Thoughts on homemade videogame box art?

[BlackMageGaming]

When moving to my new home, I decided I wanted to catalog and display my collection of games. I have a large collection since I started collection "retro" games back in middle school, and inheriting many of my family members old consoles and games. In doing this, I had found several games without boxes, and even some boxes without games! (Red Ringed Xbox 360s ate them)
I really don't like having loose discs or small cartridges laying around, and it's difficult to display them neatly. So I decided I want to print out box art for games that don't have boxes in my collection. Which has been great so far, but I'm having a bit of trouble in some areas...

I was going to print out some gamecube games I didn't have boxes for, but right when I was going to take the box art from Vimm's Lair, Nintendo decided to be evil and sent a cease and desist to Vimm, removing all Nintendo properties from Vimm's Lair. So I had to move to different means. The Cover Project worked great for a while.

It all started with the Game I-Ninja, which I had the disc to, but I couldn't find the complete box art to. So I decided to create my own boxart for the game. I was able to find the front and back of the box art, but the spine wasn't showing up anywhere. So I just simply put the logo on the spine and stretched the front of the box to the spine for the background.
My next problem is Cat and The Hat for the PS2, which I can't find box art for in a printable format anywhere.

 
So, what are your thoughts on making box art like this?
The collector side of me thinks it's a bit disingenuous to fake a game's box art, but the practical part of me doesn't care, as games deserve to be played.
Also, if anybody knows of some great databases or websites that host box art, that's also appreciated!
I primarily used The Cover Project and Vimm's Lair.

[Nikodile]

I'm pretty torn on this usually. If the games have easily openable/accessible cases officially (e.g. Gamecube, PS2, etc) I try to find the authentic case/cover of the game through ebay or something.

In other cases, like N64 or SNES, where games came in boxes and aren't easy to access whenever you want to play a game, I bought a lot of Universal Game Cases and would just print out covers for them.

These were the covers I used for my N64 games years ago:

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Over the years, I got really bored of the white covers so I changed them to be more on par with how the boxes looked when you actually bought the game:

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By far, my favorite "unofficial" covers though are my shockbox covers for my Neo Geo MVS games. Neo Geo AES had cases like this, but Southtown Homebrew is a site dedicated to arcade preservation and offer cases like these for MVS games. Love them:

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[TheFrugalGamer]

I'm biased because I'll go for practicality over the collector mindset every time--games are meant to be played! But I ran into something similar with some of my PC games a while back because I was keeping them in DVD cases, but they were originally shipped in large boxes (this was for the Sims: Hot Date and Streets of SimCity, among others). I ended up making my own artwork, I really like they way they display on the shelf.

I'd say if it makes you happy, then go for it. It's your home, and you can always toss the original art if you decide to part with the games in the future.

[zephie]

i've had phases with wanting to go hard into game collecting, usually ending pretty quickly when i remember how much it already costs to live without video games. cartridges i feel look good on their own on a shelf, and i thought just putting a sticker of the game's logo on one of the sides would be neat. but i have OCD, and designing, or choosing premade custom covers for entire boxes would bother me when i inevitably notice something i want to change, and then have to reprint everything for consistency's sake. at least with official boxes i can forgive inconsistency because "It Just Be Like That"

also this post was how i learned the news about vimm's lair