Wednesday, January 4, 2012

Nano Assault box art blunder?

As many of you know, Christmas 2011 was the day I joined the ranks of those who live in the third dimension ... of gaming! Or something... basically, it's when I got a 3DS. One of the games I had been most interested in was the alarmingly budget-friendly ($20!) Nano Assault.

I had dabbled in Nanostray 1 and 2 for the DS. But the third installment in the series, Nano Assault, really looked like the shmup fix I'd been jonesing for. After picking up the game and savoring its gorgeous visuals and glorious shmuppy-good gameplay, I turned to admiring its snazzy box art when I realized.... the ship is completely backwards!

Observe...



If you look at the in-game ship, the rounded surface is the front and the back has several metallic pillars (shafts?) sticking out - one from the center and then one on each diagonal corner. The center pillar emits propulsion exhaust to propel the ship forward while the other pillars act as back-swept wings of sorts.

However, the box art seems to have a trail of propulsion exhaust bending from around the alien cell in the background to the rounded surface of the ship. Meanwhile, laser blasts are firing from the metallic pillars and culminate in some kind of explosion. Seems like if I were designing a (nanoscopic) fighter jet I would put the weapons facing forward, wouldn't you? This all implies a forward-swept design in the wings and thus that the layout of the ship is entirely backwards!

So what's the deal? Am I crazy or is this an honest to goodness gaff? How could such a major error make it to the box art's final design? Who could be responsible?

What do you think?


2 comments:

Mop_it_up said...

I think that boxes are produced by the marketing department, which means it was made by someone who didn't make or play the game itself. They were probably shown a few screenshots or a short video of the game and given a few days to create the box art.

Rocker said...

yeah haha. thats a pretty bad blunder