 |
The Gallery of Hideous Box Art
Strider
Capcom’s original plans for Strider were fairly ambitious. With the help of the manga studio Moto Kikaku, Capcom created an arcade game, an NES title, and a comic series in the late 1980s. They met with varying degrees of success. The arcade Strider is now a cult classic, but Moto Kikaku’s manga lasted only one volume and had little impact. The NES version of Strider, based on the manga, landed somewhere in between the other two prongs of Capcom’s project. Its ambitious, world-spanning plot and creative designs made it popular enough in its day, but it’s a messy game full of stiff controls and flickering graphics. As an NES game, Strider is an example of awkward programming that undermines a promising concept. Its box art is an example of...well, something.
So we have a nice little scene of Strider Hiryu strutting a striped track suit while preparing to slice open an attacking Soviet soldier and his giant, belt-mounted cell phone. It’s a rather dynamic cover, with that borderline violence that attracted young NES owners but didn’t upset their parents with the sight of flying Communist entrails. Of course, we assume that Hiryu's opponent is a trained guard from deepest Red Kazakhstan, even though his ushanka cap resembles a cowboy hat and he apparently thinks that the deadliest part of his futuristic AK-47 is the top of the barrel.
Yet Hiryu’s face is truly the cover's highlight. Usually depicted as a masked ninja, Hiryu became a constipated elf for this NES artwork. He’s caught in a disgusted grimace, possibly to evoke the fury of an international assassin, but it really just suggests that his commie-cowboy opponent hasn’t bathed in a while.
Normally, we’d compare this to the Japanese version, but it doesn’t exist. In a puzzling move, Capcom never released Strider for the Famicom, even though Japan was the only place where the Strider Hiryu manga was available. Perhaps the choppy NES game didn’t meet someone’s standards, or perhaps legal issues arose. It’s certain that the NES game’s cover played no part in this, because, all things considered, it’s not so awful. Worse art was visited upon Strider.
Much, much worse.
Next: You don't want to see this. Trust me.
|
|
|
All applicable characters, names, and titles are copyrighted by their respective companies and used for review purposes.
|
|
