Xbox Lies, Official Boxart for Unofficial Xbox Games Options

[l11l1VeNoM1l11l]

It's been a while since I actually contributed anything to the scene. I've scrapped all of my XBMC projects. The iBox skin for PMIII that I was working on was an idea that just faded in the abyss. A Mac OSX skin came out far before I was finished with mine, and as much as I liked it, I was a little discouraged. Seemed like there were too many people with the same idea and xTV turned out FAR superior to my design. Another project I was working on was getting 3D coverflow to work in the videos and programs sections of PMIII. I accomplished it, but in a 2008 version of XBMC. Now that both the skin and the entire program were updated, my code stopped working as well as it used to and I'm too lazy to figure out why.

Anyway, after playing Hyper Eye's awesome port of Odamex, I wanted to make box art for it. It immediately dawned on me that there isn't any "official" boxart for ANY of the homebrew games out there. I checked out the Xbox homebrew section on xboxisozone.com and saw that some people have actually made a few here and there, but none of them are overly appealing. So, I'm making my own in a series called Xbox LIES. I hope you like them. So far I have finished box fronts for Doom (Odamex), Quake and Quake II. The fronts are mainly intended for Xbox Media Center's programs menu. It's very difficult to find large enough scans of the original PC artwork and even more difficult to find any kind of images related to homebrew games made exclusively for the Xbox. I'm doing what I can to fill in the gaps, but I can't promise anything at a high enough resolution to make an actual print out of. I'm going to be uploading the largest finished fronts for now, but when I have all of the fronts finished I will launch a .rar file with all of them included as default.tbn files, all at the same resolution.

I'm totally open for criticism and please feel free to upload your own work. If you can forward any rare images related to Xbox homebrew, I'd be extremely appreciative. Thanks and enjoy!

These are the ones that I have finished so far. I created alternate boxes for Quake and Quake II to modernize them a bit. I had nothing to do with the artwork...just spent hours searching for images online. The original Quake II box was really hard to make considering all of the scans I could find online were total crap. Next comes Quake III Arena, but I'm having trouble finding decent images for that too. Not sure where to go with it, but I'll come up with something by tomorrow. Here you go:

[cbagy]

Should be a few HomeBrew/Ports 3d boxart on the Xtras FTP somewhere

[l11l1VeNoM1l11l]

Should be a few HomeBrew/Ports 3d boxart on the Xtras FTP somewhere

I've never even been there until you mentioned it. I'm happy I couldn't find any though, lol. Thought I might have to scrap another idea there for a second. Awesome site though, I can't believe I never bothered checking it out before. I know you can enable the Madmab emulator editions to play videos and scroll boxart and everything, but how do you get XBMC to show fanart and play trailers of Xbox games? I've been way out of the loop lately.

[cbagy]

lol, yeah, just remembered i may have deleted the homebrew/ports 3d boxes, can't remember.
XBMC unfortunately doesn't do the video preview thing (yet).

[ultimate509]

I Like the artwork you chose for the covers...be sure you release your psd file with the xbox bar and that blue lies bar setup for someone to add to your idea once your done,that way someone can fill in the gaps.Oh and about fanart for xbox games its possible via xbmc, but I think you need certain skins, just check out this site and ask there.
http://www.xbmc4xbox.org/forum/

[guybird]

I am actually VERY glad to hear you are doing this, as you've mentioned, there are various ones here and there floating around, but not a consistent set for all titles. The main reason I want to see a complete set done in your style, is so I can make a fanart background to match what I have for my emulators and xbox game genre's. I would also like to see the same thing done for the popular emulators, so I could do the same for the generic "Emulators" fanart. It would have to be done to at least 15 systems to look decent, but definitely looks best when you have 24+. It would also be great to have fanart for each homebrew as well, although this will probably be the most difficult to accomplish. I've been making my fanart 1080i compatible, but finding hires images like that are far and few between. Maybe patching together a bunch of in game screencaps and then applying my cylindrical effect to them would work? Or at the very least maybe we could just display the game's logo as big as we can on a black background? In any case, it would be nice if a group of us could pool our resources to do something like this.

Below is an example of my fanart layouts as it looks with my transparent icons as well as my style for homebrew apps. Note that I really like your icons, but personally I'm going with the transparent look in order to show off the fanart more than anything, but I really want your icons for the fanart layout (and obviously there's probably lots of people out there that would prefer just your icons as is). I'll have to make a couple of mockups for Doom to see what might be the best way to do the fanart for it.




Sorry to threadjack, but I figured for those of us out there that work on icons, this might be a way to get everyone on the same page.

[l11l1VeNoM1l11l]

That looks really cool. I'm going to have to download the latest version of XBMC for Xbox and tinker around with the new menus. I'm still using a 2008 build. Seems like every time I try to upgrade, something has been removed that I use frequently...so I'm probably going to stick with my build, but use the newer one just to play around with the game fan art. I can't really help you with HD images, though. I still only have an SD-TV :-(

That's the only thing bugging me about making box fronts for these games - there simply aren't enough high-res images online. It's killin' me, man. I finished 4 more boxes today that I'll have to upload once I get back on my laptop.

I absolutely freaking LOVE that transparent DOOM png. Must have taken hours to cut all of that out. I will definitely find use for that thing myself, even if it's just used as an icon on my computer. Thanks for uploading it!

By the way, what skin is that screenshot from?

[ultimate509]

Good Art that covers some pc ports, just crop/and add your touch where needed.
http://www.thecoverproject.net/view.php?game_id=7664
http://www.thecoverproject.net/view.php?game_id=7712
http://www.thecoverproject.net/view.php?game_id=7711
http://www.thecoverproject.net/view.php?cover_id=10675
http://www.thecoverproject.net/view.php?cover_id=11462

Ill update this post with links later if I find anymore good images/links... cya

[guybird]

Damn I thought I made my links clickable, here's my photobucket with all of my icons. Here's a similar one I just did for Duke Nukem:



I'm hardly an expert at Photoshop (pretty lousy actually) but it seems some of my recent icons (doom, duke, etc) turned out pretty good but a lot of my console icons look like shit. Hopefully someday maybe I can go back through and clean them up or something. Anyhow I'm using a pretty recent build of XBMC with "Transparency!" skin (hence why it looks good with transparent icons). Even if YOU don't have HDtv, you should still make fanart (if you ever do any) at the highest resolution possible as XBMC scales it to your current resolution. You should be able to use my fanart in 480i. I have all my icons in simplified psd's if you want/need them, I would recommend if we're going to use your "lies" layout as a standard, for you to upload that template here so we can try out some other images to make some new ones. It looks though that its not going to be as simple as "take image a, insert into template and voila!" as pc box art is all kinds of goofy shapes, its probably going to take a lot of manipulation.

Maybe if we find more sites like ulimate posted, we can find some decent images to start with and go from there. Here's a few I found:

http://www.vgboxart.com/boxes/PC/23234_duk...em_3d-print.png (go to just vgboxart.com once you're done looking at that example)
http://gaming.wikia.com/wiki/Category:PC_box_art
http://imageevent.com/gamescans

This looks to be more promising:
http://covertarget.com/s2.php?search=quake...amp;sid=5368349

[l11l1VeNoM1l11l]

Ultimate, thanks for the links. I'm definitely going to work with them. I didn't know about that site either! After browsing through RX's site and that one, I'm both appalled and thrilled that no official Xbox Homebrew boxart actually exists. I do have some questions:

A.) When was Ultima VII ported to Xbox?
B.) Were Descent 2 and 3 ported, or just the first one?

And I will gladly upload the templates for the box top. Here are the templates I use: XBOX LIES Templates

Edit: I'm afraid you'll see up close that the photoshop work isn't done extremely well. When I changed the color from orange to blue everything got very distorted, so I smoothed it out as well as I could. I don't think anyone will be viewing the boxes at full resolution (their mainly intended as icons), so I don't think it's a huge deal). If anyone wants to improve it, please feel free.

I finished working on these today, but I feel the need to update the Quake III one after seeing the high-res boxes on thecoverproject.com.





AVP's boxart has already been done, I simply wanted to sharpen it and add the lies top. Same goes for Asterix, which is just an OpenBOR homebrew. I'm going to work more on the Quake III boxes right now.

This post has been edited by l11l1VeNoM1l11l: Oct 30 2010, 03:16 AM

[ultimate509]

A.) When was Ultima VII ported to Xbox?

(Exult/Ultima VII - The Black Gate/Ultima VII Part 2 Serpent Isle)
This is what I have on my xbox got it from the Rx website, just become a member to see the download area, check out he homebrew download area Exult is there....

B.) Were Descent 2 and 3 ported, or just the first one?

I think just I & II were ported together meaning you load up Decent and you can play I/II i may be wrong , ha I just linked you to the cover art of part III so you could use the image of the space ship...

[guybird]

Yeah when you start looking into some of these "ports" you'll find a lot of them are actually things like Dosxbox setup to run just one game, and other weird scenarios. Looks like Decent 1 & 2 are covered in the port, dunno about 3. Have no clue about Ultima, didn't even realize it was ported (although its working via Dosxbox).

http://www.ressurectionxtras.net/forum/dm_...howcat.php?id=2

Not a comprehensive list, but covers the basics.

[l11l1VeNoM1l11l]

Tell me about it, Guybird. Most of the images I'm finding are requiring a ton of work just to make fit the DVD case size. God, I'm in awe of those icons you're making, though. I always found it funny how Duke Nukem 3D's boxart was very similar to Doom's. Epic dude, standing upon a mound, firing downward...yeah...good ol' pseudo 3D FPS.

Anyway, sites like the ones you guys are posting are perfect for getting this job done. I'm trying my hardest to work right now, but I keep getting distracted because my girlfriend is watching the Halloween episodes of our favorite TV shows...aaaaaaaaaaand I can't look away.

[l11l1VeNoM1l11l]

Myah...I'm so distracted right now. Every time I get done posting I see that you guys already post replies to my last one. As far as the games that are basically .cut files to games in emulators (like the DOS ones), I won't be making boxart for them. Only the games that are actually ported to Xbox and the "sub-versions" of OpenBOR and xMugen.

However I did make this. It's not an unofficial port, I just felt the need to make a box reminiscent to the Saturn version, considering the Xbox cover didn't include a top at all and I use the Dead or Alive Ultimate box set cover as my DOA 2 Ultimate cover.

[l11l1VeNoM1l11l]

Okay, it's getting late so I'm calling it a night. Here is the updated Quake 3 front, a new (smaller) Quake 3 front, and the Heretic front.