Thread by @gamespite

New month, new box art thread. I'm gonna kick off this month with that Pac-Man box again, because it's so good. Look how happy he is. How can you not love this. How?? Are you made of stone? My god.

Previous threads:

Jan. |

https://twitter.com/gamespite/status/1345124484408373249

Feb. |

https://twitter.com/gamespite/status/1356265639720136705

Namco’s third Famicom release (you can tell by the number in the corner) was Xevious, a shooter that never picked up much traction in the U.S. Players loved it in Japan, though; it would be one of the single most widely imitated game concepts of the mid ‘80s over there.

It would only be supplanted once blockbusters like Super Mario Bros. and Dragon Quest came along. An evolution of the Space Invaders model, Xevious added to the mix a scrolling environment (no more drifting aimlessly through space) and a dual-targeting system.

The shooting mechanics allowed the player’s Solvalou fighter to hit both aerial and ground-based targets. Xevious also featured dynamic enemy formations, ominous boss ships, and an ear worm of a soundtrack. Interestingly, the box art features a screen photo, a rarity in this era.

You almost never saw pixel imagery on packaging in the early ‘80s; publishers used paintings to distance their game’s image from the primitive reality of what you saw on screen. This doesn’t simply show a screenshot, though; it uses the photo as a visual element. Fittingly artsy!

Next up from Namco: Mappy, their lesser arcade mascot game. It did OK. But it was no Pac-Man... or Galaga... or Xevious... or Tower of Druaga...

Mappy’s an odd little platformer where you play as a policemouse attempting to nab a bunch of cats who are attempting an art heist.

You do this by slamming door, hopping on trampolines, and blasting the thieves with microwave pulses. It’s a weird game. The box art is moderately charming, though I question how much of a threat it paints the cat-burglars as when one is literally bawling in helpless terror.

You do get a glimpse of the crime boss, though. In America, they named him Goro, but in Japan his moniker is far more clever: Nyamco. Like Namco, but said by a cat (“nyaa” is Japan’s “meow”).

(Thanks to @stevenplin again for lending this box for photos!)

Ah, Urban Champion. Not the best game Nintendo has ever put together. But in fairness, what other fighting games were there to compete with in 1984? It was pretty much this and Karate Champ, which is also a tough game to love these days.

These two games make an interesting contrast—where Karate Champ attempted to present a highly realistic and authentic competitive martial arts simulation, this is down and dirty street fighting.

Two guys face off, punch each other, try to knock their rival into a sewer... then break it off and whistle nonchalantly when the cops drive by. Sometimes, annoyed residents will drop a flower pot on your head. Great game? No, it’s barely playable. But it has lots of personality.

Like Urban Champion, Ice Climber is one of those games you look back at and can see Nintendo getting a feel for console game design. It’s not great, but it has a lot of interesting ideas that build on previous Nintendo creations and hint at better things to come.

Like Mario Bros., it’s a two-player simultaneous game built around jumping and hitting overhead platforms. The jumping physics are pretty frustrating by modern standards—the arc of the Climbers’ leaps is shallow, which means you have to place yourself very precisely to advance.

It can be frustrating, but you can see how these ideas would be refined for future games. Plus, it’s designed for co-op, which is always a good time. The box art is great, at least: Quite similar in composition to the NES box art, but packed with way more personality.

The polar bear and seal are absolutely freaking out to see a kid in pink smashing through the ice from below, which, yeah. Understandably so. (Thanks again to @stevenplin for lending this one to the cause.)

Wandavision? That’s so 15 hours ago. The real hotness today is the MULTIvision—the Othello Multivision, that most niche of consoles: A Sega SG-1000 clone. By all accounts, Sega hoped to license the SG-1000/SC-3000 platform to other manufacturers to turn it into a standard!

This didn’t happen (though the very similar MSX architecture did become a standard), yet the scheme found one nibble. Tsukuda Original, a company whose portfolio consisted basically of the board game Othello, decided to get in on the SG-1000 biz with a clone of their own.

The Multivision came with Othello built right in, and ultimately a total of eight exclusive cartridges (including a James Bond game adapted from a western release) would appear on the Multivision, which was cross-compatible with SG-1000. A fascinating little slice of history.

The Multivision is an odd device. It’s narrower and more compact than the actual SG-1000, with a taller profile. It accepts carts (which are 99% identical to standard Sega carts, with the exception of a logo on the back) by way of a slot beneath a smoked plastic shutter.

The smoked shutter isn’t all that feels like a product of a bygone era. The major dated feature—besides plastic that yellows with age—is the controller. The Multivision doesn’t just use a joystick, it uses one built into the console—a concept that should have died with the ‘70s.

The plastics and the chunky shape of the console, as well as the numeric buttons on the system’s upper bevel, also do a lot to peg this device to a specific place in time. It really feels like an ‘80s kid’s toy or learning computer that somehow plays legitimate video games.

Nintendo’s Excitebike concluded the Famicom’s modest but nevertheless impressive 1984 with an inventive racing game that approached the genre from a fresh angle. Literally: other racers of the era presented the sport from a top-down perspective or with a view behind the vehicle.

Excitebike, however, interpreted motocross racing as a side-scrolling competition. As a racer, it uniquely parlayed the Famicom hardware’s strengths, as the console’s designers had built it to support smooth horizontal scrolling.

Weirdly, this was the first Famicom release to really exploit that feature—so you have to imagine it made quite an impression. With speedy gameplay, stunt-focused controls, and chunky cartoon racers with a surprising amount of personality, Excitebike hinted at great things ahead.

At this point, we’ve moved beyond the point in the SG-1000 library that I’ve actually played through, so I’m approaching these entries from an outside perspective. I guess it’s fitting, then, that Champion Boxing marks a pretty significant change for the platform.

It’s an impressive-looking game that transcends the console’s graphical limitations to port an arcade game surprising well. Champion Boxing leaves behind the tiny, single-color sprites of 1983’s SG-1000 releases to give players control over a huge, detailed, cartoon pugilist.

He fights an equally detailed rival through a side-view perspective. I’ve read Champion Boxing was designer Rieko Kodama’s Sega debut, and her artistic sensibilities are on full display... even in a game about two rubbery muscle dudes punching the sweat off each other’s faces.

Speaking of faces, this is also the debut of Sega’s new, uncredited cover illustrator, who works in a mode that looks a LOT like the art of Weekly Famitsu cover painter Susumu Matsushita. They would provide box art for a great many character action games for the next few years.

Sega’s Safari Race feels, to me at least, like the missing link between the company’s early racers (think Monaco GP and Turbo) and Out Run. You’ve got the scenic road race as in Monaco GP (in this case, an African drive that evokes the Paris-Dakar Rally)...

You’ve got the primitive behind-the-car viewpoint (as in Turbo); and the prospect of a race in which skillful driving nets additional play time (the entire premise of Out Run). What sets this racer apart from all those other Sega games is the “safari” referred to in the title.

As you make your way across the savannah, you have to dodge all manner of wild critters in order to avoid a road disaster. You also have to stop to refuel at gas pumps randomly standing at the roadside. It’s a little strange.

Like Champion Boxing, Safari Race’s big gimmick is the player sprite. While opposing racers and wandering wildlife are all depicted with classic SG-1000 single-color sprites, your car—the same model seen in Sega Rally more than a decade later!—is drawn in beautiful detail.

There’s some conflicting information online about when, precisely, Sega launched the SG-1000 II. 1984? 1985? Probably the latter, since that’s when all the games manufactured on model II-specific media—the teeny-tiny MyCard—began to appear.

The introduction of a secondary media format wasn’t the only thing the SG-1000 II brought to the table. For starters, it replaced the janky original SJ-200 joystick with a Famicom-style game pad designed with two face buttons and something akin to a D-pad.

Also, the game pad no longer came hardwired into the console. You could still dock the pads on the system, though.

And it looked really cool! Low profile, clean lines, delightfully elaborate English text printed along the top —exquisite mid ‘80s Japanese industrial design.

Another SG-1000 II shot. It’s a lovely bit of hardware design, even yellow with age. It reminds me of something I read about Star Trek: When they were working on the 3rd film, the starship Excelsior was crafted to resemble the Enterprise by way of ‘80s Japanese industrial design.

The SG-1000 is the epitome that idealized reference: Clean, simple, geometric lines. Perfectly balanced without being symmetrical. Uncluttered, yet embellished with a few grace notes of superfluous detail. And, at the same time, it packs a lot of functionality into its slim case.

It has a cartridge slot, a hidden card media slot, a cable connector to add computer functionality, and snap-in cradles to hold the low-profile controllers tidily out of the way. Was it as powerful a console as Famicom? Not at all, but it’s a beautiful piece of hardware even so.

As with all the other Champion series sports games we’ve seen on SG-1000 to date, Champion Soccer feels like a decent effort that Nintendo would realize better a year later. In this case, however, Nintendo wouldn’t do it THAT much better.

Champion Soccer works a lot like Soccer for NES, with the biggest difference really boiling down to the fact that the field scrolls vertically rather than using the horizontal format seen on NES. But otherwise? This is impressive stuff for SG-1000.

Like Safari Race, it features complex multi-piece sprites that combine multiple pieces to hide each on-field athlete a respectable amount of detail, while the ball scales in size to simulate rising through the air closer to the camera. The one real shortcoming? Choppy animation.

The box features more art by someone whose works closely resembles that of Susumu Matsushita. I’m not certain this WASN’T illustrated by Matsushita. He established his studio and began painting Famitsu covers in 1986, around the time SG-1000 dried up. Coincidence? Well… maybe.

I don’t know the origins of Hustle Chummy, but it feels like developer Compile was flipping the bird to Jaleco and Pop Flamer. A game about a mouse in a maze, collecting round red objects while using flame attacks to defend himself from tiny Godzillas... just like Pop Flamer.

That’s about where the similarities end, though—the superficial details. For one, Hustle Chummy is more of a Lode Runner-style platformer than a maze game. For another, the objects you collect—apples—have an actual impact on the gameplay. The more you gather, the slower you move.

You can refresh your speed level by stopping by the little hole where you, being a mouse, call home. Also, it’s fun! That’s the big difference between Hustle Chummy and Pop Flamer.

I’ll consider the artwork the point where the two games call a draw. I like the cute cartoon style of this illustration, but there is something to be said for the wacked-out surrealism of Pop Flamer. I think we can all agree, however, that SG-1000 box art is generally pretty rad.

Namco converted a single game to SG-1000—1983’s Sega-Galaga—then promptly defected to Nintendo’s camp. As a result, the Famicom saw a port of Namco’s minor arcade hit Mappy fairly early on, while SG-1000 instead got Flicky, a game designed very much in the image of Mappy.

Personally, I’d say this is the better game. It’s faster, more fluid, and revolves around less convoluted mechanics. There are no doors to fuss with, no microwave beams blasting across the screen, and you don’t have to bounce on trampolines to get about.

Instead, your tiny bird leaps about under their own locomotion, gathering up a team of lost chicks to lead to safety while avoiding hungry cats. The more chicks you rescue at once, the more points you earn—but a lengthy conga line of baby birds is more vulnerable to predators.

The risk/reward here is reminiscent of other SG-1000 releases, including Choplifter and Hustle Chummy, but there’s a zippiness that helps Flicky stand apart. The box art has an ugly/cute vibe to it that Japanese illustrators do so well. I’m not sure I like it, but I respect it.

Girl’s Garden is probably the single best-known original creation for SG-1000, a fact that can be attributed to the fact that it was the freshman design and programming effort for Yuji Naka, who of course would go on to program Phantasy Star and Sonic the Hedgehog.

This is nothing so remarkable, but it is a strong effort that does a few interesting things with the platform’s tech. The visuals are great—the sprites aren’t elaborate or colorful, but somehow the graphics make the 16-color palette look pastel and floral rather than garish.

It also manages to pull off parallax background scrolling, which was absolutely just Naka showing off. As a game, Girl’s Garden is decent enough. You need to wander around a garden, collecting flowers and avoiding bears. The bears can be diverted by dropping pots of honey.

Flowers have to be collected in full bloom rather than as buds or wilted blossoms. These details lend the action enough complexity to sustain interest without bogging it down. Not a bad start. Too bad about the box art, which is like the cover of a mediocre ‘60s kids’ comic.

Forgot to mention a few days ago—Champion Boxing was one of the handful of games Sega converted from cartridge to MyCard. Guess the kids liked it! Here’s the smaller format version. The medium is different, but the message is the same.

Much to my surprise, I have now posted images of every game Sega and Nintendo released in 1983 and ‘84. So, I guess it’s on to ‘85 with a true classic: Balloon Fight for Famicom. Sure, at its base level, Balloon Fight is simply an imitation of Williams’ Joust...

...(in fact, Balloon Fight co-dev HAL Labs would port Joust to NES eventually), but its bursting with so much personality that it stands on its own. The action moves a little more slowly than Joust’s, but in this case that means you have more granular control over your movements.

It also means you can position yourself against your rivals—cunning warriors who float around on balloons and get about by flapping their arms—with greater precision. Also, Balloon Fight contains the single-player obstacle challenge mode Balloon Trip, which is great.

The art sums up just about everything that defines Balloon Fight: Your little guy, the enemy with the bird helmet, and a very large fish that happily consumes all that drift within range.

With Exerion, we have the second game to appear on both Famicom and SG-1000. The two versions of Jaleco’s shooter compare differently than Lode Runner did; where Hudson completely reinvented the look of that game for Famicom, Exerion got a direct adaptation on both consoles.

Not surprisingly, Famicom unquestionably acquits itself better. Its graphics are more detailed, scroll more smoothly, and allow for a more convincing lateral scroll effect. The visual difference is not some superficial thing, either.

The more robust capabilities of the Famicom make for a game that simply plays better than it did on Sega’s system. It’s not a masterpiece here or anything, but it plays well and captures the distinctive inertial physics of the arcade version well.

As good as Namco’s Famicom port of Pac-Man was, their conversion of Galaga turned out even better. Though inherently incapable of being 100% arcade-perfect (what with the sideways monitor and all), its fidelity really spoke well of the console’s capabilities. Everything is here:

The enemy formations, the starry backdrops, the dual-ship strategies, the Challenging Stages, the vivid colors and memorable sound effects, the exquisite gameplay balance. It’s probably not fair to compare this to the SG-1000 port given the differences in hardware power, but...

But this adaptation absolutely eclipses Sega-Galaga. Even the pop-art cover better represents the arcade cabinet’s bezel art and colors than Sega’s semi-realistic painting. A great conversion that proved the Famicom could still deliver recent-ish arcade experiences in fine style.

Hudson followed its highly successful adaptation of Brøderbund’s Lode Runner with another Famicom rendition of a Brøderbund computer hit: Will Wright’s Raid on Bungeling Bay. This one wasn’t quite as neatly suited to the Famicom audience as Lode Runner, though.

Rather than featuring a bunch of characters who could be redrawn as charming robots, Bungeling Bay was a flight combat simulation with tiny hints of strategy—not exactly cute and cuddly. But in the context of its release, technically very impressive for the Famicom!

Players control a chopper that flies around a large, free-scrolling map, gunning down enemies and blasting their factories. Abstract, impersonal, but a showcase for features that had never been seen on Famicom. (I have to assume the amorphous box art didn’t do sales any favors.)

Jaleco’s Famicom port of Formation Z could be regarded, I suppose, as the system’s answer to Sega’s Orguss for SG-1000. Both games see you take control of a robot that transforms into a jet fighter (or is that vice-versa?).

Where they differ is in the way that Orguss makes you feel like it’s punishing you for turning into the robot mode, while Formation Z makes the robot form itself feel like punishment. Here, the jet mode offers a far more enjoyable play experience than the robot conversion...

...but flying around comes with strings attached: You have only a limited amount of flight time, which you must replenish by collecting energy pods while marching along as a robot. A bit repetitive, and the robot sequences last way too long...

...but I’d say Formation Z is a more interesting (and playable) interpretation of the convertible-robot format than usual. Its fundamental lack of inspiration shines through clearly in its cover, which is the second Jaleco Famicom box (of two) to feature an F14/F15-style fighter.

Nintendo’s Soccer is not, in my opinion, one of the company’s stronger efforts at creating a sports game simple enough to be represented by putting the sport’s name on the box in place of a title. To be fair, though, it’s a little tough to create a truly simple take on soccer.

For soccer games to work, you need to simplify the whole thing to the point that players have no real control over the action, or else make a complex simulation. Nintendo favored the first approach, but they didn’t go all-in, and the end result came out feeling a little clumsy.

And the box art gets freakier the longer you stare at it. The characters in the foreground are outlined, with less-defined defending players. The two players in the foreground are TOO defined, with awkward cartoon noggins pasted on vaguely realistic bodies. It’s unsettling!

Games like Space Invaders for Famicom make me wish I could travel back in time to experience the Japanese console boom first-hand. I can certainly see why arcade colossus Taito would make its debut on the system with the hit that put them (and Japan’s games industry) on the map.

But did audiences in 1985 care about a game that, by the standards of video games in the mid-‘80s, amounted to a work from the dawn of time itself? I can imagine jaded young audiences just rolling their eyes at this relic.

At the same time, I can also envision a scenario where teens and adults who dropped endless streams of 100-yen coins into the cabinets during the coin-op’s heyday would have been drawn to relive their memories by this straightforward yet vibrant packaging art.

In reality, it was probably a mix of the two. Anyway, Taito would eventually give us NES knockouts like Little Samson and Power Blade 2, and this was as good a place to start that journey as any.

With Lode Runner raking in cash hand over fist for Hudson, it should come as little surprise that they hustled out a follow-up less than a year later. Certainly the original FC cart left room for further releases, given that it excised 100 of the Apple II version’s 150 stages.

Championship Lode Runner was not an attempt to bring those missing levels to console, however. Rather, it directly adapted the computer game by the same title. The original Championship Lode Runner was Brøderbund’s own Lode Runner update (I hesitate to call it a sequel)...

...compiling the 50 cleverest and most ruthless fan-designed stages built in the Apple II version’s level builder. Here, Hudson brought those soul-crushing creations to console to make sure Japanese children felt the same sense of despair as American kids had experienced.

The stage designs may represent an upgrade over those of the original Lode Runner, but the box art feels like a downgrade from the joyous cartoon packaging of the first LR. The main character does look an awful lot like Bomberman, though, which turns out not to be a coincidence…

The name Zaxxon carries a lot of clout for people who were tall enough to see over the edge of an arcade control panel in 1982. (I just barely qualified.) Nothing in arcades looked quite like this at the time, with its isometric viewpoint and constant dual-axis threats.

Sega seemingly borrowed some ideas from Konami’s Scramble here—players have to shoot fuel storage tanks in order to keep their own gas meter topped off—but the bold perspective and courageous inverted flight controls made for a truly one-of-a-kind shooter.

The SG-1000 port was, to go by its catalog number, Sega’s first release for 1985. By then, of course, tykes like me had already memorized the ins and outs of the ColecoVision version, so I’m eager to sit down and properly compare the two to see which fares better in hindsight.

Sega wins on the box art front, with a clever illustration that shows the iconic viewpoint and serves as a walkthrough. A classic given its due on SG-1000—certainly it’s a damn sight better than the disastrous adaptation of the other Sega/Ikegami arcade team-up, Congo Bongo.

It’s not just the Susumu Matsushita-looking cover art that causes Sega’s Champion Pro Wrestling to give off serious Champion Boxing vibes—the game itself looks and plays like a somewhat diminished version of the prior release.

Once again, it features large, multicolored character sprites that defy the limitations of the platform, facing off in a ring. And once again, the player controls their little digital man by way of a clumsy menu-driven interface.

Seeing this element in a wrestling rather than boxing game makes the inspiration of Technos’ Tag Team Wrestling quite blatant—and like that game, it’s not very fun! On the contrary, it’s quite clumsy and frustrating. But it does at least look very nice for an SG-1000 release.

A racing game? On a Sega system?! It’s more likely than you think.

GP World, by my count, is the SG-1000’s fourth racer, and also the most traditional take on the genre. Lacking fanciful objectives or road gimmicks, this is—as the title indicates—a pure grand prix racing game.

Its timing seems to put it head-to-head against the very similar Nintendo’s F1 Race, which is unfortunate. GP World is an impressive feat of programming for SG-1000, but it doesn’t compare well to HAL’s racer for Nintendo, which really put the Famicom hardware through its paces.

“Konami no Shinnyuushain Tooru-Kun” is quite the mouthful; I much prefer the title of its English adaptation, Mikie. Of course, Mikie and Shinnyuushain Tooru-Kun have more significant differences than the length of the name of the box.

The former sees a school kid trying to win the affections of his sweetheart—aged down from the original Japanese version, in which the protagonist has just entered the working world. (Though he still wants to win a lady’s affections, because some 8-bit motives are universal.)

Tooru-kun sees Konami making its debut on a Sega platform, a business arrangement they’d flirt with over the next two decades but never embrace as enthusiastically as their commitment to Nintendo, Sony, or even MSX. But hey, some vintage Konami is better than none at all.

I love the box art on this one. It has a great early ‘20s century cartoon style, but with a distinctly Japanese twist. I mean, just look at all those octopuses.

And that wraps up March’s box art posts. Tomorrow: Another fresh thread.

With the arrival of a new month comes a new box art thread. You can continue following Famicom and SG-1000 releases here, if you like:

https://twitter.com/gamespite/status/1377790534853521413