When I was a little kid, the 2 things I loved most in life where Godzilla and NES games. So naturally when Godzilla: Monster of Monsters came out, it was like a dream come true. Well, almost. To sum it up, most of the game revolved around getting through (very repetitive) outer space levels while smashing up tanks and jets, and then fighting against Godzilla's monster enemies. Overall it was pretty mediocre, but back then I didn't care. When I got the game a present for my 10th birthday, I played it night and day, as much as I could.

Unfortunately I had traded the game for Amagon a year later, much to my regret when I found out what that game was like. Years later I bought a new NES system, and through a lot of hunting and asking around, my friend Billy finally managed to find a copy of Godzilla: Monster of Monsters.

I was pumped to play my favorite childhood game. It never even occurred to me to ask where Billy found it. He also gave me some other games like Legend of Zelda, Bomberman and some stupid thing called Action 52, but Godzilla had to come first.

So I started the game, and the nostalgia came flooding back like a tidal wave. Godzilla's 8 bit theme song flooded proudly through the speakers and I was soon grinning like an idiot.

Some people laugh at me for playing such outdated games,but I've never had as much enjoyment for any games other than those on the NES. Those 8 bit games take me back to when things where much simpler, more...safe. But after what's happened with this game I don't have those feelings anymore.

I had forgotten how quick the fun of smashing things as Godzilla wore off in the scrolling levels. The game bombards you with bullets and things crashing into you from every direction, and you're too big to avoid most of them. Although my excitement had worn down some, it wasn't long at all before I got to my first boss battle.

My first opponent was Gezora, an obscure squid kaiju who had never been in a Godzilla movie.
The most annoying thing about fighting Gezora is that he always backs you into a corner and starts smacking you with his tentacle, and you're unable to move until he gets off you. This move doesn't do any damage, but it can stall you until the timer runs out and you have to start the fight over, and he regains some health.

It's as annoying as it sounds. And of course, he did it when I fought him. Only for some reason this caused the game to glitch up, because once he started smacking me, he never stopped. The timer is supposed to end the fight in about 40 seconds, but this lasted for nearly 5 minutes. After a while the graphics started to mess up, with little red blocks all over the place.



Which was weird, but I just took the game out, blew on it, and then started again. I wasn't about to let a little glitch stand in my way. So I started again and this time defeated Gezora and the level's other boss monster, Moguera without any problems.

So then it was onto the next planet: Mars. I browsed around the board and found something unexpected: where Varan's piece should have been, there was instead a piece representing Titanosaurus. There where only 10 kaiju in the game, and Titanosaurus was not one of them. Or so I thought. Perhaps Titanosaurus was originally intended to be in the game but was swapped out with Varan for some reason?



So I began to feel very excited - not only was I playing my favorite game, but I was playing a prototype of some sort with a new monster! Needless to say I ran through the levels as fast I could so I get to see Titanosaurus in action.

Fought Gezora again and beat him before he could do his tentacle smack, but this time the glitch started happening when he died. Gezora's sprite didn't sink to the bottom, but instead seemed to be devoured by the glitch, and his eye started randomly spawning all over the screen.



I know now that these glitches with Gezora where my first warning sign that something was very wrong with this game. But foolishly I ignored it, and proceeded on to fight Moguera, who this time had a glitch of his own:



Moguera was twice the size he should have been, which startled me. He was also considerably harder to beat than usual(which is to say, not at all), but soon I had defeated him also, and when he died yet another glitch happened:



This happened extremely fast so I was lucky to get a screencap of it at all, but what happened was that the Giant Moguera sprite started to "shatter" and "melt". Also if you look at the garbled text at the right corner of the screen, you'll notice what appears to be a bird in a cage...I still have no idea what that meant.

At this point I was about to fight Titanosaurus, and I was worried as to what kind of glitches would happen this time. But to my surprise, Titanosaurus looked just fine, although all of the game's bipedal monsters where the same height, Titanosaurus was a bit taller. But since Titanosaurus actually was taller than Godzilla in his film debut, I thought this was kinda cool.



After a very fun fight with the monster that wasn't supposed to be in the game, I took over the enemy base and proceeded not to Jupiter like normal, but instead to..."Pathos":



*to be continued*

This is absolutely incredible.

The creepy pasta part I could take or leave, videogame creepy pastas are never scary.

But these sprite edits! Holy shit these sprite edits! They start out as completely possible but improbable image glitches (as someone who owned a physical copy of this game, less impressive visual glitches were commonplace.) But that Titanosaurus? You made that from scratch? That is amazing!

My only critique is that he mentions how he has a physical cartridge, but then he "manages to get a screen cap" and all. That's possible, but it requires his TV and computer to be plugged into each other, which I've only known a couple people who do that.

I look forward to the future of this with baited breath!

looooooooooooooooooooove

I'm liking this so far, those sprite edits are BEAUTIFUL.

Very nice sprites

Woo! This game scared the hell out of me as a kid, and is still a favourite of mine today. The sprite edits are fantastic, and the battle sprite for Titanosaurus only looks a bit out of place because its resolution and overall quality is superior to the rest of the game sprites.

Here is an odd bit of trivia. At the time of this game's release, Gezora was indeed a Toho kaiju which had nothing to do with Godzilla (the same with Mogura). Later however Mogura would be re-introduced in Space Godzilla, and stock footage of Gezora would be shown in Godzilla Final Wars. Coincidence?

I am very much looking forward to the next part. B)

You're not the only one to mention Titanosaurus looking too high quality. Which it might be, but just barely.

Like most monsters in the game Titano only has 3 colors, but instead of using colors from the game's (presumably) limited pallete, I used some different ones. Figured I'd rather have him look accurate than do a "Purple Varan" on him.

But if you thought Titanosaurus was too high quality, I'm sure the next will look even more out of place!

Funny thing about this game's decision in monster appearance, if they had gone for more obvious choices Toho might have never made 90's Moguera, nor would Varan be playable in Godzilla Unleashed.

Anyway in the next story (which I'll hopefully have done soon, the sprite work is taking a while)the game begins to change itself, and new monsters appear, but not all of them are Toho monsters.

Pathos was the same as Jupiter in layout, except the board was dark blue rather than green. The first thing I noticed was that all the usual level icons had been replaced by a blue rock and some kind of orange honeycomb shape.

There was one icon that had part of the Jungle Icon shape, but I didn't pay much thought to it.I checked the other side of the board to see the new monster. Instead of Hedorah, it was Biollante.



But that couldn't have been right. "Godzilla vs Biollante" didn't come out until 1989, and this game was made 1988. Perhaps Toho put Biollante in the game to build excitement for the movie next year, but changed their minds? I tried to rationalize the game's abnormalities any way I could, but this would prove to be futile.

Pathos' map song was the first new song I heard in the game. Like most of the new songs it was hard to describe, I'll try.

It started out slow and suspenseful, much slower than any song in the game.
But every 12 seconds or so there would be a loud clashing sound, and the tempo changed. It was like the composer randomly played parts from 5 different songs with the same instruments.

I moved Godzilla over to one of the many blue rock icons that had replaced the jungle icons and started the level. The level resembled a blue mountain range with a blood red planet in the sky. But there was something odd about the mountains, they had a "shredded paper" look to them. I thought at first maybe the glitch had affected it, but it looked far too intentional.



I quickly noticed something else about this new level: There where no enemies, at all. Not even any obstacles.

I should also mention that this was where the point meter started to become glitched beyond comprehension. But it didn't bother me much, I never keep up with game points.

So without having to focus on anything, I listened to the music while walking through the level unopposed. The music had a sorrowful feel to it. It would have been rather pleasant, had I heard it in a normal game.

The level went on for 3 screens, but with no obstacles around I finished it very quickly. I tried other levels of the same type to see if any enemies appear, but there where none. There was little else to be seen in the blue mountains, so I tried the other level type.


I started one of the orange levels, and my eyes where assaulted with a grotesque background of tumorous orange eyes. The "sky" was the same as the ground, so I I assumed the game was indicating that this level takes place in a cave.



The only enemies here where Matango Spawn, but as you can see the little bastards where everywhere. The music certainly didn't help, with a mixture of screeching sounds and loud drum beats that sounded like a monster's theme in a horror film.
After completing it, I tried to avoid playing through anymore of these levels whenever I could.

The map was short so it was only a few minutes before I was headed towards a rematch with Gezora and Moguera. But this time, their sprites and attack patterns where vastly different.

I fought Moguera first. Moguera's replacement was a flying machine with a slight resemblance to a Pascagoula alien. It was a bit like fighting Mothra, only it moved with a lot more grace. It attacked by spinning it's front tentacle like a corkscrew, and it still had an eye beam, except now it fired from the drill.




This lanky aberration had replaced Gezora, and the new beast was more of a challenge. It would run and jump at a fast pace, constantly swinging it's arms around making it hard to get close, and of course it tried to pin me in the corner with as much annoying resolve as ever. I defeated it using a combination of tail whips and heat beam spamming.





I defeated them and was going to fight Titanosaurus, but when I started the fight Titanosaurus was nowhere to be seen, and the game simply went back to the map with the Titanosaurus piece now missing.

There was no one left to fight now but Biollante, so I eagerly started the battle.

I was quite surprised that Biollante started the fight in her Rose Form. She was immobile and used tentacles to keep me away from the main body, which took the most damage.



As expected, she turned into her Final Form after taking enough damage. The sprite looked pretty damn good for 8 bit.



The battle technique was the same, except now Biollante could move, albeit slower than any other monster. Being hit by the tentacles did more damage now, and Biollante could do an acid spit, which I managed to avoid by jumping in the screencap:



Not much more difficult to beat then Titanosaurus, it only took 2 rounds. But when Biollante was gone, The music had stopped, and there was a new icon replacing the base:



This icon wasn't there before I beat Biollante. It resembled a red tribal mask, and I had a feeling of dread when I saw it. But it since it replaced the base, it must be the only way to exit Pathos. I moved Godzilla to the square and started the level.

It was a hellish looking place with no sky, and a flickering fire in the background. The fire looked far more advanced than anything I've seen on the NES.
There was "music", in the form of a slow, steady drum sound resembling a heartbeat.

All the text on the top of the screen, and the life bar, where gone. In their place was a single bit of text in the middle of the screen that said "RUN".



My feeling of dread had intensified. I cautiously walked through the level, but like the blue mountains there where no enemies. I paced around for a minute before thinking "Run? ...from what?"

The first time it hit me, I didn't even see it.

I heard a noise outside my room and turned back to see if something fell, and when I looked back Godzilla was dying. I figured it must have just been a glitch, but I wasn't going to play through the game without Godzilla so I restarted the game and went to the password screen.

Have I ever mentioned how creepy the password screen music is? If you've played the game, you know what I mean. It doesn't at all fit the mood of the game, it's more like something from a horror game. Maybe they made it like that so kids wouldn't cheat.

I was quite annoyed at this point, because I thought I was going to have to fight all the monsters again. But that didn't happen. The game started me off right where I was before I started the red face level. So I tried again, making sure to pay attention this time.

That's when heard a low bellowing sound, and then I saw it. This....thing.


Do you know that feeling your body has when you feel like you're in extreme danger? You start to recoil and tense up as the adrenaline flows through your veins, and your nerves start to feel very cold?

That's the feeling I had when I took this screencap.



I haven't seen all the Godzilla movies, but I'm pretty damn sure THIS was never in any of them. It had to be something the creators made up. But what kind of sick fuck would put THIS in a children's game?



By sheer dumb luck, or perhaps the adrenaline boost, I managed to run fast enough to get away from it. It ran very fast, so much so that if you saw it you where almost certainly going to die. And when I say "die", I mean your monster gets killed instantly if the creature touches them.

Once I had gone back to the map, I was so afraid that I was extremely tempted to just shut the game off and try to pretend this never happened. I couldn't believe what I had just seen, it couldn't have been real.

And even if I wanted to continue, And still had to get Mothra through this chase level. But as I stayed inactive on the map screen for a few minutes, my fear was replaced by burning curiosity. What the hell had just happened? What was the rest of the game like? I only had to beat this level with Mothra and then it was onto the next world.

But when I moved Mothra to the red face, the game registered it as me beating the level. I was quite relieved. I tried to prepare myself for the next world: "Trance".



* to be continued*

It was looking like simple alternate universe fic at first but then AAAAAAAAAAA.

The altered monsters are amazing, and Tiki head is delightfully gruesome and creepy! Seriously more scary than a lot of horror movie monsters!

I'm really starting to get into the story! How many "planets" will this go on for? Does anyone know?

A++

This is fantastic stuff Cosby! The sprite edits do look amazing, and I really love how the story steadily builds up the feeling of unease. The whole thing is strengthened by the fact that something always seemed 'off' about this game; from the creepy password music to the planet hopping to the huge variety of nonsensical password glitch worlds to the final lines of the game; "Earthlings, prepare to die!"

...Who knows, maybe there's some truth to all this. :ph43r:

Cosby this is both beautiful and completely unsettling, you're fantastic at this and I eagerly await your next update.

This...this is freaking amazing. Once that goddamned tiki asshole showed up, this became A++ material. So creepy, oh my god. Also, orange tumor eye cave is awesome <3

I noticed that after it had been up for about 2 hours, the forum cut off part of the story starting a few sentences after the orange cave screencap, and I had to re-post it.

I don't know why that happened, but it's a good thing I have these backed up on text files, or I would have been mighty pissed.

Cosbydaf, I really have to agree with the rest of these people, when I first started reading this, though trying to keep an open mind set, I was prepared for another completely placid piece that Chup would later try to epically read on skype, but you ended the first one on a great mark, having me honestly curious on what you occur in the next piece. And, I can safely say, though I have no real clue why, the second piece has left me extremely unsettled, even though it is morning with the sun being up.

Awesome! This actually creeped me out a bit!

This is really good! And that thing that replaced Gezora is absolutely amazing.

Can't wait for part three.

yer gay?

No, but you are
:D

That was pathetic, Posey.

Even I thought it was bad.

By slowing down a tiger's roar, I made a pretty close imitation of what the red hell beast's noise sounds like:

http://www.mediafire.com/?63ytinilyapjy63

Give it a listen while looking at the screencap!

It was not

DO YOU SEE THAT POSEYMAN?

You picked a topic that would be really easy to screw up, Cosbydaf, but it's coming along surprisingly well. I was even a little creeped out with the red-spiderthing in the second part. Especially since I downloaded the sound and played it in the background, so I didn't know the file wasn't over and it freaked me the fuck out when it roared for the second time.

Great job with the art, and everything really. Maybe you could compose the music intended to go with the spiderthing, or have someone else do it; that would be great.

Thanks everybody, the feedback is highly appreciated!

And wow, only 2 chapters in and the thread is over 1,000 views!

I'm working on the art for Chapter 3, I'll try to have it posted by tomorrow.

As for what you can expect to see: New replacement monsters, 1 new Toho monster, and a totally new element of gameplay.

Hooray!

Spine-chilling as fuck and excellent visuals. You hit it out of the ballpark yet again, Cosby.

CHAPTER 3 PART 1


I was still pretty shook up from the last level when I started "Trance". Trance's map music did nothing to ease the tension. As for how to describe it...have you ever heard the theme from Videodrome? That's the closest thing I can think of it to compare it to.

I checked to see who the new monster was, and it was Orga. A monster who didn't make his film debut until 2000, appearing in a game made in 1988. So much for my theories about Titanosaurus and Biollante. There's no way this game was made in 1988!



Those guys at Toho may be smart, but I'm sure they couldn't see that far into the future. If they could, they never would have gave Roland Emmerich the rights to make a Godzilla movie.

No, this had to be a hack of some kind. Which just opened up even more questions. Who made this hack? When? How ? And most importantly, why? The "why?" was the question that bothered me most.

My immediate assumption was to think Billy did this to pull a joke on me. But that couldn't be right either. Billy didn't know how to make a ROM hack.

And if he did, he'd probably just do something simple and stupid, like replacing all the monsters with crudely drawn genitalia. Unless Billy had amazing game editing skills, and a serious dark streak to his imagination that he never told me about, he couldn't have made this. Is it even possible to put a hacked ROM into a cartridge?

Aside from all that, my eye was drawn to a new icon on the map: a question mark. I was really curious as to what it did.



I'm sure you're also curious, So I'll explain the "Quiz Levels" now, since this was when they start appearing. There was one of these per map from here on, and they always appeared near the start of the map.

When you start on a "Quiz Level", you appear on a screen like this:



As you can see, there's a question at the top, a "yes" and "no" button, and a emoticon in the center. I refer to the Emotion as "Face"(real creative, I know), and for convenience, I'll refer to Face as the one asking the questions.

The music for the quiz levels was a track actually in the game, it's the one that plays when you try to use the "Gh1d0ra" cheat and get sent to an unplayable level.

Face asks you 12 "Yes or No" questions, and you move your monster to the buttons for your answer. When you answer, the question dissapears and Face changes expressions for about 8 seconds, then he goes back to neutral and a new question comes up. There was no time limit, nor any right or wrong answers.

Face has no respect for the player's personal boundaries, and will sometimes ask deeply disturbing and personal questions, For example:(Do you like hurting people?) (Have you ever killed/raped anyone?)(Have you been molested by a family member?)

Other times he would ask questions that where either mind-numbingly stupid (Is the Sun hot?) (Is water wet?) or just flat out ridiculous (Does your dog like the President?) and maybe once per quiz, Face would ask you a question about the game.

With one exception, Face's expression changes seemed to have no effect on the game, except for indicating what the game creator thought of your answer. His reactions rarely made any sense, and at first I thought they where randomly generated.

The questions never followed a pattern, Face never stayed on the same subject for more than 2 questions. Early on, there where questions that made me think Face was building up to something, only to then ask some stupid garbage.

Here are the expressions of Face that I saw while playing. I'll separate them into two categories: The expressions I understood, and the expressions I didn't.

First are the expressions I understood:



1. Neutral, his default expression
2. Angry (If you try to attack Face, his expression changes to this, but nothing else happens)
3. Sad
4. Happy
5. Sick
6. Maniacal (Face made this expression when he was being an asshole. You'll see what I mean later)
7. Surprised
8. Love
9. Annoyed
10. Confused
11. Guilty/Hurt

And here are the others:



2 of these only appeared once (Numbers #1 and #12), and I suspected they might have been in-jokes from the creator. Their respective questions where "Do you like Ice Cream?" and "Are you a tough guy?".


As for the questions in the first Quiz: Luckily, I had a notepad and pen handy. I have problems remembering things, so I often carry one around to jot things down, and sometimes I doodle in it when I'm bored. So when the first quiz started I thought I'd record what happened. I'm glad I did.

Here are the first series of questions, my answers, and Face's reaction:

CHAPTER 3 PART 2

Now that I've explained all that, time for the gameplay.

After the Quiz level, I tried the new green temple icon first.



Wow. Maybe this is why the game was so weird - one of the designers was clearly drugged out of his mind!

Jokes aside, I was quite impressed by the graphics of this level, as disorienting as they where (But I hate those creepy, blank staring statue faces). The music had a hypnotic, Indian techno vibe to it.

There where two new enemies in this level: a flying ghost type thing with a trunk, and a bat with a horse skull for a face. They appear at random, but I was lucky to get a screencap of them both:



Then I proceeded to a blue mountain level, expecting another nice, calm stroll.
I took my time walking through, and was completely taken by surprise when this happened:



Not-Moguera came speeding towards me and took off quite a bit of health with his tentacle screws! It only took me 2 minutes to kill him without having to worry about a time limit, but the boss monsters NEVER showed up in the scrolling levels in the normal game. I was worried as to what other rules the game would break.

After another blue mountain stage, it was time to fight Not-Varan,who's replacement was one of the most bizarre things in the game:



This strange creature attacks you by kicking, and also opening up his chest and firing heat-seeking missiles. ....I still don't get it.



The missiles where sometimes a pain to deal with, but I found out you could tail whip them out of the way. Not-Varan was probably the easiest of the monster replacements.

The same could not be said for Not-Hedorah.



Apparently the source of the horse-bats, Not-Hedorah was the most aggravatingly difficult monster to fight yet. Mostly because of his special ability: He could shriek and summon a small swarm of those horse-bat things.

I know there's only two in the screencap, but every time he did this, about 10 would arrive. The AI took advantage of the distraction and attacked twice as fast while the horse-bats where flying around.



Once that annoyance was over with, I went through a green temple level to kill some enemies to restore my health. Interestingly, none of the horse bats showed up after Not-Hedorah was killed. And that was when I got an idea:

If killing all the monsters makes the red face show up, what would happen if I avoid fighting Orga, and go straight to the base?

So I gave that a try:




The game told me there was no monster there when I tried to start the base level.
And immediately afterward, the game took control of my Godzilla piece and moved it in front of Orga. My little trick didn't work, so I tried to prepare myself for another chase. But first, I had to beat Orga.



The fight with Orga confirmed another thing: Whoever created this game hack was clearly a Godzilla fan. Not only because they picked a monster like Orga, but because they actually implemented something that happened in "Godzilla 2000" in a really neat way.



Orga's primary attacks where a punch and a heat beam from his shoulder cavity. But once you had got him down to half his health, he did something new: He would expand his jaws and try to swallow Godzilla, in the process stealing your health and energy!



But in doing so, he gave himself a new weakness: firing a heat beam into his mouth would take a devastating 4 bars off his life meter!

With that weakness revealed I soon beat Orga, and despite how much I had hoped otherwise, the red face appeared on the map where the base was, and the music stopped.



I readied myself as best I could. I started the level, and seeing that it was basically the same as the first, I didn't waste a millisecond before I started hauling ass.

I soon encountered obstacles in the form of the ground tile, suspended in air. Most of them you could jump over or destroy, others you had to crouch under.

About 40 seconds into it I heard the horrible bellowing roar and saw the spider beast following close behind me. Stacks of obstacles barely slowed it down, it would back up and then charge it's way through them, smashing them into bits. And when the smaller obstacles got in it's way, it would expand his jaws and swallow them whole:



I was afraid, but with fast thinking and faster button pressing I escaped him yet again. I felt really excited, and so I laughed and said "Not this time, asshole!" I decided to take a screencap to celebrate.

But when I said that sentence, just before the level ended, the monster did something that made my blood run cold.

It looked at me.



That wave of mortal terror overtook me again, and I sure as hell wasn't laughing anymore.

I took another screencap of the next level title, right before I rushed to the bathroom to splash some water on my face. (And to take a piss that I nearly failed to contain when that fucking thing looked at me.)



*To be continued*

Fucking awesome, Cosby. The backgrounds for the green temples are hideously cool looking and surreal. Hedorah's replacement is absolutely badass, and I love the work you put into Orga.

This is fast becoming one of my favorite creepypastas <3

Thanks, I thought you'd like the psychedelic green temple. The background took quite a while to draw.

Did you read Part 1 of Chapter 3 on the previous page? Make sure you do, as it explains the new gameplay element.

Yeah, I love the bizarre, random quality of how Face just jumps from morbid to inane.

The sprite work and the storyline just keep getting better. The temple and the new monsters all look fantastic, and if they were on the NES they would have been some of the best graphics on the system.

I like how the story changes things up just as the reader starts to get comfortable. It seems like this could just be some weird pirated game made in the early 2000s, and then something at the end happens to bring all that into question.

Yeah quality just keeps shooting up! I'm really impressed with the new monster designs, with NotVaran being some kind of demon Alpaca and NotHedora being...yeah I don't know. Really neat giving Orga a gimmick like that. The fact that the Red Spider stages are getting more complex is worrying, and I'm also glad to see the character feeling that it's just a hack, but slowly being convinced otherwise.

It's creepiness is subtle, but it definitely lends itself an air of something that shouldn't be. Face is the kind of thing that would be "Nightmare Fuel" to a lot of Tropers, so his presence, while not scary for most leeches, is wonderfully atmospheric.

DO YOU LIKE DOGS?

Dementia? Maybe we're in for Hausu references?
C'mon, it's a Toho film too...

I don't think FBB "gets" writing sentences in a manner that is comprehensible to others.

It's really rude to make a suggestion for someone else's work when you can't be bothered to say even one word of what you thought about it.

It was a JOKE, silly.
Also, this story made me damn near crap my pants, especially The Fourth Wall Will Not Protect You moment.