devolution of ideas from concept to execution in the games industry)

Dream Chronicles

Imabikisou

"Le vrai chercheur d’amour: JUNKO, d’après Yoshiro Kimura"

There's tons more gold buried in that site. Not to mention, this is one of the only English language blogs that remembers, much less anticipates a sequel to Moon.
posted by byanyothername at 8:32 PM on June 20, 2011 [3 favorites]

This is the one legitimately-purchased game I best remember from my childhood.
posted by tumid dahlia at 9:05 PM on June 20, 2011

Wonderful collection - thank you so much for sharing.

Something I'm always struck by when looking at a bunch of box art is how the quality of the illustration plummets as the graphical power of the systems the games are for increases.
posted by EatTheWeak at 1:01 AM on June 21, 2011 [1 favorite]

Something I'm always struck by when looking at a bunch of box art is how the quality of the illustration plummets as the graphical power of the systems the games are for increases.

With more abstract games, you need to use your imagination plus whatever clues the graphics give you to imagine how the characters and world are supposed to look. So FF III/VI showed you some decent pixel art and gorgeous Amano illustrations and you'd combine the two in your head. Nowadays everything is realistic, or if its unrealistic its almost exactly the way it 'should' look.
posted by Lovecraft In Brooklyn at 1:05 AM on June 21, 2011

So FF III/VI showed you some decent pixel art and gorgeous Amano illustrations and you'd combine the two in your head.

Yeah! That was exactly how that worked for me, way back when! That's probably got a lot to do with why that gameworld consumed me so utterly at the time. I'm not one of these guys that say lush graphics somehow spoil the modern play experience, but it must be said that not one of the cutscene heavy Final Fantasies from part 7 on were half as immersive as part 3/6 was.
posted by EatTheWeak at 1:11 AM on June 21, 2011 [2 favorites]

I was reading through Eastern Mind a little bit and became a little frustrated that I can only really investigate these games vicariously through others - as I don't have access to Japanese games, or the ability to understand them. Some of the games mentioned on the blog do have English translations though.

Are there any blogs you know of similar to Eastern Mind that focus on English games? I'd lve to get the best of both worlds.
posted by mister-m at 7:06 PM on June 21, 2011