Split-Screen :: The Game-Geek’s Daily Read

by gSathe

Okay, so it’s been a week already, and most of you would have heard about the Okami Wii cover mix up and the quick fix solution that followed. For those of you who hadn’t been listening (why? why why why?) here’s the short form text: The box art of Capcom’s upcoming game Okami for the Wii had been cribbed from the IGN website. Maybe whichever designer they’d hired didn’t want to take the time of going through his own client for promotional images and just Googled for the first file he could find. Whatever the case though, Capcom has moved quickly to fix things, by offering whole new covers and artwork for us, the victims.

But then poking through my DS titles I hit upon Apollo Justice and out of random curiosity, and the fact that there had been no electricity for a while and so I couldn’t play anything, not even the DS which had been discharged through the day, I pulled out the instruction booklet.

That’s when I realised that the problem wasn’t just with one game but with the whole of Capcom’s art department, maybe even the whole gaming industry! Take a look at your instruction booklets people! The images in this one, as you can see below, have been taken from none other than Gamespot!

In other words, the exact same publicity image that the company has already sent out earlier, gets recycled, though this happens often. What usually happens though, is that you use the same image from your own hard disc! Not crib it off the first webpage you find using Google!

Capcom is one of the biggest game distributors. They’re actively chasing the western market and the sensibilities expressed in their games these days shows it. They’re making a tonne of money this way too, and it’s just a little strange that the millions they earn don’t filter down at all to the art department. Instead we have wholesale cutting and pasting of materials from the internet, to a degree which I last saw when I was in college.