After the Wii came out, Nintendo supported it with fairly consistent Virtual Console and WiiWare releases. Then they became less and less consistent; now the only offerings are monthly SNK ports. If you’re one of the people who has already picked up a Wii U, you’re probably hoping that Nintendo can maintain updates as exciting as last week’s veritable Thanksgiving feast, when the company added nearly every launch game to the system’s eShop.

Unfortunately, the Wii U is looking a bit too much like its predecessor this week, as the only new thing for you to download is a YouTube app. But hey, it’s free, and you can watch videos on the tablet screen.

Thankfully, things look better on the 3DS (but only slightly). Starting today, you can download a port of the NES version of Pac-Man and an airport management sim/puzzle game called Aero Porter. Developed by Level-5 (the studio behind the Professor Layton series), Aero Porter tasks you with sorting luggage, customizing and upgrading your planes and airport, and, according to the official page, “avoiding security mishaps.” That last one sounds a bit stressful. Both games are available for $4.99.

Finally, a pair of new titles are available on DSiWare this week as well. First is Invasion of the Alien Blobs, an arcade-style action game in which you poke the titular alien blobs with the stylus in order to kill them, and second is Bloons TD 4, a tower defense variant of the popular series about a monkey shooting a cannon at balloons. Both are available now, the former for $1.99 and the latter for $4.99.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Black Friday! A day of retail armageddon and full contact-shopping … what could be better? And odds are you’ve got a gamer on your holiday gift list – because they’re everywhere now. Naturally, you don’t want to give them video games. They’ve got those already, and let’s face it, those things all the same, anyway. Better to surprise them with something they didn’t even know existed but always secretly wanted in their heart of hearts. Fortunately, I know what that is. Don’t ask how.

I also know someone will inevitably rope you into buying something for a total dork you despise with every fiber of your being. No worries. You can easily give the gift of sabotage.

So in the name of science, I’ve assembled a list of gift ideas guaranteed to delight your geekish friends and punish your nerdy enemies. That’s what the holidays are truly all about.

The Nice List

Dark Horse Deluxe Normandy SR 2

Geeks love toys. Just accept this into your heart. This nicely sculpted tchotchke, based on the signature space cruiser from the Mass Effect role-playing game series, is just right at a 6-inch length. It comes in both its Cerberus and Systems Alliance (pictured) liveries, includes a stand, and makes a nice focal point for the entire room. Unfortunately, you’ve got to make your own engine and laser sounds.

$28.75 at Amazon

Portal Companion Cube cookie jar

Finally, an easily attainable product that combines our two favorite things: crunchy, delicious chocolate-chip cookies and unconditional, artificial love. You’re under no obligation to provide the former because you are, after all, a monster. But any true nerdcore human will find this ceramic jar, patterned on our dearly departed friend from Portal whom we did not savagely destroy for personal gain, a necessary and tasteful addition to their kitchen and/or bedroom. Even when they steal all its cookies and hate it for being empty. Because that’s what best friends do.

$29.99 at ThinkGeek

MOGA Mobile Gaming System for Android 2.3+

Have I seen a lot of cheap controller add-ons for smartphones and tablets? Yes. Yes, I have. The Moga, however, feels rock-solid and is ergonomic and smartly designed. Rubber grips, nice action in the buttons, and surprisingly stiff control nubs (perhaps a touch too stiff) single the Moga out, and a retractable arm grips your phone tightly indeed. You’ll have to pick and choose the games you get for it with care (Pac-Man and Sonic CD come free), and it’s only compatible with Android phones, but that just goes to show how good the Moga is. I want it to work with every game on every phone and tablet so I’m never without it again.

$44.99 at Amazon

Super Mario Wall stickers

The geek on your list probably already has these. But just in case, and since you’ll probably want them for yourself, I include them here. Vinyl, reusable, and in glorious 8-bit color, these decals can go up on any wall and come down again without peeling your landlord’s paint off. Easier than painting Koopa Troopas yourself, more legal than armed robbery, and nostalgic enough to bring tears to the strongest of us, these will go up in your friend’s home office before Christmas morning comes.

$68.11 at Amazon

Sifteo Cubes

Got kids? Get these. Sifteo Cubes might just be one of the more clever and versatile tech gifts around. The basic set includes three 2-inch square touchscreen cubes that you move, place, touch, and tilt to solve puzzles, cleverly disguised math and grammar problems, and even some light Metroidvania-style dungeons. How? You reveal the maze by moving the blocks around each other. Very neat. More cubes (sold separately) sync right in to add more complexity. It comes with nine games, and you can buy and download more for a few bucks each, and if you’re really lucky, your kids will let you play with them, too. But probably not. Rotten kids.

$129 at Amazon

 But what perfect gifts could you bestow on your most hated enemy? We have a few ideas about that, too.

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Some parts of this interview contain spoilers for the film Wreck-It Ralph.

Litwak’s Arcade is a special place. But you wouldn’t be able to tell by its aging ceramic tiles or by the missing letters in the dilapidated birthday sign posted outside. Despite all odds, the “family fun center” manages to stay profitable in a time where most standalone arcades have failed.

Strangely, it’s also a hard place to find. The TV commercials only mention that its location is off the nebulous “Route 83.” And Google results won’t return a website — much less a phone number. So how do you get there?

Unfortunately, you can’t. Litwak’s Arcade doesn’t actually exist.

It’s merely the setting for Disney’s Wreck-It Ralph, an animated film about video games that opened nationwide in theaters last week. Packed with characters from real electronic entertainment titles — along with a slew of other references that’ll have you freeze-framing every second when it’s out on DVD — the movie tells a charming and surprisingly emotional adventure about its titular villain who “jumps” from one arcade game to the next to solve his mid-life crisis.

Perhaps more interesting than Wreck-It Ralph, though, is the story behind the making of the film. GamesBeat spoke with producer Clark Spencer and later to screenwriter Phil Johnston and director Rich Moore to reveal the challenges, the delightful accidents, and the insane ideas they had during the three-year-long project.

GamesBeat: Why make Ralph a video game villain as opposed to, say, a bad guy in a fairy tale?

Clark Spencer: Since Rich Moore first came to Disney, he had this idea telling the story about a guy who wakes up one day after 30 years of doing the same thing and thinks, “Isn’t there something more to life?” But he didn’t know what world he was going to set that story in, and John Lasseter, who’s our chief creative officer, said we should think about the world of video games.

But it wasn’t as much thinking of you should tell a video game story because no one’s done it. It was more that the right story and the right world came together at the right moment because … this story could be told in a lot of different worlds or universes. Video games is just one of them.

GamesBeat: What’s the role of the video game cameos? Are they just there to contextualize the film’s world?

Spencer: [Phil and Rich] wanted to make sure that, as much as possible, [the cameos] were organic and integral to the storytelling. We screen our movies a lot before we do the final version. In the first two times we screened the movie, we didn’t have that Bad Guys Anonymous scene. We had a different way of getting into it.

But it was taking us a long time to set up who Ralph was and what his problem was through a lot of dialogue. And someone came up with the idea of “What if we put him into a Bad Anon group?” Now we can actually bring video game characters in and it’s integral to the story — they’re telling us who Ralph is, and Ralph is telling us what his problem is in that world.

[And] when you see Sonic, it feels like Sonic is telling us the stakes of the world by saying if you die outside your game, you don’t ever regenerate. As much as possible, we tried to make sure we’re doing the right match up of storytelling, information that helps propel the story forward, with the right characters.

GamesBeat: Did you have a worst-case scenario plan in place if none of your requests for these characters went through?

Spencer: It was probably the thing I was the most angst-ridden about because every day, somebody would come up with some other great idea. And you think it’s going to make the movie so funny or emotional … but are we really gonna be able to pull all of this off? So what we said was, “What are the four most important characters to be in this movie?”

We decided it was Bowser, Q*bert, Clyde the ghost, and Sonic. We felt like if we can get those four, we can figure out the rest. And there was one more from Phil … he’s a huge Street Fighter fan, so Zangief was majorly important to him. [Laughs] We started out with those companies first. And [companies] were actually entertaining this idea. They weren’t saying no to us right away. They were actually listening and getting interested.

And that’s when we got a lot bigger in terms of the number of characters we were going to put into the film. But you still wonder if there’s going to be that day where someone says, “You can’t have this.” And we’ve built everything around it. We built so much around the idea that Q*bert is homeless. What happens if Sony doesn’t say yes?

[The films] Toy Story and Roger Rabbit kind of broke a lot of the ground for us. So companies were more open to it. They saw [their characters] all the way through the process.

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Popular culture is culture. To see that, you need to look no further than the tons of art that pop-culture icons like Pac-Man inspire.

Artist Joe Baranowski used the character as the foundation for a recent set of propaganda-like posters he created and shared on his Facebook page. Gamers are paying attention to his work thanks to the posters popping up on places like Reddit.

“I am shocked that people are interested,” Baranowski told GamesBeat. “I put [the posters] up on my personal page and had friends ask me what the heck I was doing. So I decided to put them up on Behance and [thought] that perhaps people would find them and be amused.” Behance.com is an art-portfolio website that artists can use to display their work. Baranowski had no idea that the images were taking off until he received a Tweet from a friend about it.

“I love minimalism, and Pac-Man really suited what I wanted to accomplish,” he said. “Heck, it allowed me to make 12 different posters in a single day. It was the simplicity of the characters that I took a liking to.”

The Madison, Wis.-based artist told us that the images don’t have any real deep meaning, but he’s happy that people find them engaging.

“Propaganda has always interested me,” said Baranowski. “I was amazed how it was used in World War I and World War II, which is where the inspiration came from. In the end, with this series, I wanted people to be amused and see the world from a different perspective.”

Baranowski doesn’t know when he’ll work on more game-related art in the future but says it’s bound to happen.

“I do not plan that much,” he said. “I tend to get an idea stuck in my head, and then I just sit down and make it. It almost never looks like what I imagined in my head, but that is not a bad thing.”

Right now, Baranowski doesn’t have an online store to sell his prints, but he’s open to making arrangements if you contact him through Facebook.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Update: We’ve added a version of the halftime show that was shot using a camera from this century. You can see the original video here.

Mario, Pikachu, and Epona made a dazzling appearance at the halftime of Saturday’s Big Ten football matchup between Ohio State and Nebraska.

Ohio State’s marching band put on a musical show featuring many of gaming’s biggest characters and musical numbers. The ensemble represented classics like Space Invaders and modern-day hits like Halo. The Zelda-sequence at around the six-minute mark is the show’s most impressive moment.

Check out the entire performance in this video:

Here’s each featured game in the order that they appear in the above video:

• Space Invaders
• Pokémon
• Tetris
• Super Mario Bros.
• Super Mario World
• Halo
• The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time
• Pac-Man

I’m a Michigan fan, but I’m glad that Ohio State has a marching band that’s this talented. It’s something that the Buckeyes will still be able to take pride in ever after the Wolverines stomp the football team in November.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Twitter is a practical and fun way to keep in touch with friends and family. Now that you can upload a header image at the top of your profile, it’s also easy to share your passion for video games with the world. This is where GamesBeat comes in.

We’re releasing seven days’ worth of gaming artwork, each with a different theme:

• Monday: The modern era
• Tuesday: Popular franchises
• Wednesday: PC
• Thursday: It came from Japan
• Friday: Mobile
• Saturday: Retro arcade
• Sunday: Consoles

Today’s batch of headers features 10 entries from classic arcade games. Right-click (or Ctrl-click for Macs) the picture you want and hit “save image as” to save to your computer. To add the header to your Twitter profile, please follow these steps:

1. Sign in to your account.
2. Go to “settings” and click on the “design” tab.
3. Scroll down to the “customize your own” section.
4. Click on “change header” and select the image you want to upload. No need to scale.
5. Click “save.”

Pac-Man

Frogger

Donkey Kong

Rampage

Asteroids

Joust

Missile Command

Space Invaders

Karate Champ

Galaga

For gaming-themed Timeline covers for your Facebook profile, click here.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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I obviously love video games (you don’t get into this field by accident), but I’m also a huge Disney geek. I’ve adorned my room with monuments and mementos plastered with Mickey’s and Donald’s likenesses. So when Disney announced it was going to make an animated movie set inside the world of gaming, I thought it sounded like pretty much the greatest thing ever. Judging from the newest trailer Disney released for Wreck-It Ralph today (embedded at the bottom of this story), well…now I really think it looks like the greatest thing ever.

The company responsible for eight decades of animated hits has packed this video with charm and humor that can appeal to anyone, but gamers will especially find a lot to like in this short preview. For instance….

Old characters get new voices

While the main characters in Wreck-It Ralph are original Disney creations, plenty of icons from gaming history litter the frame. This includes a set of villains that form a support group, including Bowser from Nintendo’s Mario series and Zangief from Capcom’s Street Fighter franchise.

While Zangief obviously has a thick Russian accent, the voice of Clyde is more amusing (he’s the orange ghost from Pac-Man). Why is his voice so funny? Well, it’s just so…normal. Like, in the way you would least expect.

I also like that Clyde looks like the leader of the villain support group. Makes sense. He has been in the bad guy game longer than just about any other character (Pac-Man’s been around since 1980). Nice touch, Disney.

Poor Q*bert is homeless

Remember Q*bert? That weird orange thing that loved to hop around those colorful squares? Well, while many of his old-school contemporaries have still kept their popularity in the modern age of gaming, poor Q*bert has found himself forgotten and homeless. Just looking at the pathetic, little guy with his dirty cardboard sign (declaring that his game is unplugged) just breaks my heart.

Forget about Bambi’s mom dying. This is the new saddest thing ever.

Call of ‘Doody’

One of the arcade games Wreck-It Ralph invades is Hero’s Duty, a clear homage to modern shooters like Call of Duty and Halo. Upon hearing this, Sarah Silverman’s character can’t help but make a joke about the word “doody,” a mockery I’m sure we’re all heard made at Call of Duty’s expense before.

It’s Sonic!

Disney previously announced that Sonic the Hedgehog would make an appearance in Wreck-It Ralph, but this new trailer gives us our first glimpse of the blue blur in the movie. Let’s hope that it does a better job of not ruining him than Sega.

You can find plenty more fun gaming tributes and cameos in the full trailer, posted below. Disney releases Wreck-It Ralph in theaters on November 2.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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As August slowly creeps along, we find ourselves coming closer to the end of summer. You could spend your last sunny days outside enjoying the fleeting moments of warm afternoons with leaf-covered trees gently swaying in the wind. Or you could spend them inside looking at this gallery of gaming-themed sand sculptures!

And don’t pull an Anakin Skywalker and tell me how much you hate sand! I know you don’t despise it more than having to go outside, you stereotypical gamers you. And I say that with the greatest level of endearment.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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If you’re like me, you’re constantly looking for top-notch art to use as the background image for your iPhone (or iPod Touch). Well, Reddit user LeapYourBar recently created a set of stunning wallpapers based on some of the most iconic characters in gaming, such as Mario, Sonic, Mega Man, and Donkey Kong. These pictures use a grungy, simple design, but their minimalist look add a certain amount of class to your phone.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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The universe is innately captivating — even my son at the young age of 2-and-a-half marvels at the rocket ship decals, strung-up planets, and stars projected on his ceiling.

Last weekend, I visited Baltimore City’s long running and free Artscape festival that — you guessed it — showcases the passion of the area’s local, burgeoning creative community. This year, I saw the Gamescape exhibit, and within I witnessed a group of talented individuals likewise fascinated with galaxies, black holes, and exploding stars…and all the concepts they represent: the awe of discovery and the expanse of new, unexplored frontiers. In space, anything seems possible.

I walked through the double doors leading into the Bunting Center, a brick building on the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) campus. Just inside hustled a small group of local programmers, artists, and students who were setting up widescreen televisions, computers, and other equipment.

Pac-Man ghosts and Mega Man characters decorated the walls. An arcade room, sporting Mortal Kombat, Ikari Warriors III, and Bad Dudes vs. Dragon Ninja (among other games) and allowing  just enough space for a half-dozen cabinets, lay hidden through an open archway. The cozy area provided for Gamescape had a “just thrown together” vibe; it lacked the bombastic marketing campaigns that characterize big video game conventions like Los Angeles’ Electronic Entertainment Expo.

I sat down to an inviting PlayStation 3 controller hooked up to a PC running the game Protostar by indie developer Bitty Bash. “Are you guys showing stuff yet?” I asked. I’d arrived early. Programmer Paolo Munoz responded enthusiastically, “Yes!” Protostar is a Galaga-type, top-down scrolling shooter set in outer space.

As I dodged enemy bullets and returned fire, Munoz explained to me that his kids had inspired him to make a game. At 7 and 4, they were just getting into titles like LittleBigPlanet and Mario Galaxy, and he wanted to create something they could all play together.

Using free tools from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology called Flash Develop, Munoz began building. “You can make a game, too,” with such things, he told me. Initially, his scope for Protostar was small, but that all changed when he brought in Scott Brown to create pixel graphics. Brown would come up with cool and interesting enemy designs, and Munoz then felt compelled to implement them into the game. With Jonathan Stuart rounding out the team as music composer and background artist, they completed a full-fledged title with a lengthy mission-based campaign.

Protostar is particularly traditional, but Munoz didn’t seem to mind. “You don’t have to be original to make something new,” he told me. “You’ll make something from the heart.” Heart was definitely on display, as I saw configurable ship systems (armor, shields, engines, blasters, launchers, and missiles) that function as a sort of self-directed, granular difficulty setting and missions that change when playing through a second time, keeping each experience fresh and encouraging multiple runs.

From this first 2D shooter, I made my way to the next, a game called Sinc by indie studio Seven Hills Games. Programmer and designer Greg Aring, who lives just outside the city in the Baltimore suburb of Catonsville, has taken the genre in a different direction by blending music with the standard gameplay and implementing the now common twin-stick shooter control scheme to the side-scroller.

Sinc is set in a post-Earth universe where you take control of the lone human left after an alien invasion of the planet. The twist is that all the world-destroying mayhem happened while you were away on a terraforming mission on Mars. The radio uplink back to Earth no longer transmits a reply. You can spend your time on the red surface looking at rocks, and if that sounds boring, it’s intentional. Aring even considered implementing a mode where you’d watch bacteria cultures grow…in real-time.

The meat of Sinc exists inside a hyper-sleep chamber where you spend most of your time. Since terraforming takes millions of years, it’s the only way to accomplish the job. But in there, your dreams will haunt you in the form of fast-paced shooter action.

Each dream is a journey to another distant planet in the Milky Way, and in your little space explorer, you’ll blast incoming enemies and eventually face a boss encounter. Aring told me that he considered making each level last the same amount of time that light would take to move between each location, but some stages became too long (Mars to Jupiter, for instance, would have been almost a half hour).

The game populates enemies onscreen based on the soundtrack playing in the background, and each trip features rows of digital decibel-level meters on the edges of the screen that shrink and grow with the music. The blend of sound and gameplay creates a captivating experience, and Aring has included a separate mode where you can just play the shooting portion of Sinc. There, you’ll collect “beats” that simultaneously change the pulsating soundtrack and create new challenges.

All of the music in Sinc comes courtesy of Zach Murphy and his band The Wet Dreams, which has a techno vibe that transcends into roaring cacophony as you approach the end of each stage. Boss encounters play to decidedly ominous undertones.

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The arcade is dead. You already knew that, but that industry’s coffin is about to get another nail. The cathode-ray-tube technology that powered the monitors for nearly every classic arcade game in the twentieth century is defunct. Sony, Samsung, and others have left it behind for skinnier and more lucrative LCDs and plasmas, and the CRTs that are left are about to sell out.

The current stock of new 29-inch CRT monitors is dwindling. Online arcade cabinet and parts supplier Dream Arcades has fewer than 30 of those large displays sitting on its shelves. When it sells out of the current inventory, it will never get another shipment in that size again.

“We’ve secured enough [of the other sizes] to get us all the way through next year,” says Michael Ware, founder of Dream Arcades. “After that, that’s it.”

The future of arcade-cabinet restoration is looking bleak.

“The old arcade games are like aging people,” says Walter Day, founder of high-score-keeping site Twin Galaxies. “They have old livers and aging kidneys. There will come a day when very few arcade cabinets have original components. Time will wear them out.”

To be clear, it’s not that games like Donkey Kong or Pac-Man will suddenly become unplayable. The games can run on newer LCD screens, but they may not look as the developers intended.

“It’s just not gonna feel as nostalgic,” Ware tells GamesBeat when we asked him about the problems with the modern display technology. “The pixels will be sharper on an LCD, but they may not be 100 percent accurate. Colors won’t be quite as vibrant.” Additionally, Ware explained that the refresh rate on an LCD may not play well with an old game’s code that is expecting a much more responsive CRT monitor. It could cause unsightly screen tearing that looks like one half of the screen is occasionally redrawing before the other.

When the last major manufacturer stopped making CRTs, they sold the manufacturing equipment to a Chinese company that couldn’t properly reproduce the winding procedure. “Turns out that’s a semi-manual process,” says Ware. “You have to wind the CRT bulbs by hand, so they stopped making them. I have an engineer on staff that couldn’t do it. I couldn’t do it. It’s almost an art form.”

Winding together a CRT tube with its electron gun (the two major components in a CRT) requires a delicate touch. It’s a two-part, by-hand procedure that begins with the laborer painting the inside of the tube as it spins on a centrifuge. The worker must use a dipstick-like brush to coat the depths of the monitor with a conductive substance. Then he must merge the glass of the bulb and the electron gun under a flame that burns at 400 degrees celsius. Any debris or dust that gets into the unit at that point will shorten the display’s life expectancy.

Because the process is so difficult, it’s unlikely that anyone will pick up the mantel just to serve a small community of classic-arcade enthusiasts. More likely, niche repair companies will begin charging more and more money to fix the older CRT bulbs.

We’re looking at a situation where playing Donkey Kong in the way that its creator intended is reserved only for the most dedicated collector. It will be prohibitively expensive to recreate that experience.

“I have a feeling that — y’know how there are those guys doing pinball repair on the side — there will probably be some guy you can send your monitor to and have him rewind the bulb,” says Ware. “I think it’s going to be really expensive.” A CRT tube is very heavy, so shipping costs alone would be costly. “Right now, I don’t know of anyone who does [the winding].”

To fill the void, Day suggests that new companies will emerge to reproduce those old machines using only modern-day technology. An LCD screen connected to a PC running a piece of software that approximates the original experience will be adequate for most people.

“At that time, [exactly restoring the original units] may become a high-end designer kind of gift that is only pursued by the wealthy,” says Day. “In the very far future, the value of an authentic 1980s arcade game may become so high, that the monetary value will be significant, and all the private sellers might sell their holdings to [museums], which are better equipped to preserve them properly.”

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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You might have seen this collection of movie poster clichés earlier this year (courtesy of French blogger Christophe Courtois). It shouldn’t surprise you that video game box art has its own recurring visual motifs, and I’ve collected 11 of them here.

For simplicity’s sake, I’ve mostly limited this to titles from the current generation of hardware (Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and Wii). Otherwise, we’d be here all day.

Face-to-face

TV screenwriter Eddy Canfor-Dumas says, “Conflict is drama.” And he would know because he wrote Supervolcano.

Even non-narrative games like Pac-Man center around two forces in opposition, and the designers of game covers can express this in any number of ways. You can’t beat the classics, however, and sometimes it’s enough to just have two characters demonstrating their antipathy by getting into one another’s face.

Notable offender: Developer/Publisher Rockstar’s Bully: Scholarship Edition mixes up the formula with a difference in height between the two people staring each other down.

Guns pointed up

Modern video games are just straight-up full of guns, so it makes sense that many covers focus on their characters’ relationship to their hardware. It’s hard to show people holding guns without making them look too threatening, however, so the workaround is apparently to show them casually pointing their weapon into the air.

Notable offender: See that woman on the box for House of the Dead: Overkill’s Extended Cut? She’s pointing two guns up.

In the shadows

In this age of gritty reboots and cynicism, some video games have gotten pretty dark, and their covers reflect this in the most literal way possible. Apparently, the quickest way to convey to a prospective player that your game is for-reals serious is to design a cover in which your hero glowers in a poorly lit room.

Notable offender: Limbo’s and Alan Wake’s shadow-intensive covers make sense, considering the darkness inherent in their design. But why does a boxing game like Electronic Arts’ Fight Night: Champion need to go all monochromatic?

Screaming

Good visual art expresses emotion, and I can’t think of a quicker way to do so than to just have a picture of a person screaming.

Screaming probably appears on so many game covers because it can mean so many things, like anger, pain, fear, or aggression. But mostly, it gets us a bunch of pictures of people with their mouths open.

Notable offender: Dead Space: Extraction’s screaming heroine was so memorable that gaming blog Joystiq devoted an entire day to sneaking her into every image they posted on its site.

Explosion in the background

A game’s box is often the first impression a title makes on us, and it only has a few seconds to let us know that its contents are fun and exciting. Some can accomplish this with brand recognition and scantily clad warrior princesses, but it never hurts to goose up the excitement a little.

And in many cases, the shortest route to excitement is blowing some shit up.

Notable offender: Developer Infinity Ward’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 flips the script by featuring the only non-orange explosion in this image.

Face in your face

Some games discard the old reliable guns and explosions in favor of something a little more character-focused…and nothing focuses more on a character than an extreme closeup of their face.

Notable offenders: Super Meat Boy, SpongeBob Squarepants, Billy the Puppet from Saw, and God of War III’s Kratos are so in-your-face that their covers don’t have room for anything else.

From the waist up

If all those faces in your face made you uncomfortable, this batch of game art will be a little easier on your territorial bubble. It may not help that so many of the people on these games appear to be threatening you, though.

Notable offenders: This may be the preferred format for superhero games. Wolverine, Spider-Man, Batman, Thor, and Green Lantern all appear from the waist up.

“Look at my back”

Some characters are just rude. Here we are, just trying to pick out a game, and they can’t even be bothered to face us. You can’t take it personally all the time; occasionally, the subjects have their hands full with some kind of giant monster or an explosion. But others couldn’t care less and look back over their shoulders as if asking if we like the view.

Notable offender: Developer Capcom’s Devil May Cry 4 manages to sneak in a back shot of series hero Dante, who appears behind Nero, the game’s new character. Nero, for his part, appears from the waist up (see above).

3 people in a row

Three, as we know, is a magic number, which is probably why so many game boxes feature three characters standing in a row. Some of them mix it up by just putting three giant heads or torsos in the sky, but they’re not fooling anyone.

Notable offender: Publisher Sony’s PlayStation Move Heroes gets a special mention because it has not one, but two sets of three characters arranged in a row.

Hero in the middle

Main characters are at the center of the action, so why not get superliteral and put them in the center of the cover? Also, make sure it’s just them, so nobody is confused over who the game is about.

Notable offenders: War games like the Call of Duty and Battlefield franchises all favor this look.

The White Void

A lot of cover artists are into minimalism. That’s what I tell myself, anyway; the other possibility is that the designers of these covers just forgot to add a background.

Notable offenders: It’s easier to name platforms and companies for this one than specific games. Wii titles, Electronic Arts’ sports franchises, and Red Faction: Armageddon publisher THQ love the White Void.

In conclusion

If you’ve been looking closely throughout this article, you might have seen a few games pop up in more than one category. One title in particular contains four of the elements I’ve discussed here, and for that, I am declaring it the Ultimate Cliche Box Art.

Cover tropes: This is your king.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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If you follow VentureBeat but don’t regularly check our GamesBeat site, here’s a list of the best games stories we ran over the last seven days that you may have missed.

This week, Microsoft wanted to purge the Internet after several Xbox 720 details leaked, game designer/director Hideo Kojima said he’s not finished with Metal Gear Solid, and Nintendo showed off the 3DS XL handheld.

We also ran reviews for Quantum Conundrum and the Nabi 2 tablet.

GamesBeat:

The DeanBeat: Will your game company survive the zombie apocalypse?

GamesBeat’s Top 10 Gaming Prequels

First U.S. Pokemon Black 2 and White 2 teaser trailer

Tekken development team to make next Super Smash Bros.

Artists use chalk to bring games to life…or sell pizza (gallery)

Turkish gaming climbs to $450 million in 2012 (infographic)

NaturalMotion raises $11 million to set up U.S. headquarters, develop high-end social mobile games

Nabi 2 tablet blends gamification with parenting (review)

Quantum Conundrum is an unbalanced measure of brilliance and flaws (review)

Metal Gear Solid creator Hideo Kojima “not yet finished” with Solid Snake

Windows Phone 8 gets a strong gaming push with native code and deep ties to Windows 8

WWE ’13 continues 25-year tradition of Mike Tyson punching you in the face

Why Sony thinks the PlayStation Vita has an advantage over the Wii U

Zynga focuses on simplicity with its latest social game, Ruby Blast

Australia lifts ban on mature games

Man turns an NES into the ultimate Nintendo-emulating machine (gallery)

Unity Technologies looks to rule Linux and mobile gaming with Unity 4

Indie first-person shooter Receiver brings robots, mystery, and one complicated pistol

Sony’s free-to-play online shooter Planetside 2 will pack 2,000 players in an arena (interview)

Civilization V: Gods and Kings can’t fix what is fundamentally flawed (review)

See live demos of Black Ops II, Halo 4, and more from Jimmy Fallon’s gaming week

VentureBeat:

Nintendo 3DS XL revealed, does not have second analog stick

Roadhouse buys social/mobile game maker The Embassy Interactive

Emota’s teddy bears can send hugs over the internet

Microsoft wants leaked Xbox 720 doc erased from existence

Redbox reveals game rental stats and trends (exclusive infographic)

7 awesomely geeky video game marriage proposals

App Annie launches analytics for Google Play Android apps

Turn your iOS device into a musical instrument for free with Ocarina 2

China’s Tencent nabs a minority stake in Epic Games

Kabam acquires indie maker of Realm of the Mad God web game (exclusive)

Bunchball launches 10 apps to quickly “gamify” websites and enterprises

Leaked Microsoft document details $299 Xbox 720 in 2013, Kinect glasses, OnLive acquisition

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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When I played with chalk as a kid, I was happy to just make a circle, or if I was feeling especially creative, a triangle. Luckily, people far more talented than me have taken the colorful sticks and used them to create impressive works of gaming-themed art.

The gallery below features characters and worlds from some of the most popular video games (including titles from Nintendo’s noteworthy The Legend of Zelda series, the physics-breaking Portal, and the block-falling puzzler Tetris) brought to life thanks to the power of chalk.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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