TMNT IV - Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles IV: Turtles in Time - Custom Album Art Covers (SNES and Arcade Versions)

Well, it's been a little while since I uploaded a TMNT album cover, but since I've now uploaded TMNT 1, 2, and 3 I figured it's only be appropriate that I uploaded the covers for the fourth game, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles IV: Turtles in Time. I've got a cover based on the arcade flyer, as well as some covers based on the SNES cover, as well as different variations for each. Choose whichever you think works best.

Arcade Version with "Original Soundtrack" text

Arcade Version, Clean

SNES Version 1, Clean

SNES Version 1 with "Original Soundtrack at the bottom

SNES Version 1 with "Original Soundtrack" Centered

SNES Version 2 with Konami logo and "Original Soundtrack" text

SNES Version 2 with Konami logo

SNES Version 2 with "Original Soundtrack" text

SNES Version 2, Clean

Tetris 2 Super Nintendo [SNES] - Custom Album Art Cover

Well, I had to do a little bit of cleanup & color correction on this one, matching up two different scans of the box, one of them being a higher-quality "Player's Choice" version, the other being the standard version, but not quite as high quality.

The end result came out pretty nice, I think. Here's two different versions, one with the "Super Nintendo" logo, one without it. I also made a sqaure-formatted back cover, although... it's just the same text that was on the original box. I was debating adding a track listing, but decided against it.

DuckTales NES Original Soundtrack Custom Album Cover Art

So, here's an interesting one. Much like the custom cover I did for Doom, this is a box that already had a border, and would be very easy for me to add color onto the sides of it and get it into a square, 1:1 format. However, if you remember, the original box has a yellow stripe in the bottom left corner advertising $10 off other Capcom games.
If you don't remember, check out one of the source images I used for this project: http://media.psnstores.com/images/ducktales/boxart/2.jpg

Now, that source image was high resolution, and was a pretty nice scan. It only required minimal cleanup, and spot removal here & there... but, seeing as how that stripe would ruin things, I decided to try and clone stamp it out. However, with an island and different waves being part of the image, I found this to be somewhat difficult. That is, until I found an image from the re-mastered version of the game, which was a re-creation of the original box art.

Now, the colors for this new image were darker and since this new version is actually a re-creation of the original box art, instead of an actual scan, things didn't line up exactly. Of course, they lined up well enough for me to paste just the bottom corner in there, line it up and erase some bits so it lined up slightly better, do some color & levels adjustments, and re-create the border in that area.

That left me with this image, which I'm sharing with you all now, in-case you'd like a nice high-quality version

of the original box art.

Below, I have just one version of the soundtrack cover. I cropped it a little tighter on the top and bottom, and added an extra amount of border on the left and right sides. I also didn't bother adding the "Original Soundtrack" text anywhere, as I'm starting to feel that approach to these custom covers are somewhat tacky. Anyway, hope you guys enjoy the final result, and find it useful for your music library.

Gunstar Heroes Original Soundtrack Custom Album Cover Art

Here's another one I did for Gunstar Heroes on the Sega Genesis.

I couldn't find a clean source image without text, so instead I just found the biggest, nicest quality scan I could find:
http://www.theoldcomputer.com/game-box-art-covers/Sega/Megadrive-Genesis/G/Gunstar%20Heroes%20(4).jpg

I took that image cropped it down to a 1:1 square, and used the clone stamp in Photoshop to get rid of the red border on the left, and a little bit of the logo on the top. Then I cleaned up the levels, making the colors a bit more vibrant, filtered out a lot of the noise from the scan, making everything a bit smoother, but without losing too much quality. I think the final result came out pretty nice.

Anyway, after that I found a transparent version of the Gunstar Heroes logo at this website: http://archive.kontek.net/gunstarheroes.classicgaming.gamespy.com/art.html

I took that pdf, converted it into a high-resolution transparent png, brought that png into photoshop, and positioned it on top of the freshly cleaned up cover. I then added some "Original Soundtrack" text, like I have with other covers.

So, I've got three versions here:

Standard Version

Alternate Version (No "Original Soundtrack" text)

Clean Version

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III: The Manhatten Project Custom Album Art

Hey there! Been a while since I posted, but I figured I'd post another TMNT cover I made.
This time it's for the third NES game, The Manhatten Project.

For this one, I added a small matte border on the Edges, since any way I would try to crop the image into a square, it would just look odd, like part of it was cut off.
This way, I feel retains the feel of the original full image, while still being in a square format.

Version 1

Version 2 (No "Original Soundtrack" Text)

Here's the source file I used

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Arcade Game Custom Album Art (Arcade and NES versions)

Hey guys, well... after making a cover for the original NES turtles game, it got me thinking about the TMNT arcade game.  I figured I wanted to do an album cover for both the Arcade version and the NES version, as they both have separate soundtracks.

First up we've got a cropped version of the arcade flyer.  The highest resolution I could find of this was 850x1000, and after getting cropped, it brought it down to 850x850.

For this, I made two versions. The first with the logo and "original soundtrack" displayed.  The second only has the logo.

Since the game was never released in arcades by anybody except Konami, I figured to only create one series with the Konami logo displayed.

Version 1

Version 2

For Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Arcade Game on the NES, it was released under Konami's Ultra Games label, as well as under Konami itself in Japan. I decided to make a few different versions because of this. There's also a version with the "original Soundtrack in the corner, and some version without "original soundtrack" shown at all.  Due to not being able to find a clean version of the source image, I wasn't able to offer as much variation in the versions as I did for the custom album covers of the first Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game on the NES. However, I still think you'll be able to find one that is to your liking here.

Version 1-1

Version 1-2

Version 2-1

Version 2-2

Version 3-1

Version 3-2

Version 3-3

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (NES) Custom Album Art

Alright, here's a cover a lot of you may remember for infamously having all four of the turtles wearing red bandannas  I always thought it was pretty funny, myself.

Anyway, as much as I think the game is just mediocre, and how those underwater levels are incredibly frustrating with that unavoidable electric seaweed... I still find the music to be absolutely incredible. Like a lot of Konami's other work back then, they had very excellent chiptune composers producing tracks for their games. The composer for this game was Keizo Nakamura (Also known as Jigokuguruma Nakamura) who is known for his work with the Konami Kukeiha Club, working on soundtracks for such games as Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, and the NEC PC-Engine dating sim Tokimeki Memorial.

Enough about all that, though. We're here for the turtles! For this cover, I was lucky enough to find the source artwork (Originally illustrated by Michael Dooney) by itself in a fairly high resolution. You can find that source image here and the website it came from here.

Even though this is a Konami game... due to Nintendo's restrictions on publishers Konami had to publish it under their Ultra Games label. So, I initially decided to make two versions, one with the Ultra Games logo and one with the Konami logo. Then I also decided to make a few more versions one with the Nintendo seal of quality, and one without any logo. There's also three different versions of what I wanted to put in the bottom right corner... including one with nothing there.  So, for each logo in the bottom left, there's three different versions, and for the one without any logo in the bottom left, there's three different versions.  That means there's 12 different slight variations on this cover for you to choose from (including one that only has the turtles logo at the top).  Pick whichever version you like the most!
I've also uploaded a zip file with all of the different versions, as well as the original Photoshop document I used to edit it all together. You can find that here.

If you'd like to simply download one of the covers, I've got all of the images uploaded below. Click to view each one full-size.

Version 1-1

Version 1-2

Version 1-3

Version 2-1

Version 2-2

Version 2-3

Version 3-1

Version 3-2

Version 3-3

Version 4-1

Version 4-2

Version 4-3

1600x1600 image limit?

I've noticed that there seems to be an image size limit of 1600x1600 here on Blogger.  Specifically because that doom cover was automatically re-sized down to that from 3500x3500

I realize many people probably won't need any album art at 3500x3500 resolution... but I figure why bother making something like this a smaller resolution if you don't have to? In 20 years when we're all using 9600x5400 monitors, people will surely be clamoring for higher resolution album art.

Putting all of that aside, I'm not sure what to do about this.  I'm thinking of switching over to something like Flickr or Imgur and simply posting a link to that full resolution stuff alongside the 1600x1600 version I post here (as this is what many people probably prefer currently).

Let me know what you guys would want.

Doom: Music From the Game

I'm not sure where I got that album title from, I don't believe it was ever an official release, however... that is how the files are tagged for me.

I remember that I downloaded all of the tracks off of doomworld.com, pretty sure Bobby Prince put them up there himself, considering the descriptions included there.

Well, turns out I wasn't able to find much of any high resolution custom-made album covers. but, I did end up finding a FUCKING EXCELLENT scan.  It is literally almost as though it wasn't a scan at all, considering how perfect it is.

I honestly didn't even have to do anything except crop & re-size, this scan was so perfect.

So, without further adieu, here's a custom cover for the Doom soundtrack:

Custom Cover

Original Source

Gradius III Custom Album Cover

I know that there are official soundtracks out there for Gradius III, with official covers.  However, I haven't found any soundtracks with the SNES versions of the songs, they all collect either arranged versions or the arcade versions.

So, since I like to have album covers for everything, even ripped video game music, here's a custom cover for Gradius III.

I wasn't able to find as high resolution of a scan for this one as I did for the Zelda one, so I'm only going to be offering these in smaller resolutions.  Roughly 600x600 instead of the very large versions I had for the Link to the Past covers.

Complete Version

Clean Version

Cave Story + Soundtrack, Custom Album Covers

Hey there guys!  So, I'm not sure about you guys, but I frequently buy the Humble Indie Bundle, because it's usually such a good deal, and there's such great games in there.  If you're reading this blog, you'd be right to assume I'm pretty OCD when it comes to having album art for my music collection as well.

So, when they released the Cave Story + Soundtrack through Humble Bundle, and it didn't have any Album art, or proper tags, I set out to resolve this. However, it turns out that they never released that album anywhere besides there! There isn't any official album art, so I decided to put some together, featuring some Cave Story art.

Anyway, I wasn't able to decide on a single cover for the front, since I found two that I REALLY liked, so I'm giving you two alternate front covers.  Let me know in the comments which one you like best!

The first front cover's art is the same as the Japanese Cave Story 3D box art, which was handled by Zanpan.  You can find more of his art here: http://www.pixiv.net/member.php?id=290991

Front 1

Front 1 (Clean Version)

This second version is also done by Zanpan, I believe this art was done for the 3DS version's instruction manual, but I thought it would look really nice as an album cover.

Front 2

Front 2 (Clean Version)

For the back cover, I knew I wanted to make a clean version without any tracks listed, but I also was wondering which names I should use for the tracks. Unable to decide, I just made two versions, one with the translated titles (based on the other cave story soundtracks) and one with the original titles (based on the filenames). If you ask me which one I prefer it would be version 1, but I'm sure some people would get upset if I didn't include one with the official file names, instead of the actual titles.

Anyway, I also found this awesome piece of art by Derek Yu. When I saw it, it was literally the perfect size, and the composition was just right for the back cover. I knew it would look great with a tracklist next to it.

You can find more of Derek Yu's artwork here: http://www.derekyu.com/

Back (Version 1)

Back (Version 2)

Back (Clean)

A big thanks to the incredibly talented artists. These covers wouldn't be the same without you guys!