I concede, that is definitely the box to rule all boxes. Totally cheating though Gareth bringing a multigame box to a single game(+expansions) box fight Edit: If you've got some extra pictures of it, put some up I'm rather intrigued by the box and all it's boxy goodness.
The last game I got that echoed the game boxes of old was The Witcher 2 Premium Edition. The actual last big box game I bought was probably Diablo2. That was about the time that they started fazing out the boxes in favor of the plastic things we have or had until recently. When the Lord of Destruction expansion came out for it it was in the plastic dvd cases that we all know.
Didn't big boxes disappear because of an EU ruling that said that the size of a retail box had to reflect the size of its contents? I used to have a load of Infocom games at one point - I remember the amount of stuff you used to get with them was massive - manuals, maps, books. Ah, nostalgia
I forgot to mention I still have most of my big box games for my Amiga 1200. They are piled up in my wardrobe. I can agree with other comments that games just don't have that sense of wonder anymore when you open them. Digital is convenient. So much so that even a lover of real material versions such as myself, has not bought a game that was not digital since the end of 2011. (DX:HR & SW:TOR)
I see you've played knifey-spoony before! Terribly, terribly busy at the moment, but managed to take a shot of the box: And the pewter Cyberdemon figure: I'll see if I can't shoot the other bits in the coming weeks.
This is a personal favourite of the few I have near mint (not my image). Not a great game, but it comes with a very Douglas Adams-y in flight magazine
When I was younger I would like big manuals, or at least ones with story in them. Now I'm older and I would much rather be playing the game. Any detailed backstory can come in a book or another game. Excluding backstory, manuals are horrible at stating the obvious and tautology. Having entire sections on how to pause a game and that 'resume game' is what you select when you want to resume the game. Big boxes take too much space. I'm fine with physical games, but I'm glad there is digital. I don't have to go to the nearest shop to get a game, which used to be a game-specific retailer and could be miles away, or a horrendously priced store like HMV or Argos, before the big food shops (Tesco, Sainsbury, Asda etc.) started really selling them (and, hilariously, at a far more competitive price than the game retailer, Game). And now I can buy online without waiting 2-3 days for the post. But I would trade all that in to take away the control the publishers have over digital games. They can press the button any time and erase the game from existence, or just pretend it never existed (EA). We have emulation, but consoles get more sophiticated and, whether it's 10 years, 100 years or 1000 years from now, the internet will be fully regulated and piracy and 'piracy', while maybe not completely dead, will be easily punishable by the law and 'black market games' will be a huge risk.
I think its a bit like the love you (or certainly I felt) towards owning a newly released record where the sleeve work and packaging felt just as important as the music inside (looking at you here Iron Maiden). Still remember spending ages looking at the sleeves from my Dad's ELO and Stones LPs. I used to love the box art from developers such as Psygnosis, but I think that imagery was important as it fired the imagination regards what you were playing (when did the game ever resemble the box art!). It was part of the hard sell. Early flight sims used to have manuals the size of a novel but it was the only resource you could get to learn the game. Combine that with later games coming on a shed load of discs you needed a big box! Now with downloadable manuals off the internet, graphics which leave nothing to the imagination and rapid downloads and storage they just aren't needed anymore. Fondly remembered but I will take todays games with a lack of boxes over them anytime. (I'm currently prepairing a speech for my 10 year old along the lines of "SSD?!? Only computer storage I had as a child was my bedroom cupboard. And that could only hold 10 games because of the box sizes. And I had to type Run"Disk just to get them to load. Or I had to wait 10 minutes for the tape to run the loading screen! Bah. Pesky kids have never had it so good!)
I don't miss the silly over-sized boxes that hold a thin paper manual and a CD (or a half dozen 3.5" floppies). I still have a few classics stored away in the loft - Amiga: Monkey Island Simon the Sorcerer PC: TIE Fighter Wing Commander Day of the Tentacle To name a few. The rest were binned a long time ago.
D'you know what used to drive me nuts when manuals were still a thing? Console game manuals which had a picture of the controller with call-outs to each button, but instead of reading "Punch," "Kick," "Hyperdrive," the call-outs just said "X button," "Y button," "A button." The actual control reference was in a table spread over at least two pages - not even opposing pages, but laid out so you had to turn the page over to see the other half of the table - which was completely useless for quick reference. *So many* games did that. Nuts. Like this, from Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance for the Xbox. A round of applause for keeping it to one page, at least, but minus several points for the tiny near-unreadable controller diagram.
If you know of a way of getting them to run on a current system (and no, VMs don't work) then I'd be slightly cheerful as I still have mine sat here and would love to play them again. Then again, I could always just stick 98 on the Duron 900 box as it ran them a treat way back when... Well before digital distribution was viable I loved big box games as the manuals and fluff they came with gave me something to read on the way home The Heavy Gear games were great for that but my favourite was Mechwarrior 2 (DOS version, of course) as that was the only thing I was after and there was a bit of a wait for the train home. I read the manual cover to cover several times before I got home and had several omni mech builds planned out on the journey (Vulture medium laser build with enough heat sinks to repeatedly alpha strike the lot or chain fire continuously for minutes being my personal best )
^^Would love to get them running again. Hopefully GoG will pick them up at some point. MW2? It was all about the PPCs! 6 at once - *whoosh* Warning! Shut down imminent! Enemy mech destroyed!
My 'big box' games. I shudder to think what my Steam/GOG/Origin games would look like in big box form, I would probably need my own warehouse to store them.
Likewise, need to check if they have a "Please can we have...?" thread on their forums. Nah mate, 3 ER PPCs and the heat sinks for chain fire if you're going down that route - one shot kills were fine when there was only one enemy. You needed to be able to kill lots of enemies so sustained fire was the kiddy. 60-65 tonners were my favourite balance of speed and firepower and ridiculously flexible. The default vulture build only needed a few tweaks to be far more effective though - ER large lasers on each arm instead of the pulse, ditch the mediums and stock up on double heatsinks. Aw yeah!
