Poll: Box Art Brawl: Duel - Pilotwings 64

japan got that thiccness

Neither one is all that great, so I guess I'll go with the Japanese cover, for being slightly less ugly.

i think the NA art would be better with a better scan--as it is here, it looks crazy desaturated

The Samurai and Ninja Island wins for me.

Both are super-fugly

The NA one and the EU one both manage to crop out that one guy with the N64 logo.

I like the composition of the NA cover more, and the use of an aircraft better fits the game.

It's a game about flying. Japan gets the point for at least having something actually flying.

Oh yeah, sure… sure… It's very fair to compare and vote when one of the images takes up an inch on the phone's screen, and the other takes up the entire screen...

They're both shockingly bad. Not Nintendo quality whatsoever.

NA is better for me, the composition is a lot better, the JP only has the characters in line, pretty boring.

Went with JPN on this one.

I hate how invasive the text and overlays are in the NA/Europe versions, but the Japan cover is just unimportant characters posing. The game could be about almost any sport looking at that one.

(Oh there is that glider in the air I looked right over… are the characters there just to watch?)

Neither are great and I never liked these characters tbh. I missed the flight instructors from the SNES game and more serious tone. Tony, Shirley, Lance and Big Al >>> These guys

Neither are very attractive, but at least Japan’s follows the most basic rules of picture composition.

Two very ugly designs, I can see why you phoned in the descriptions on this one.

Did Capcom provide the box arts of Pilotwings 64?

Anyway, as for which one I prefer? I think the Japanese one. I hate how the Western pnes have a character obstructed by the western box art designs (the red stripe on the NA one and the "Only for N" in the European one)

Never understand why the European ones put that black border around it.

@Purgatorium it was to mentally prepare you for the way that pal games would actually display.

Japan. Full character spreads = win

I'm not really a fan of either because the character designs just don't really look appealing to me but Japan wins because it isn't ruined by the ugly red line that or black box that plagues the other covers.

Japan is only slightly ahead in my eyes but both designs are solid 👍

Wow, these are terrible. Japan is less awful to me. The Euro version has the horrible border. The NA version has that terrible red strip. The peeling upper-right corner both have makes them even worse. I hate N64 boxes because of all that nonsense. Japan's box wins for me, in spite of itself.

Japanese box art every day of the week!!

@StuTwo They had a black border around them?

I love the large sky above on the Japanese one, but I'm bored by the box art trope of all the characters just standing there, so the NA box gets the vote from me, just for having a more interesting scene composition.

The US manual uses the Japanese box art. So, we get both worlds over here.

And yeah... the character designs are kind of awful, as nostalgic as this game is for me.

I voted NA/EU because it has less focus on the terrible character design, but they are both really bad.

@SoManyHaveDied I was hoping there would be a thick comment and it was the first one! Thank you much, pumps my tires up!

@Jacoby ahhh yes, a fellow connoisseur of the thicc ::tips hat::

Box Art Brawls Current Total:

Europe: 40

Japan: 46

North America: 48

Australia and New Zealand: 1

@Purgatorium In many, yes, cases pretty much.

PAL was 50 fps refresh rate (slower than NTSC at 60 fps) but with a notably higher resolution than NTSC. A lot of games were badly localised - they just slowed the speed down 15% but never bothered to increase the resolution.

So the leftover space was black borders around the action (which was of course slower and at a lower resolution than in the US and Japan). Waverace 64 had particularly big borders top and bottom.

@StuTwo Wow, I didn't know that. Must have been hard dealing with that back then.

@Purgatorium It was ok. In hindsight we had a poorer experience but, then again, the companies that were more successful in Europe were Sega and Sony and their games were much better converted to work on PAL (and of course then benefitted from the higher resolution).

It's not a coincidence that they were more successful here - the attention on the local delivery of their games was just one symptom of a bigger underlying focus. Nintendo didn't really care as much as Sega/Sony so they were always second place here.