Raccoon Mario game cases

It seems a lot of blogs have lots of pictures.  I don't want my readers to feel left out.  I'm not a photographer, so I'm not going to put up some cool artistic photos.  Also, I'm afraid of my soul being stolen by cameras, so it also means there will be few if any photos of myself.  So what's an up-and-coming blog writer to do?  Video game crafts!  As you may have guessed by looking around this blog, I like pixel art and old video games.  I've done many different projects in different media, but today I'm going to show you my most recent creation, a set of DVD/game cases:

Fly Mario Fly!

Each case has a row of pixels from the image of Mario, along with the title of the game superimposed on it.  These cases are for my GameCube collection, although there are no games in them right now.  In fact, none of our games or DVDs are in their cases right now.  If we kept them out and displayed them, they would take up nearly two full bookcases of space.  So right now, they are in a few large CD folders.  While I don't want to display all of our DVDs or games, I thought it would be neat to display at least some of them in an attractive fashion.  Which leads us to the decidedly unattractive video game themed cases.

I wanted the skinny cases because they don't take up as much room and they look better with the single pixel thickness.  Looking online, I saw they were like 20 dollars for 100 crappy ones, which I thought was reasonable, but still more than I wanted to pay.  Instead, I got the DVD cases really cheap at Russ's because they got rid of their video department so had no need for them.

At first, my idea was to use the letters of the title of the game/movie as the pixels for the spines, like this:

[NINTENDO*GAMECUBE]ANIMAL*CROSSING

[NINTENDO*GAMECUBE]DONKEY*KONGA***

But that proved both difficult to properly format and kind of ugly, since I had to use extra characters for the spaces.  So instead I just made the pixels solid and put the text on top of it with the text being on a slightly transparent white background to make the text readable.  The text is smaller because otherwise it would obscure too much of the background pixels, but is still readable:

Speaking of games I haven't played all the way through, I guess I'll have to do a "ketchup gamer" about this one.

Anyway, the Raccoon Mario was mostly me just trying things out.  It's not in color because we do not have color ink right now, and for some reason, HP has made it difficult to find the cartridge for our printer.  Also, I don't really want to waste color ink until I'm ready to make my "final" version.  

I'm thinking about doing maybe two to four different works like this for our Gamecube, Wii, and Playstation (1-3) games, but I'm not sure what I want to use.  Part of the problem is I really like Nintendo pixel art, but I'm not sure that would be appropriate for the Playstation cases.  

I know most of my friends are not really gamers, but any suggestions for simple video game pixel designs I could use for the cases would be appreciated.   And Cara (my wife, for those who for some reason are reading this despite not knowing me), telling me not to do it at all is not a suggestion.