Joel Luther

Oh no! The dreaded black lines! Seriously, is there a way to change the added background color?

Anyway, here are the rest of the pictures.













And now for the critique:

Front:

I think I did this pretty well; so there's not much I can complain about. I did all of the renders myself (LONG time). There are NO (I looked, trust me) high-res screenshots of Galaxy, which was very frustrating. You may notice that some of the renders on the front have rough edges, which is not my fault, all of the images were that way. For some of the images, I actually took screencaps of the gameplay videos, and those were higher quality than images. Strange, isn't it? About the Wi-Fi logo .... don't ask me. I was just going on a rumor I heard coming out of the Media Summit. Can't verify it, or say what it will be used for. I just thought it was interesting.

Back:

I had a little trouble with the back, and it shows. I thought the idea for the screenshots was great, it just wasn't executed as well as it could have been. If you don't know what I'm talking about, check out the gameplay videos (where the player connects two bubbles to move to them). I think the bubbles were 'too blue' and sort of messed with the quality of the images... For the remote trail ... I had a lot of trouble finding what to use. I ended up just taking a screencap of a gameplay video, rendering it, and scaling it based on the distance of the bubbles. It's kind of rough around the edges... For the text bubble: I made a rectangular selection, filled it with white, lowered the opacity, and set it to Lighten Only. I then brushed the edge with a white fuzzy brush ... don't remember what size. I downloaded a font for the Mario text, then added my colors myself via fuzzy select and a gradient. The text below that is in Arial. One small mistake: I couldn't find a two-player icon, so I put a four-player. You probably wouldn't have noticed if I didn't mention it anyway.

Spine:

There's not much to critique here. I could have split the logo into three parts: 'Super', 'Mario', and 'Galaxy', then lined them up, but I thought it looked better the way I left it.

Overall:

I think I did pretty good, considering it was my first box, and it was done in GIMP, amidst tons of crashes. I think there were some obvious points where I could improve, but I learned a lot of stuff and techniques from this box. If I had to rate myself, I'd give it a ... 8.5/10

If you made it through all of that, congrats! Even if you didn't, what do you think my next box should be? Post in the comments! And let me know what you think of this one!

--Joel