8 AMAZING Box-Arts That Made You Buy BAD Games

For all of the blood, sweat, and tears that developers put into making great games, there's no denying the simple fact that marketing is where they often live or die.

Great games can flop due to a lack of sustained pre-release buzz, and sometimes players are convinced to pick up a dreadful game because it has some really cool box art.

While today there isn't really much of an excuse for not doing your due diligence before throwing down some dough for a game, the allure of a gorgeous, brilliantly designed, or even just attention-grabbing cover truly speaks for itself.

Though most of us no longer browse physical video games in actual brick-and-mortar stores, powerful key art can still strike a stronger immediate impression than just about anything else.

And these video games are clearly all a testament to that, each promising a top-shelf experience that the end result simply couldn't live up to. 

If nothing else, the poster artists get an A+ for their work, perfectly selling everything that players wanted these games to be, yet fell so painfully shy of...

It's tough to deny that the box art for Jurassic Park-themed first-person actioner Trespasser goes really damn hard, as the kids say these days.

We all have an insatiable interest in dinosaurs - evidenced by the ongoing success of the Jurassic Park movies despite their generally tawdry quality - and so Trespasser's in-your-face visual of a feral raptor screaming at you is tough to shake.

Moreover, the cover art also enticingly ballyhooed Trespasser as "the evolution of first-person 3D gaming" - which, releasing just weeks before Half-Life as it did, was actually still believable at the time.

And to be fair to Trespasser, it's not mere cynical junk like many of the games on this list. 

It's instead a game that's both innovative and awful - rightly celebrated for its large, open environments, impressive dino AI, state-of-the-art graphics, and extensive ragdoll physics, but dinged for being frustratingly clunky, bug-filled, and really quite boring when it comes down to it.

These issues were all largely attributed to the game being rushed to market, but at least we got some all-timer cover art out of it, and its innovative mechanics inspired a bevy of more successful FPS games, such as Halo: Combat Evolved and Far Cry.