10 Worst Nintendo 3DS Box Art

Pac-Man grins in the bottom corner while ghosts, a castle and a giant wobbly logo fight for the rest of the space. Everything is the same bright, plastic shine, so nothing stands out at all.

Ben 10 leaps out of the middle while a wall of other cartoon heads gets squashed into stripes around him. It looks less like a fighting game and more like a channel guide that has been sat on.

A cube built out of mahjong tiles floats on a purple background, with a few loose tiles drifting around it. It is not ugly, exactly. It is just a cube, and it explains the title more than the game.

A goggle-eyed 3D sheep jumps in front of a barn while cows and chickens wander around in the background. The render is smooth and shiny, and the animals have no personality at all.

A tiger's face and a polar bear are cut out and pasted over a zoo map, like a school project. Japan's box, by comparison, lines up a whole herd of animals on a clean white background, and it looks far more like a game about running a zoo.

A purple unicorn with a swirly white mane stares out of the box with huge, glassy eyes, under a banner that tells you to take care of magic petz. Is it cute? Is it haunted? The box will not say.

Three grim floating heads hover over a yellow car spinning through a crash. It is the standard action movie poster, and it tells you nothing about the game.

A fist punches a little cube-headed ninja through a cluttered white and red room, and it is hard to tell what is going on. Funnily enough, the game later became infamous for an exploit that let 3DS owners run homebrew code, which triggered a surge in demand for a game critics had written off as a bargain bin title.

A silver car sits on a white background with its tail lights glowing, and that is the cover. For one of the eight 3DS launch titles, that is a very quiet way to say hello. It was also a direct port of an iOS game, Asphalt 6: Adrenaline.

The Western box crops its heroine just under the nose, leaving her chest and a scroll tucked into it as the whole picture. That is not an accident: the man behind the game decided that one of the things people most wanted to see in 3D were breasts. Japan's box, on the other hand, shows the whole cast standing together, faces included.