Thinking Outside the Box

Catherine’s Blog, Supplemental

In lieu of posting some completely inane musing, as I usually do, I have something kind of useful for once. And for my friends who stop by this blog out of kindness, and not out of any particular love of, or even interest in, gaming, maybe this will be interesting for them, since it applies to movies and music as well as games.

Do not come to expect this diversity from my writing! This could be a fatal mistake!

Gaming is not a cheap hobby, but I try to make it as cheap as possible by buying used whenever I can. E-Bay and Gamestop are premium outlets for keeping costs down. Gamestop is ideal for anything from the current or previous generation of consoles (e.g., Wii, PS3, X-Box 360, GCN, PS2, and X-Box games). A little googling can usually turn up Gamestop coupon codes for 15% off used games or free shipping for even more savings. For older titles or rare titles, E-Bay is good. No matter how old or obscure a game is, someone, somewhere, is probably trying to unload it. Amazon.com's Z-Shops are even a little preferable, for me, for this purpose, since you can load up on games from different sellers and then pay all at once with a credit card. However, Amazon.com can't match E-Bay's selection.

In any CASE, a little sleuthing can save a gamer big bucks over time if he or she consistently seeks out savings by buying used whenever feasible. There is, however, one big drawback to buying used. Specifically, that used games don't always come in their original case.

I, for one, am slightly neurotic about the boxes that my games and movies are in. I don't like games that originally came in a DVD-size keep case to be stored in a jewel case, or vice versa. And I especially hate the little cardboard or paper sleeve that they sometimes come in---sometimes even when they are new (Wii Sports, I mean you)! Maybe others are less concerned about this aesthetic than me; but I really want to see my games, CDs, and movies lined up, spines out, in uniform packaging with appropriate spine art on display. And when a guest is perusing my library, I want them to be able to read the package description of a movie or game, should they so desire.

In practical terms, I recently ordered Tales of Symphonia for the GCN, used, and it arrived in a DVD keep case with no box art. In searching for a remedy, a little research turned up this gem of a site: CDCovers.cc.

This website hosts a huge archive of cover art for various media including VHS, DVD, video games of several varieties, and CDs. You can search by title or browse by section and download any artwork you're missing, adjust the size, and then print it out, trim it down, and place it inside the sleeve of any keep case or jewel case. Many of the titles also have artwork for the inset as well.

I find that for a DVD or anything DVD-size, you'll want to open the artwork up in Photoshop (or whatever image editor you use) and set the height of the image to 184.15 millimeters and the PPI to 300 (ideal for printing). If you're printing the whole spread, you won't be able to print the entire thing on one 8.5 x 11 sheet of paper; I split the image into two overlapping images and printed both, and then taped them together from behind before trimming them down. On a related note, I also found a great thread at VGBoxArt that has several downloadable Photoshop templates for various game boxes (e.g., the GCN box, the PS2 box, etc.).