![]() Good visual art expresses emotion, and I can’t think of a quicker way to do so than to just have a picture of a person screaming. But why does a boxing game like Electronic Arts’ Fight Night: Champion need to go all monochromatic? Notable offender: Limbo’s and Alan Wake’s shadow-intensive covers make sense, considering the darkness inherent in their design. Apparently, the quickest way to convey to a prospective player that your game is for-reals serious is to design a cover in which your hero glowers in a poorly lit room. ![]() In this age of gritty reboots and cynicism, some video games have gotten pretty dark, and their covers reflect this in the most literal way possible. Notable offender: See that woman on the box for House of the Dead: Overkill’s Extended Cut? She’s pointing two guns up. It’s hard to show people holding guns without making them look too threatening, however, so the workaround is apparently to show them casually pointing their weapon into the air. Modern video games are just straight-up full of guns, so it makes sense that many covers focus on their characters’ relationship to their hardware. Notable offender: Developer/Publisher Rockstar’s Bully: Scholarship Edition mixes up the formula with a difference in height between the two people staring each other down. You can’t beat the classics, however, and sometimes it’s enough to just have two characters demonstrating their antipathy by getting into one another’s face. ![]() TV screenwriter Eddy Canfor-Dumas says, “Conflict is drama.” And he would know because he wrote Supervolcano.Įven non-narrative games like Pac-Man center around two forces in opposition, and the designers of game covers can express this in any number of ways. For simplicity’s sake, I’ve mostly limited this to titles from the current generation of hardware (Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and Wii). ![]()
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