dawnofsorrow
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Promotional Consideration: Behind the boxart
Promotional Consideration is a weekly feature about the Nintendo DS advertisements you usually flip past, change the channel on, or just tune out.We spend a lot of time analyzing boxart, partly because many consumers are first introduced to a game by its cover, and partly because we're people with odd interests. We've brought in designer and illustrator Julie Giles to give us some insight on the packaging process. Julie has worked with Konami to lay out the covers for titles in the Castlevania and Metal Gear series. She also helped put together the award-winning Castlevania 20th Anniversary package, arguably the finest preorder offering for a Nintendo DS release.Are you ever curious about how your favorite boxart pieces were put together? Or what decisions influenced a particular cover's look? Read on for our interview!
Critic's choice: The top five DS games
All week, we've been sharing our favorite games with you, as well as snippets of our personalities outside the fanboy sphere. Now you know that some of us weren't really huge handheld fans before the DS, that at least one of us is terribly silly, and most of us seem to dig cats, in some way or another. But forget the trivial details -- how do our favorite games stack up against the critical darlings? We offer this side-by-side comparison to wrap up Fanboy Favorites week, and we hope you've enjoyed this closer look at not only the DS Fanboy staff, but some of the best that the DS has to offer.
DS Fanboy Favorites: Alisha's top five
All this week, the DS Fanboy staff is letting you in on a few of their favorite titles. Each day, a different member of the staff will present their personal top five DS games along with a snapshot of their gaming paraphernalia and habits, in an effort to provide our readers with a little more information on the tastes and personalities of our writers.If there's anything that can be said about my life -- and that includes my gaming life -- it's that it's messy. I'm messy. I have all this organizational garbage that's supposed to make it easier to store and find all my stuff, but see, I keep accumulating more stuff, and so I need more organizational items ... it's a vicious cycle, and it's part of why I love cartridges. I know where the box is for Clubhouse Games. It's about three feet away as I type this. I could get it, but why? Clubhouse Games goes in and out of my beloved handheld so often, I usually just leave it here on my desk along with the other games I'm interested in at the moment, and I don't have to worry about it getting all scratched up because it isn't delicate like some pansy disc. This makes me happy. I have to be more careful with CDs and DVDs ... but that doesn't mean there aren't a few stacks of discs around my workspace. Believe me, if it's at all stackable, I'm gonna stack it, and to hell with the consequences.Of course, the problem with the size of DS carts means that sometimes I lose my Clubhouse for a while, and that makes me unhappy to the extreme. Luckily, there are other games that can distract me ....
Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow for five dollars
Just several months ago, gamers were still complaining about Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow's rarity and unyielding price point. Even if you were lucky enough to find a used copy, buying it would still cost you about $30 at GameStop. Several stores eventually put the game on sale for $19.99, and Konami released a greatest hits version with dreadful boxart, making Dawn of Sorrow available and affordable for everyone to enjoy.The good times don't end there, though. The frugal folks at CAG noticed a couple of weeks ago that Best Buy has been selling the "Konami's Best" version of the game at an astonishing $9.99. Combining this rock-bottom sale with "$5.00 off" coupons scanned from GamePro brings the price down even further to about $5.00! We usually miss out on these insane deals, failing to get to the store in time before eBay hounds pick the shelves clean, but we drove to Best Buy anyway to see how we'd fare. We were surprised to find that our store had over a dozen copies, and that the GamePro coupon worked like a charm! Success!Make sure you take advantage of this sale now, as it ends on April 1st, punishing the fools who've missed out. Head past the cut for the "$5.00 off" coupon.
Mankind ill needs a boxart such as this
var digg_url = 'http://digg.com/gaming_news/Worst_box_art_branding_ever'; So, uh ... remember that Amazon Castlevania deal that we got all excited about, and encouraged you all to take advantage of? Yeah, about that. NeoGAFfer Reilly bought a copy of Dawn of Sorrow from Amazon, and what you see above is what arrived. Konami has started their own "Konami's Best" branding, and rebranded Castlevania with the lovely new label. If you don't know what the original boxart looked like, it's the one pictured on the new box. We knew nothing of this when we sent you all to Amazon. At least there's still a fantastic game in there.You want to know what's really sad? We kind of want one of these "Konami's Best" copies for our collection.
