Custom Super Mario Advance boxart slipcovers.

[Xander]

What are different about these? Am i missing something? The art looks the same as the official covers.

Well, for starters, GBA games came in flimsy cardboard boxes that aren't useful for storage or display of games. DS games came in sweet cases that are useful for both; and most DS cases had a GBA cart slot in them! So in order to store and display GBA games in DS cases, it's necessary to make slipcover designs. The slipcovers are a different size than GBA boxart, some early slipcover designs (at The Cover Project, for example) were stretched horizontally like an old TV channel on a widescreen TV! So I remake them at a proper size. Additionally, many attempts at slipcovers use scanned GBA boxes, which tend to be grainy and not as high a quality as they could be.

When possible, I will simply recreate an official cover design but use high resolution assets. High resolution assets are sometimes difficult to find for games that are around 15 years old! Some games, like Fire Emblem: The Binding Blade were Japanese only releases, so I adapt the rectangular Japanese boxart format to the more square international format.

Another fun part is the spines. I like to make the spines for a given series similar to one another so that they look nice when lined up.

Me.