More DVD cases!

One of my favorite video games of all time is Final Fantasy III for the Super Nintendo (or as it is known today Final Fantasy VI).  My first memory of it was when I visited my cousins' house and they were playing it.  At the time, my sole RPG experience was Dragon Warrior, a NES game we got for free from Nintendo Power.  I didn't play that game much because I found it very repetitive, difficult, and boring.  What I saw in my brief exposure to Final Fantasy III at my cousins' house was completely different.  Here was a game with fleshed-out characters, a wonderful story, amazing music, and compared to Dragon Warrior, a pretty fun battle system.  I only saw the game for about a half hour, but I knew that it was special.  Unfortunately, that was the last I would see of the game for several years.

I was going to go further into the story about my playing Final Fantasy III, but as I started writing about it, I realized that there was so much to say, and it didn't feel appropriate for this blog post, which is supposed to be about a craft that I made inspired by Final Fantasy III.  I'll save that story for another time.
Suffice to say, one of my favorite parts of Final Fantasy III was it's music.  And one of the most famous (infamous?) scenes in Final Fantasy III is its opera scene, where one of the characters, Celes, finds herself in the lead female role in an opera.  The scene is very touching, and the music is extremely beautiful, even though the "singing" is limited to SNES sound effects.  I have heard orchestrated versions of the opera music, but there's a certain charm to the digitized version.

Anyway, inspired by this scene, I decided to make another set of DVD cases.  I found a good clip from the opera scene:

And here's the final product:

I don't think it shows up as well as my Yoshi's Island DVD cases, since most of the background is too dark.  Also the reference is a little more abstract to be people who are not as familiar with games, but I still think it turned out well.

Video Game case art: Yoshi's Island

In a previous blogpost, I gave a sample of some DVD cases that I was working on.  Well, recently I came across some color ink for our printer and decided to go all out an make an entire (small) shelf-long picture.  I had a hard time picking a theme because I wanted something recognizable and simple but colorful and interesting.  I decided that my first "complete" DVD case art should consist of art from one of my favorite Super Nintendo games and one of the most beautiful games of all time: Yoshi's Island.  I decided to use a scene from the introduction where the Yoshis come upon baby Mario:

I used full-size Gamecube cases for this instead of the thin DVD cases I was planning because it was easier to fit a somewhat larger picture on them.  Here's what the final results look like:

The hardest part of this was trying to come up with a way to put legible text on the cases without it being in the way.  You may notice in the picture above that the left four cases are slightly different.  I tried to make the text blend in with the background, but that made the text hard to read, so I had to settle with using small print in a bright color:

I'm glad the camera is kind of crappy, otherwise you would be able to see that the game on the right is "Ribbit King". 

Well, that's it for this post.  Now to come up with another picture to use for more cases.

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.