When a game has nice boxart it already has a plus before you even start playing it. Unlike Manhunter, Operation Stealth hasn’t got this going for it. The boxart is not very nice to look at in my opinion. But worse yet, it hasn’t got it’s name on it’s spine. As my collection is growing, I have less and less space to put games face forward. And I only do that with games that are special to me. Operation Stealth isn’t one of those games. Not yet, at least. So most of the time I see my games from their spine. That isn’t such a bad thing if the spines look nice as well.

But that’s not always the case. I have a few games that are blank like the Collector’s Edition of Broken Sword 5 or Tales of Monkey Island. What were the thinking? And there are a few games that have too much tiny letters with system requirements, stickers or ugly logo’s on their spine. I tend to put the nicest looking side facing forward, which sometimes leads to different orientations of the titles next to each other. Or putting the boxes upside down. I’m not too bothered about that.

Collection big box computer games is nice because of their different sizes, shapes and coloring. Much nicer to look at than a shelf full of Nintendo Switch games; now that’s an ugly thing. But Operation Stealth has nothing but ugly lettering on its spine. The worst of the worst. The one saving grace is that it has the title on the top side. So I’ll put that out front. It looks like a small box now.

Maybe there’s a nice US version I can pick up someday that looks a bit better. Or a nicer version for another platform. The version I now have is the Atari ST version. I’ve noticed that games for the ST often come in smaller boxes. Almost like they give in to their inferiority complex…