There was a time, when arcades were still viable and people the world over were marveling at a new invention known as the "cotton gin," when fighting games were the Big Thing. It began with Street Fighter II and its 382 different iterations, and only got stronger with the introduction of Mortal Kombat. MK honed the fighting game craze more specifically to violent fighters, and the copycat games hoping to cash in on the fad followed suit, each trying to outdo the last in sheer excess.

It was in this time that an executive at Data East Pinball named Joe Kaminkow had become friends with Bob Gale, who produced and co-wrote the Back To The Future trilogy as well as directed and wrote the sole venture into "interactive" movie territory with the retarded Mr. Payback. Gale would occasionally send his new scripts to Kaminkow, one of which concerned magical tattoos that came to life and fought each other. Kaminkow thought this sounded like a great idea for a video game, but what kind? Violent fighters were currently all the (primal) rage, so... that kind. He then set off to crank out a quick MK clone with his new idea.

It should be stressed at this point that the company's title is Data East Pinball, not Data East Video Games.

Of course, the whole project was a failure. A team that had no video game experience was set out to create a game in half the time normally given, one that would've been no more than a cheap knock-off in a sea of cheap knock-offs even if it had come out as planned. The development team dragged themselves to the finish line, and then Data East summarily cancelled it. The official reason was that "it did not compare favorably to Killer Instinct," but in fact the true reason was "it did not compare favorably to some shit I scraped off my shoe." The game was more or less forgotten by the three people who had heard of it in the first place, until very recently when someone managed to get a ROM dump and MAME was updated to be compatible with it. Now it's out and about, but there're still quite a few people unaware of its existence. And we can't have that.

Given its origins, it only makes sense to start with the plot. Such as it is. Now, you would think a game based on a movie script would have to have at least a semi-decent story. The story came first, after all, so it's not like they just threw something together to tack onto an existing game, like they do with so many others. But, as in so many things, you are wrong.

Last time, on Tattoo Assassins:

Ancient Desert Grown Man Baby, clad in the ceremonial control-top diapers of his people, gives a non-committal shrug upon discovering some mystic rainbow juice plugged by the mysterious Q-Tip of Ghaltraztabar. I like that they couldn't even give the guy a prop bottle.

I wonder if the stuff in that flask is what they pour into the molds to make Gobstoppers. Now that would be something to get excited about.

No, turns out it's an ink that can turn into stuff when seared into human flesh. It's just like when Spider-Man came back from the Secret Wars with the outfit that would later become Venom, except intead of getting a new costume he got drunk and went to an all-night tattoo parlor.

However, it turns out only an elite group of superhumans, lead by Richard Dawson, Pat Sajak and Marc Summers are compatible with the ink. Those whose bodies reject the ink are forced to become stars in Japanese animated fetish porn.

Whichever secret organization that employs these people could cut back on spending with some judicial lay-offs in the color guard. I think either Mr. Grass Green or Mr. Forest Green can be considered redundant.

Left alone and confused after Vincent Price died before fixing his hands, Koldan takes out his anger and frustration on humanity.

In response, Grown Man Baby sends all the chumps who weren't good enough for the ink to do his very important mission. How did they find out they weren't good enough, anyway? Wouldn't they have to test the ink on them? And wouldn't that mean they should all be turning into Bebops and Rocksteadys by now? And why am I bothering to ask?

Well, that will certainly put an end to Koldan's plans!

Oh.

Trivia buffs may be interested to know that this is GnR/Velvet Revolver guitarist Slash's former wife. Trivia buffs may also have a tendency to smell like cheese, wear sweater vests and enjoy stamp collecting.

By the way, it's around about this point that the feeble attempt at a story has completely jumped the tracks and rammed into the station, presumably where Richard Pryor is humorously aiding Gene Wilder in pretending to be black. The "he found a magical duck with mysterious powers that can render moot everything that just happened" mechanic is not a popular storytelling device.

I'll get right on that.

So now the stage has been set. It's a retarded premise for a game, but it would've been even worse in its original format as a movie script. The idea doesn't really lend itself to anything other than watching two people beat each other up for a few minutes. Not even each other; their tattoos would be fighting, making it like an early form of Pokemon. Big-titted naked chick on a Harley, I choose you!

But the true focus of any fighting game is its characters. Even Mortal Kombat, for all its extras and window dressing, wouldn't have been as popular if it weren't for the "cool" factor of characters like Scorpion and Reptile and Goro. In fact, one can track the popularity of the series by watching the characters presented in it:

Hello. I am a fucking ninja who is here to kick you to fuck and then burn the fuck out of you because my head is a FUCKING SKULL FROM HELL.

Hey. I may look like the designers are trying a little too hard to be bizarre, but hell, you gotta admit it worked. It looks like that thing from the Come To Daddy video knocked up the chick on the cover of The Dentist II and I popped out. You don't wanna mess with that shit.

I, on the other hand, look like your cousin Earl went overboard with his paintball outfit again. Still, I'm a robot, and robots are cool, right? Right? Johnny Five is alive! Right?

Hey, I'm just here to pick up my kid from soccer practice.

I found it hard to swallow at first too, but sure enough there was an article in National Geographic just last month which announced: "Archeologists discover evidence of extremely Caucasian Amazonian tribe with Lurleene-from-Texas haircuts."

Already we begin to see certain flaws in the design here. Their exotic tribeswoman is your friend's mom in a two dollar bra and adorned with a giant, ugly tattoo that looks like it was done in permanent marker. Still, compared to some of her fellow fighters, Maya is actually fairly normal. She does, however, have the most horrible stage in the game, for the sole reason that it features a loud, low-quality wooping bird call sound that is played roughly every 1.2 seconds. Seriously, if you're somehow inspired to play this game after reading this, turn your speakers down as soon as you see the jungle.

Looking as if he's unsure that the car coming towards him will stop at his signal, Billy furthers the tradition of white people playing anyone who isn't white but isn't black. But he does so in a silly hat. Be sure to catch Billy's victory move, where he does a stereotypical Indian dance complete with "huy-ya huy-ya, huy-ya huy-ya" speech while millions of native Americans roll in their graves, cracking and distorting the Wal-Mart parking lots above them.

He also shares the fighting stance of a turn-of-the-century collegiate pussy.

Yawh hair treatment?

Nothing says manly biker like a rubber vest. I think a gang calling themselves the "Sore Losers" shows a real lack of confidence. They're so accustomed to the fact that they suck that they admit it right up front. They could have at least called themselves the Bearers of Certain Weaknesses Which We Are Constantly Striving to Improve Upon. Maybe it didn't fit on their jackets.

By the way, ending all your paragraphs in ellipses makes your retarded stories sound more epic, because you're forced to assume there's something after that...

AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

*cough* I'm sorry, I'm sorry. That was terribly unprofessional of me. I'm a writer, I should express myself better than that. Let me try again.

I AM INTERFACED!

....

AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

So they're throwing around a bunch of ideas for this game, and Crispin Glover cosplaying as Kid Vid from the Burger King Kids Club with his mouth agape like a 13 year old who just saw his first pussy is the one that sticks. The host of an infomercial about hair growth awash in aqua with raver bracelets and an oversized lightning bolt decal that you get out of a 25 cent vending machine to put on your Trapper Keeper demonstrating overpriced VR units in front of a Holograms Unlimited store to disinterested mall patrons passing by on their way to the Sunglass Hut. No.. No, wait, he's missing something..

Poorly drawn Tron pants, that's what it was. Okay, wrap it up folks, let's call it a day.

Jesus. Go get a refund for that tattoo, dude. Unless your specific request was "Y'know Cecil? From Beany & Cecil? Yeah, I want that. But with, like... two heads. That's awesome." And why did they feel the need to make every character wanted by at least one major organization? It never figures into the story, I guess it's supposed to show how hardcore these guys are. If you ask me, they should all be wanted by the fashion police, r u with me on this one folks/

P.S. Drawing a little beard on your face isn't fooling anyone.

Criminals are a superstitious, cowardly lot, so I must wear a disguise that will strike terror into their hearts. I must be a creature of the night, like a... a...

Octopus! Of course, it's so simple! Its propensity for multitasking alone inspires fear in those equipped solely for one or two undertakings at once. And I will make it so its left- and right-most tentacles are massaging my firm, up-thrust bosoms, further terrifying those who would do evil with the startling intimacy I share with those multi-tendrilled clavigers of the sea.

hey where are all the other black people

By wearing two strips of garbage bags over her tits and being blonde, Hannah identified herself as the slut of the group. The fighting game slut had little to do with promiscuity and everything to do with being the one female character where the focus was entirely on her being a sexual object. All fighting game females are sexualized to some degree, but there's a big difference between Chun Li and Black Orchid. For the prime example of this character type, see Sophia from Battle Arena Toshinden. And Sophia pulls off the outfit a lot better than Hannah, might I add.

The woman who played Hannah, Gretchen Stockdale, was a model and former Raiderette. She's now, I shit you not, a lawyer, and I find that so Goddamn funny I'm not going to comment on it anymore.

GEE WHO COULD THIS BE A PARODY OF

Yes, a hilarious take on somebody you had no doubt completely forgotten about up until this point, in the game for one weak laugh on an overplayed joke and then a lifetime of making this game look bad and dated. Karla is also the most obvious example of the characters having "recolored" eyes, which basically means a big block of blue or occasionally green was dropped over their real eyes in MSPaint. It's rather astounding, given how much money they spent on digitizing all these actors, how much time they spent afterwards drawing over them. Some of the characters, most notably Tak, look so cartoony in their final form in-game that you would never know there was an actor there for reference to begin with.

On the flip side, one of the first things I look for in a woman is whether I can see myself in her tits, so she's got that going for her.

Finally there's Derek, who I guess is supposed to be a tough rocker but really just looks like Fisher Stevens is mildly annoyed about something. Perhaps because he couldn't find a sweatband so he had to use a bath towel.

Those are the main characters, but like any good fighting game, and like several bad ones, there were bosses to contend with:

HOLY CHRIST KILL IT WITH FIRE

I suppose they were trying to make something scary, but there's "big monster" scary and there's "does it have boy parts or girl parts" scary. According to the game credits, Rhina is played by a female, but I'll have to take their word for it. The bosses don't have any descriptions in attract mode like the regular characters, so I can't tell you what the hell is up with this thing. So I'll just say she got bitten by a radioactive rhino during a stay in Africa and gained the power to protect your truckbed from rust damage.

Deke Cay (see what they did there) is the closest thing to having an interesting character the game has. Not real close, mind you, but closer than fucking Billy Two Moons. Deke didn't have any special moves or any other boss-like characteristics; none of them did, actually. They all just looked different. He did, however, point and laugh derisively when you lost, which to this day I don't believe any person in the history of the world has actually done outside of a movie, TV show, or Pistons/Lakers game.

Right at the end, they gave up and stumbled into late-generation Masters of the Universe Skeletor henchman levels of stupidity. Prism couldn't even get into the air; if you uppercut him, his head just shatters and reassembles. But, despite being made of quartz or whatever, he still bleeds when you hit him. And you get plenty of chances, as he just sorta stands around and occasionally throws a punch. Making your next-to-last boss almost entirely immobile is not the best idea.

Then after that came Koldan himself, who I won't bother to show here because he looks exactly like he did in the intro. He doesn't have any particularly special moves, but he does manage to be slightly more difficult than the previous fights. The most notable thing about him is the way he dies, which admittedly is pretty neat.

So is there anything salvageable in this game? Perhaps semi-decent gameplay hidden amongst the juvenile trappings? 'Fraid not. You can get through pretty much the whole game just by whoring jump kicks and your special move. The bosses -- specifically Rhina and Koldan -- pose a little more of a challenge because they've been artificially sped up, so they move about twice as fast as your previous opponents, but are still nothing particularly troublesome. I'm terrible at fighting games, yet I played through TA multiple times on only a couple credits each to take all these screenshots. On top of all this, the controls are very clunky. The game has a combo system, but it's pretty hard to take advantage of when your character responds so poorly. In all, the game is worth nothing more than an oddity to cock your head at for a minute before returning to Magical Drop III.

Speaking of oddities, there's one more thing to cover. The number one rule of knock-offs is counterfeit jeans fund terrorism. But the number two rule of knock-offs is that since you can't do it different, just do more of it. One of the biggest draws to the MK franchise was, of course, the fatalities, so Tattoo Assassins boasted 224 separate ways to kill your opponent. It even had a counter that kept track of how many you had seen, though that seems like it may be broken in the ROM that's currently out. Each character has one or two kills they can do with their tattoos, and there are numerous "general fatalities" that any character can do, including animalities (meaning TA actually did them before MK did), morphalities (turns the enemy into something goofy, like an old woman or something), nudalities (which had been rumored to exist in various MK games for years), and turning your enemy into the Mona Lisa. That's right, your prayers have been answered, finally you can humiliate your friends by turning them into artwork.

As a matter of fact, the vast majority of the fatalities weren't fatal at all. It was like a game full of Friendships. Jesus, they couldn't even get that right. Anyway, here's a small selection of some of the odder ways to finish somebody off.

So now you know. There's a game out there you hadn't heard of that's really stupid and you shouldn't play it. Undoubtedly you feel more fulfilled with this knowledge in hand. On a scale from 1 to 10, where 1 is the lowest and 10 is the highest, I give Tattoo Assassins a

All the background information in this article came from here, which is apparently the only source of information about this game on the entire Internet.

Update!: Now see the endings for every character! Or don't!

-Bill