The Darkstalkers Official Artwork Extravaganza

Back in the day, a kickass video game mag existed. It was called Diehard Gamefan and it was notable for acknowledging the beauty of game art. When it wasn’t splashing its pages with concept or promotional art, it was using the graphics of the games themselves as part of the layout. Often, the text of a given article would be laid out on top of art — whether hand-drawn or digital. The pages popped with color and life. I loved it.

At some point during Gamefan’s run, it put out strategy guides, including one for the second game in Capcom’s Darkstalkers series, Night Warriors: Darkstalkers’ Revenge. This particular guide kept true to Gamefan’s standards and included a whole lot of official artwork for the game. Recently, I discovered the guide in a box of books I hadn’t seen in years, and I decided that I should scan the art and post it online. I’m sure I’m not the only one who can appreciate it. My only regret is that the guide came out before the third game, Jedah’s Damnation, so what I’m posting here won’t include Lilith, Q-Bee or B.B. Hood — each a well-crafted and respectable character in her own right.

Hope this brings back some fond memories of joystick-waggling for a few people. (Click any image to access larger versions of it.)

Main vampire Demitri in his transformed, demonic state.

Here Demitri is again, with one of his conquests.

British werefolf Jon Talbain. Neat fact about ol’ wolfy, via Wikipedia: His Japanese name is Gallon. In Japanese, the name would be pronounced like the word garou, “hungry wolf.” The word may sound familiar to anyone who played the latest and possibly last incarnation of SNK’s Fatal Fury series, Garou: Mark of the Wolves. Had I known at the time, this little linguistic nugget would have made the “It’s a Secret to Everybody” post.

Victor von Gerdenheim, the game’s take on Frankenstein’s monster even though he was erroneously referred to as just a Frankenstein. Really, shouldn’t we just use golem and cover our bases?

Undead Aussie rocker Lord Raptor, known in Japan as Zabel.

An even more sexed-up Morrigan Aensland, the batty succubus who became the series’ mascot. I love that a bat is functioning as her shirt clasp.

Freaky mummy man Anakaris.

Werecat Felicia, who’s probably the only naked female fighting game character that I’d still refer to as “cute” and not “sexy.” Maybe it’s her proximity to Morrigan?

Bishamon, the samurai possessed by cursed armor, accompanied by the ghost of his wife, Orin.

Protean merman Rikuo, who gets to be the game’s Dhalsim.

Vampire-hunting dhampir Donovan Baine, accompanied by the strange psychic girl Anita.

Donovan and Anita again.

Donovan alongside the various elementals that aid him in battle. Note that the ice elemental is labeled Brizzard in stead of Blizzard.

Anita surrounded by toys inspired by the “reduced” forms various characters suffer when struck by Anakaris’s pharaoh’s curse breath.

The fighters themselves with their little mascot forms.

Comic relief character Sasquatch.

Mayan mechano-man Huitzil.

Hsien-Ko, the Chinese hopping ghost with a heart of gold and a sleeve full of cutting implements.

Hsien-Ko and her twin sister, Mei-Ling, who splits their current form time share-style.

And finally evil galactic overlord Pyron.

And below, some composite illustrations:

Even the Darkstalkers fear the consequences of getting caught reading Anita’s diary. Is that Akuma lurking in the background?

The three ladies, before the other three ladies showed up.

And, finally, Morrigan and Demitri by moonlight.

Again, I hope this stirred up some long-forgotten gaming memories for a few readers. Hey Capcom, how about a new Darkstalkers already?

Capcom, previously:

• Does Q from Street Fighter III appear in one of the Street Fighter II backgrounds?
• Weird world geography in Red Earth
• Mega Man name etymologies
• Street Fighter and Final Fight name etymologies
• The legacy of W.A. Stokins
• Pajama Hero
  

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Storke Tower Was Broken

NOTE: The file I linked to no longer works, so I reposted the clip as a YouTube video. You can hear it here.

Picture it: May 18, 2009. The UCSB campus. The Storke Tower carillon goes off-key or breaks a cog or gets possessed or something and fills what I imagine to be especially foggy air with creepy, atonal lullaby music. Spencer wisely thought to record it with his phone.

Seeing as how Spencer has now graduated and no longer has reason to hear any of the music played at Storke Tower — cacophonic or not — I felt I should put this up. May it be a lingering memory of UCSB for all of us graduates.

The Doom Train Cometh

Though I may geek out on video game mistranslations and other such manglings more so than other people, this one, you have to admit, is pretty phenomenal.

Early on in Final Fantasy 6, characters fight a boss known alternately as the Doom Train or the Phantom Train. Of course, it’s the train that takes the dearly departed to the afterlife and, of course, it’s ill-tempered and challenges living humans to a physical fight.

Like many Final Fantasy bosses, it showed later on in the series as a summon — that is, in Final Fantasy jargon, a thing your characters can call into battle to attack their enemies. For the Phantom Train, its return to fame was Final Fantasy VIII. For no apparent reason, it bore a different name in the Japanese version: Grasharaboras. Inexplicable though this name might have been, the hellish locomotive was all the more fearsome in this second incarnation.

But why Grasharaboras? The compendium of name origins offered at Final Fantasy Compendium suggests that the name might be a corruption of Glasya-Labolas, the name of a demon featured in the anonymously-written demonology tome The Lesser Key of Solomon — an earl and president of hell, no less. Realistically, this name probably existed prior to the book, but the internet was not helpful in determining where it might have come from.
According to Wikipedia, Glasya-Labolas is the “author author and captain of manslaughter and bloodshed [who] tells all things past and to come, gains the minds and love of friends and foes causing love among them if desired, [and] incites homicides and can make a man invisible.” I have no idea how the name ever came to be associated with a sentient train, especially since Wikipedia concludes the entry by noting that Glasya-Labolas is traditionally depicted as a dog fitted with a griffin’s wings.

The use of the name in Final Fantasy VI doesn’t mark the only use of the name in a video game. It appears in at least one of the Tales Of games in its traditional “griffin dog” form. Furthermore, Grasharaboras isn’t the only way its name can be mangled: other interpretations include Caacrinolaas, Caassimolar, Classyalabolas, and Glassia-labolis.

So that answers that. No idea why the character’s name would have ended up the way it did, but it’s certainly allowed for some fun mistakes.

Don’t Ask Alice

Did you ever want to watch a clip from a movie in which a woman, contemplating a recipe for chicken mousse in the kitchen from The Brady Bunch, has her hair set on fire by a malicious insect?

Because now you can.

Context: Stacie Ponder’s review of the 1975 film Bug.

Doom Bus

Don’t be like Spencer. If you’re waiting at the stop and an empty bus arrives, its destination advertised only as “out of order / fuera de servicio,” don’t get on, even if the driver tells you he’ll take you where you need to go. Though you may well end up in the desired place, alive and unharmed, there’s also a significant chance that the place “you need to go” will turn out to be somewhere you’d only want to be in some larger sense that you didn’t anticipate — the afterlife, for example, or perhaps some freaky opposite land where “no” means “yes” and melting Dali clocks stalk the streets. In short, beyond the sunlit world one believes to be reality.

One small upside, even if this mysterious bus ends up being some sinister psychopomp: You get an opportunity to take photos like this one:

Is that the crisp light or morning you see through the windows? Or something more sinister? And what if this bus was full just moments before you boarded?

I feel like this scenario must rip off the plot of a Twilight Zone or Outer Limits, or, failing those, at least a Tales From the Darkside.

Man-Watermelon, Redux

I honestly did not foresee myself being able to follow up the previous entry with another post about some ungodly mishmash of man and melon, but allow me to show you an even closer approximation of a real-life Homo citrullus.

[From Bits & Pieces, via Boing Boing]

But I Do Not Want to Become a Watermelon

Technically speaking, it would be misleading to say that the subject of this post gave me nightmares, in the plural. But it did result in one vivid childhood nightmare — and that’s singular. It’s just difficult to say “This gave me a nightmare” and give the thing discussed the amount of power that ones gives to another thing that generated multiple nightmares and would have even probably ruined you as a person if you weren’t so strong, deep down, inside, somehow.

When I was about seven or so, I received the gift of the Nintendo game Bubble Bobble. I’ve previously walked Back of the Cereal Box readers through obscure bits of video game lore, but I’m convinced that the Bubble Bobble franchise is one with which many people would be at least tangentially familiar. Aside from the main line of games, there’s a slew of spin-offs that appeared in arcades. Anyone casually walking through a family-style pizza parlor in the last fifteen years could have had reason to notice various games with such resort-evocative titles as Rainbow Islands and Parasol Stars. Beyond these, there’s the game known variously as Puzzle Bobble or Bust-a-Move, which saddles Bubble Bobble’s emblematic dragon characters with the task of operating a bubble-shooting machine that they must use to ricochet away the clutter presented on the screen above them.

Allow this image to illustrate:

image courtesy of hotbottle.com

It should look especially familiar to anyone who ate their pizza in view of the arcade but also to anyone who spent the early part of this decade addicted to Snood. Minor modifications aside, Snood is a total homage to Puzzle Bobble, and that’s putting it nicely.

Long story short, Bubble Bobble has been around a while and, consequently, has taken on many forms. Maybe you’re nodding your head in agreement, maybe not, but at least we have established that it is a video game that spawned subsequent games and have therefore put this all in a bit of context for the video game illiterate.

In Bubble Bobble, the player controls the aforementioned dragons, who, it must be said, specialize much more in cuteness than the snot-singeing badassness for which dragons have become famous. These dragonitos fight their way through the game, one static screen at a time, fending off marginally less cute enemies by spitting bubbles at them and consequently encasing them inside. A sphere of soap film keeps the enemies quiet enough until the dragon tags the bubble, killing the enemy inside. Now, one way that Bubble Bobble is a lot like other video games of its era is that its enemies, once killed, transform into items. It’s common video game phenonmenon: You kill someone bad and they turn into something good, like a coin or more ammunition or a life-restoring heart or whatever. In Bubble Bobble the universal currency happens to be food — both produce and prepared pastries.

Observe:

Simple enough: from enemies to food.

Then there was that nightmare, which had everything to do with a single piece of promotion art that the game’s developer and publisher, Taito, decided to release in the United States.

Perhaps the title of this post will give you a hint at what so disturbed me. It appeared in advertisements, it appeared on the game’s box, it even appeared on the game cartridge itself: some artist’s conception of what a dead Bubble Bobble baddie would look like midway through his transformation into food, specifically watermelon. This is pretty awful, when you really think about it — the equivalent of a centaur with his horse bits replaced by a watermelon slice that presumably would be unable to contain any vital organs. And that’s to say nothing of the fact that the fully transformed bit of food would be presumably gobbled down by the one who caused the change to begin with. Even with the wacky video game logic of enemies’ corpses somehow turning into valuable goods all aside, you have to admit, this is a grotesque, horrifying little situation that the promo art suggests.

This image of a half-man, half-watermelon slice hybrid screaming in fatal agony did once make an appearance during my dreams shortly after I noted how awful the image was. But unlike the cartoony illustration above, my subconscious brain decided to dissever the idea from any bouncy Bubble Bobble memory and instead approximate what the metamorphosis would look like in real life, with an actual person stuck partway through the change that made his lower half a watermelon slice. I can remember it quite clearly, and believe me when I tell you that this man was none too happy about his lower body having transformed into a picnic snack.

To this day, anytime Bubble Bobble crosses my mind, the immediately following thought is that unfortunate son of a bitch Watermelon Man. Consequently, I’m less than enthusiastic about the aforementioned generative nature of the original game. On some level, I dread it. And, by extension, Snood. And possibly watermelon.

Sometimes I think my video games figure too heavily into my life.

Here Comes the Supercopter

Some might call him a squatter. I chose to call him a delightfully unexpected guest. He lives on the window in the hallway.

My camera’s zoom exaggerates his size slightly, however; he’s actually slightly larger than my thumb rather than slightly smaller. Neat, right? The camera does not exaggerate his hairiness or overall creepiness.

Ronald McDonald, as Designed by Stephen King

Something that terrified me as a child: the notion that Ronald McDonald himself was hiding in the bushes, waiting to wave terrifyingly at me at the drive-thru.

I was buying coffee, I swear.

Great Big Globs of Greasy, Grimy Christmas Guts

The wood nymphs, it would seem, have turned on the Christmas elves, with disastrous results.

What Anthropologie tried to do: Deck the walls of its State Street location in a festive, holiday manner. Picture it: The walls themselves spilling forth with a cornucopia of handmade winter vegetables. Lovely, right?

What Anthropologie accomplished: The fact that the cloth produce occupied the squarish, recessed areas on the store’s back wall gave the display the appearance of surgically removed patches of skin with all manner of festering unpleasantness beneath. The reds, oranges, pinks and browns of the decorations themselves recall exposed guts and assorted butcher shop discards. It’s as if the wall itself were the surface of some giant, department store-sized creature that has been lacerated and whose insides are leaking. The white woodland creatres standing before the gooey grossness are presumably there to feast upon it.

The proof:

What you should take away from this: Anthropologie wants you to remember this Christmas — by any means possible.

Your Courage Hangy-Ball

Old roommate Meghan — now currently of Filthadelphia, a.k.a. the set of Blade Runner — posted this, a taken-in-the-mirror photo of someone she termed “the scariest kid I’ve ever seen.”


Close, I guess, though I think Disaster Girl takes the cake.


A good tradition to keep up nonetheless.

Then There Is No Mystery Left

Remember this spider?

I saw it in Australia, in the Whitsundays. Big as my hand it was. I’m not sure if my words alone can convey how horrifying it really was, but if I tell you that it shouted hateful epithets at me and my travel companions, will that paint the picture vividly enough?

Dina emailed me about this very spider this week. Not this spider, precisely, but its species. According to an October 22 article in the Telegraph, this little nightmare eats birds.


Horrifying. Absolutely horrifying. Almost as horrifying as that pelican-on-pigeon action some time back.

And a Peach in Their Pants

So a mysterious pink cloud appeared over London on Monday.

photo via the telegrapaph

Am I the only one who wants to think it’s condensed love particles, frozen in the atmosphere and hovering visibly in the sky? Should we not harvest this love and sell it in dust form to smoothie parlors worldwide so they can crumble this physicalized love into our berry healthshakes?

Because that’s probably what it is. Love, I mean.

I’m just saying.

(via Towleroad)

Encyclopedia Drew and the Phantom Skull

A happy Venture Bros.-esque coincidence involving a table candle and a wine glass at Ca'Dario last night. Nothing accompanies fine Italian food better than the reminder that you are, in fact, going to die.

Cred to Noam and his Noamphone.

Previous Encyclopedia Drew adventures:

• Encyclopedia Drew and the Mystery of the Mixed-Up Currency
• Encyclopedia Drew and the Case of the Troublesome Tang
• Encyclopedia Drew and the Look-Alike Cats
• Encyclopedia Drew and the Mystery of the Barfing Bathtub
• Encyclopedia Drew and the Mystery of the Rabbit-Eared Woman

Sanity Melts Like Lemon Drops

I like whippets. And I like any animal made to exhibit human qualities. "Like," however, doesn't get anywhere near my thoughts on the below video of a whippet eerily singing "Somewhere Over the Rainbow."

I can only hope the the person who made this did so specifically to disturb the people tricked into watching it and not because he or she actually thought the above video would actually induce happiness. Now it's your problem, I suppose. Let's cross our fingers and hope that the dreams that we dare to dream do not, in fact, come true.

The Birdo Unitard

Technically, it's not supposed to be a Birdo unitard, I'm fairly positive, but I'm hard-pressed to say what else it could be.


Good to know I'm not the only one seeing Birdo in places she shouldn't be.

[ Source: Sailors Fighting in the Dancehall ]

Phantom of the Stupid Hat

Best Week Ever posted a countdown of the ten best silly hats from Ladies' Day at Royal Ascot. The following photo took the number two spot, though it's easily my favorite.


Unspeakably terrifying, but also hilarious, in that the Crazy British Lisa Kudrow's facial impression would seem to indicate that she has no idea what her hat actually looks like. How Best Week Ever puts it: It looks like she’s being chased by the Ringwraiths from Lord of the Rings. And this poor woman… look how happy she is!!! She has no idea the four whoresmen of the apocalypse are hot on her tail! Look how happy she is to see you… she’s all “Hi Bahsil! What? Behind me you say? Ghosts? Oh Bahsil, you ol’ –” THUD. El morte.

Ten Times Worse Than Clawglip

A few facts about the coconut crab (a species that I feel too few people know about) followed by a few pictures of said species. Unlike that Mae West post, these are completely for real.

From the coconut crab's Wikipedia entry:

• The coconut crab is the largest living arthropod, a biological phylum that includes insects and arachnids in addition to crustaceans.

• Its leg span can reach 6.5 feet across.

• On one occasion, the coconut crab was observed to eat a rat.

• Its German name — Palmendieb, means "palm thief" — comes from the animal's ability to tear open the extremely tough shell of the coconut. (What such pincers could do to your relatively thin hide is better left to your imagination). The coconut crab climbs up palm tree trunks — meaning that they can appear at eye level, horrifyingly — and then attempts cut into the coconut while it's on the tree, often causing the fruit to fall to the ground. (People used to think they purposely knocked coconuts off trees, but they've apparently since realized that they're too dumb to make that kind of agenda.)

And with this in mind, observe these photos of the coconut crab in action.

from flickr user fearlessRich

from flickr user AnnaPang03

from flickr user salpet

You're most likely to run into one of these monsters on Christmas Island than anywhere else, but report back with nightmares nonetheless.

The Mathematical Equation for Creepy

Quick way to achieve the full-blown heebie-jeebies:

An ominous bass line

+

A good dozen different kinds of Lynchiness

+

Monochrome

+

Weirdly dispirited dancing that gives the suggestion of some kind of mind control

+

The knowledge that it came from eastern Europe

+

Beehives

=

Heebs and jeebs in abundance

The proof:

It's from a Polish film, Salto, about which I know nothing. Who new the Polish could be so subtly off-putting?

The YouTube info for the clip suggested that I also check out the dance scene from the French film Calvaire, which was more explicitly nightmarish.

[ Source: Music for Maniacs via PCL Link Dump ]

Torn From a Page in a Best-Selling Book

A new feature for the Cereal Box: If Sunday is Maria Bamford Day, as it's apparently become, then Saturday gets to be Strange Word Day. Here goes.

fissilingual (FISS-il-ING-wool) — adjective: possessing a forked tongue.

A good word to referring to anyone featured in a Google image search for "tongue splitting," and altogether a word that we don't get to use often enough. View at your own risk, and know that these people were not born this way.

A regular Google search for the same term also brings up the Loftus Plastic Surgery Center webpage, which includes a thorough explanation of tongue splitting procedures, as well as the following paragraph, which I enjoy despite its notable lack of the word "fissilingual."

Many will wonder, "Why would anyone ever choose to have such a thing done?" Suffice it to say, that we live in a free country. Many men and women across the country have caught onto this trend and tongue splitting has become increasingly popular. At the Loftus Plastic Surgery Center, our goal is not to pass judgment, but to ensure safety for the public. Unless this procedure is offered by a reputable surgeon, those seeking it may be forced to have it in unclean and unsafe environments.

Note how they carefully avoid giving an answer to the question of why anybody would want this done. My offer for an answer: to give reason to use the word "fissilingual."

[ Source: Depraved and Insulting English ]