Blazing Star - Neo Geo Conversion Project (Part 2)

Posted on June 4, 2002

Written by Tiptonium

Hello Everyone,

I completed the conversion process as described in Part 1 of this article. Now it was time to generate some artwork for the new home converted Neo Geo cartridge. I'll get to the details but for you inpatient types here's a quick picture of the finished product:

|  Click Here To See The Insert Close Up  |   Click Here To See The Label Close Up  |

Let us now have a moment of silence for the Fatal Fury 3 cartridge that is now the host of this magnificent shooter.

The first decision was concerning the language. I opted to produce an English version instead of the published Japanese version. I made a conscious decision not to create an exact replica of the original artwork. This should make those that fear the dilution caused by exact replicants in the Neo Geo world.

The primary software tool used was Adobe Photoshop 7.0 I started off with the US Snap Lock Cartridge Template graphic for the insert.

The stripe color is for that of a fighting game. So the first thing to do was to correct the color. It should be blue. Since there is a real lack of good resolution stock art for this game I had to get a little wacky with it. I rendered the front cover worlds using Strata 3D, a 3D rendering program. I positioned the "worlds" so that it covered the entire front and spine. Next, I needed to create a Blazing Star title graphic. I did not go for perfection here, just something that looked similar to the original. Photoshop was again used to create this graphic. Next up were the battle craft. I managed to fine a few low resolution pieces on the Internet that were captured from the game. Again, using Photoshop, I resized and positioned the craft on the front cover. Final touches to the front cover included added a few light flare effects, adding the meg count and placing a few stars using Photoshop's paint brush option.

The spine was easy enough. I just copied the front panel Blazing Star graphic that I created for the front cover, rotated and scaled it down a bit. After that, all that was need was the meg count number so I did that.

And finally, the back cover. Here I used a collection of screen grabs from the game as well as some bits from a scanned copy of the Japanese version of the game. Screen grabs include the in game action shots and the girls in the background. The gals directly above each game screen were snipped from a low res scan of the back of a Japanese Blazing Star insert. Quite a bit of touchup was required since the originals had a bit of Japanese text over parts of the graphic. Do to the low res nature of the images, they looked pretty bad when blown up. Luckily, Photoshop's dry brush filter gave them a nice touch. I also included some gameplay information that was scanned from a low-res bitmap of a flyer. I cleaned it up as best I could.

Ah, but it still was not quite ready. Why? No game description! So here's what I whipped up:

Now to the label. Simple enough. I used a US template label, turned it black, pasted the Blazing Star title, added a lens flare and painted a few stars on the thing.

That's it. This project is officially complete!

-- Tiptonium Out...