Videogame Boxart/Cartrige Shape/Manual thread

Alright this one goes out to the people that took their time to make their artwork on the boxes and sometimes the boxes themselves look extremely nice. For the box itself I'd have to go with the Magnavox Odyssey 2 boxes.
Attachment 4929

Just look at that.

As for the quality of the manual, I'd say the winner goes to the 2 Lunar games for the SCD. You feel the embossed LUNAR on the front and you think, oh man this is going to be good. You open it up and there in FULL COLOR, backstory, character bio's, weapons, random pictures. It's just something that most other games don't have. So post me something good, something that deserves notice.

I liked the Lunar games on CD, but they def don't hold a candle to the ones on the PSX. WD pulled out all the stops on that... but I don't think that kind of setup is really fair to judge other games by! :D

But yeah, there used to be a lot more effort put into the manuals at least. Now they are mostly all b&w, half of them look like they got copied down at some local mom n pop repro shop. At least the cases still tend to have halfway decent designs on them.

I think that the only company that still puts some effort into their manuals is Rockstar. Their manuals are pretty fucking good.

Compare that to, say, those by companies like EA and Activision; the latter being the worst offender. Short, flimsy black and white manuals that aren't even complete! Activision's always have a "for full instructions visit [some Activision support page]". I had a look at the Modern Warfare 2 instruction manual at a relative's house and there was only one screenshot of the game. And even then it was just the HUD; the rest of the image was blank!