What's the last game you purchased just based off the cover art?

I guess this needs explaining in our current download generation, but many people probably remember going to a store and just looking at a cool game on sale, and thinking that looks crazy, then just buying it. No research, no reviews.

Nowadays, you would be hard pressed to avoid a bit of extra info on a game before a purchase, but you can still see a download picture and think eh...gotta try that out.

Plenty of other situations where you'd seek a game after just some cover artwork or ad etc, so let me hear some...

What game just made you go, ill give it a try, just based on the cover art?

Project Sylpheed.

Valkyria Chronicles

I think it was State of Emergency or Kingdom Hearts 1. That one was SHINY!

Back in the day my brothers and I saw Gladius on the shelf and thought it was going a cool gladiator hack and slash game that we could all play, and man we were disappointed that it wasn't that.

Metal Gear Solid.

For me that's hard because in some way I've always kept up with reviews from magazines even before the internet took off in the mid 90s. But I guess the game I would pick is Devil May Cry 2, because I liked the first one so much, I assumed that the sequel would be better as a lot of big game sequels were back then. I didn't wait for a review or the game to go on sale. I pre-ordered it. Well, as you might suspect, I regretted it. As a sequel the game was bad in every way. But because I didn't have money to just buy a lot of games, I still ended up playing it a lot. And I've come to accept that as an action game, it's not too bad, but as a sequel to the original, it fell flat.

When DMC 3 came out, I waited for the reviews, saw many people were prasing it, then I took the leap. Best game in the series. With DMC 5 coming in second.

I... don't think I've ever done that. Even as a kid I would only buy or rent games that I'd heard of through Nintendo Power etc.

Also sequels can get less time to make, less production time, and less money due to them being sure fire hits for the EXEC standpoint and shareholders so asking or saying this time it will take 2x the money as last time to make a game that will sell about the same...doesnt fly. So sequels today unless BIGGGG get a crap end of the stick with dedicated devs who turn coal into diamond with the little they get to work with and make decent sequels that often dont live up to the first.

But yeah back in the day you could bet money the sequel to your favorite PS1/PS2 generation game would slap. Tons of additions, graphics a bit better, long, fun, ironed out issues. So much so that people sometimes just brought the second of a series before the first cause you know...2 beats 1. lol. All opinion of course.

i honestly can't remember , i'd been reading gameinformer since my teens so a large shift happened for me going from boxart grabbing me to articles grabbing me. i guess if i had to come up with something off-hand it might have been trinity: souls of zill o'll but in reality it was probably more due to it being the only thing in the military px i hadn't played or knew about ... in the end i might have only played a hour or so of it? it was too hard for my tired brain to grasp without dieing that night and i just never went back to it ( tho i have thought about it over the years)

Not like you're going to buy a C64 game in 2014 in order to play it.

This was the last time...1983

Same. Even as a kid I knew something about the game. Browsing mail-order catalogues for my birthday, looking at the games on offer, I'd usually choose something with a character I recognised, rather than thinking the art looked cool.

@cikame said:

Oh wait, I actually blind-bought this (through my mom) when I first saw this box art too. And it was worth it.

To be fair, that box art for Uniracers is fucking amazing.

The original Game Boy Castlevania game. Forgetting if it had a subtitle

It's been a long time since I have due to being up on the news and whatnot the last 15+ years, but I used to do it a ton while working at Toys R Us. Really hard to not to impulse buy when you are staring at games all day.

I think the last one that really stands out to me was part due to the cover and part due to collecting a ton of Atlus and NIS games in the PS2 era, but Rule of Rose stands out to me for that reason. Cover is very understated and doesn't really indicate much about the game. Makes it stand out amongst a lot of the late era PS2 game covers.

Good topic. My friend and I about 15 years or so ago would walk into an EB games store every so often. We would go to the used section and each pick out a game to buy just by looking at the cover. It was pretty fun going in blind.

Don't think I ever bought one and even in the case of renting some Genesis games, I looked at the back of the box after the cover had intrigued me.

Not sure if it was the last one, but most memorable is buying Kuri Kuri Mix for about $3:

It's a great cover IMO, I much prefer it over the USA cover ( The Adventures of Cookie & Cream ).

I used to buy a lot of used games, which often meant looking at a $5 or $10 game I had never heard of and trying to figure out, not necessarily whether it was a great game or not, but rather if it is good enough for the price :)

I didn't end up playing it much, but it was still good value.

(and it's a really fun curiosity considering what From Software would become -- sadly I had to get rid of all my physical games when I moved to the other side of the world).

First and last: Beyond the Beyond on PS1. Part of it was how JRPG-starved I was in a pre-FFVII world, part of it was seeing it as the first PS1 jewel case I'd seen in public.

I had many regrets following this decision.