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Welcome to Box Art Brawl, our weekly dust-up to find out which of three regional box art variants is the best.

Last week it was Shadowrun's turn to battle itself. Japanese Shadowrun obliterated the competition with over 70% of your approval, leaving second-place North America and third-place Europe to mop up the remainder.

This week we're looking at Natsume's classic 16-bit shooting gallery game Wild Guns. This steampunky Western from 1994 is available on Switch in Reloaded form, and also as part of the SNES library for Nintendo Switch Online subscribers, so there's no shortage of opportunities to catch up with this great game if you missed it back in the day.

Enough waffle. Draw!

Europe

EU

We begin (alphabetically this week) in Europe. We can see an epic Western shootout on the edge of a grand canyon. However, towering over the cowboys, cowgirls, wagons and cacti is a wicked-ass giant armoured Terminator with a massive gun instead of a right arm. Note, also, its elegant, gentlemanly ruff and exhaust horn things framing the polished cranium. If McG had put one of these into the irredeemably awful Ternimator Salvation, the movie might have been elevated to 'almost watchable' (or at the very least 'meme-able').

Throw in a nice chunky logo, a '2 PLAYER ACTION' diamond and some green drones and bullet casings breaking the border and it's a mighty fine opener from the European PALs. It arguably gets enough right to make the odd perspective of the town against the huge misty canyon just feel like a non-issue. Nice shootin', Tex.

Japan

JP

The Super Famicom box features a similar logo embellished with more detail and shows protagonists Clint and Annie. It's less immediately obvious but it also includes one of the mech-dude Terminators in the bottom left corner, although here it looks more like the Iron Giant.

We're not really sure what's going on in the background here, but like the European cover, the main images are strong enough to overpower other issues. Another strong entry.

North America

NA

Essentially, the North American cover uses the same image as the European one (or vice versa) flipped horizontally and reframed slightly. We can see more of the bottom of the image, which helps make more sense of the perspective, and we lose a bit of the sky at the top. It also adds a bunch of tags in the column on the right. Gotta have that "True arcade feel!".

Again, there's a lot to like. We're not sure the white dusting on the top of the logo, settling there like snow, was really necessary, but it's another fine cover. Tough week, that's for sure.


Three covers (well, two-and-a-half?), but just one vote. Click your favourite below and hit the 'Vote' button to cast your ballot:

Which region got the best Wild Guns box art?

And that's it for another week of the BAB! Join us again next time and stay safe until then, lovely people.