@the-witchhunter - this is incredibly disturbing, i love it. fair warning, i took it more in the direction of that oglaf comic (nsfw) where Vlad fully doesn't realise that this is a love shrine, this is a completely normal thing that you do for your arch enemy!
———
“Daniel! I can explain!”
“Oh… my… God...”
“Daniel, really, it’s not what it looks like!”
“Really?” Danny breathes, shocked and honestly kind of fighting down the urge to vomit. The thermos slips from his fingers and clatters to the ground, the sound echoing far too loudly in the enclosed space. “Because it looks like you have a shrine dedicated to my dad in your closet.”
“No, that’s not—it’s more complicated than that, Daniel. You wouldn’t understand.”
“I don’t think I want to understand.”
“Your father is a ridiculous man, Daniel. I hate his stupid face so much. Look at him!”
Vlad turns back to the actual shrine, with actual candles and actual flowers and actual photos of his dad with… Holy crap, did Vlad cut out Mom in each of the photos? What the fuck?
Wait… Look, Danny tries not to look too closely at the weird things Vlad has hidden around his mansion dedicated to his mom, but he’s fairly sure that the pictures of her he’s cut out (in heart shapes—yeah, Danny’s definitely going to barf) are the ones Vlad’s put in his other weirdo closet shrine that Danny also wishes he’d never seen.
“Why don’t you just have one shrine? Why have—no, you know what, I don’t want to know. I think I’m just gonna leave.”
Yeah, that sounds like the best option. Danny takes a cautious step back, very ready to get back home, bleach his eyeballs and maybe never look at his mom and dad ever again. Or, at least, not until he has successfully blocked this from his mind forever.
He only gets one foot out the door when Vlad lashes out and grabs him. The day just keeps getting better and better, really, doesn’t it? Even as he twists and turns, he can’t get out of Vlad’s ironclad grip and he’s pulled even farther into the closet.
Panic rises in his throat as Vlad shuts the door—what the fuck is happening? He doesn’t want to be dragged into Vlad’s creepy shrine to his dad, what the fuck? What the fuck!
“I loathe your father, Daniel, I hate him with the very core of my being. Look at him!”
There’s no goddamn way in hell Danny is looking at any of the pictures, no thank you. He squeezes his eyes shut and wishes he were somewhere, anywhere else, when Vlad jerks his arm forward so he comes nose-to-nose with the largest framed portrait of his dad in the very centre of the table, smiling with his doctorate and a very unfortunate 80s mullet. Dear God, no.
“I hate his smug face! I hate his stupid fashion sense, you have no idea how much I detest that orange jumpsuit of his, how much I want to claw it off him and tear it to shreds! If I have to listen to him say another boneheaded, idiotic, ridiculous thing, I will—I’ll rip his throat out with my teeth! You don't know how long I spend here looking at him, imaging all the ways I'll have him grovelling at my feet. One day, Daniel, I'll have him one day...”
———
The sun was going down when Danny finally managed to escape and find solace in Sam and Tucker. He's not going home. Not yet.
“Danny, are you okay? We were so worried, we couldn’t get hold of you for hours! Where were you?”
“Sam, Tuck… Vlad, he…”
“Holy shit, Danny, you’re shaking, are you alright? What happened, what did he do?”
“I think… I think he wants to fuck my dad.”
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My first post of 2024 may have been cited to be the first look at Star Tower, my arcade-centric Pizza Tower AU, though consider this post to be your first real look at both the AU! This is a post I've been wanting to make for quite some time, and I am simply overjoyed to finally reveal the first set of characters for Star Tower!!! ⭐👾✨
This is a long post packed to the brim with art— some of which aren't featured in the above image— so if you're interested, I highly suggest you read on underneath the cut! 💙✨
As an AU, Star Tower dates back to March 3rd of 2023, which is when I first drew the logo for it. A sprite of myself drawn in the Pizza Tower artstyle predates Star Tower as an AU by about a month, so I think it goes without question that the stand-in for Peppino is Star Tower is a representation of myself!
It's just another day for Star Splitscreen at the local arcade, when all of a sudden, the multicade cabinet bugs out and sucks her inside! It's within the cabinet's confines where she meets the omnipotent Sinistar, who claims it'll set her free if she can best its '20-in-1 Supercade Challenge'.
What follows is an arduous adventure that sees Star venturing through arcade games familiar and obscure, and learning Sinistar's secret identity as well as escaping back into the real world all depends on her success... it's a good thing a seasoned arcade expert like her has what it takes!
I knew going into designing for Star Tower that I wanted each floor boss (I.E. Pepperman, The Noise, etc.) to be represented with an actual character from an established arcade game (With one exception...) and trust me when I say that I spent a fair amount of time carefully going through every arcade game I knew of and selecting a character appropriate for each boss's role.
Ultimately, I'm quite proud of the selection of characters I settled with, so let's jump right in and discuss Pepperman's stand-in...
Goro from 1983's Mappy! I find that, in terms of appearance, Goro was a perfect fit to replace Pepperman. Both are predominantly large red characters who are often depicted with wide, toothy grins— it was the perfect match!
Unlike both his canon personality and his personality in the animated ShiftyLook series, Goro in Star Tower is a lot more nefarious and self-centered, and sends out the Meowkies to do his dirty work when his own efforts don't cut it. I wanted to include sprites of the three Meowkies for this post originally, but I decided to save them for a future post (That's tech talk for 'I'm still trying to figure out how to stylize them').
I think of the four main bosses, Goro was the hardest to sprite in the Pizza Tower artstyle solely for the way his head is drawn. There's something about his face that was extremely difficult to draw at such a small scale, but after drawing pretty much every other sprite featured in this post, he was the final character in this lineup that I drew a sprite for, and I'm quite happy with it!
While Goro is certainly an iconic character, the same can't be said for The Vigilante's stand-in who, in spite of starring in one of the earliest known arcade games, is all the more obscure. Enter...
Mr. Jack from 1979's Sheriff! The Vigilante is the only boss of the main four who originally was going to be represented by an entirely different character, that being Kinzo from 1996's Pac-Man Arrangement.
It was when I remembered about Sheriff that I realized that Mr. Jack was the perfect candidate to replace The Vigilante. I mean, both are represented as mostly yellow cowboys armed with guns and a fashionable cowboy hat. How much closer could you get than that?
The real challenge was finding a good image of Mr. Jack to base his appearance in Star Tower off of. For those who don't know, Mr. Jack only has three known images of him that exist despite the fact that the game he hails from is over forty years old, so it wasn't exactly the easiest task.
I decided to base his appearance off of how he looks on Sheriff's bezel as that's the only full-body look we've ever gotten of him. The guy already looks like a Pizza Tower character as it is (A long lost cousin of Burton, perhaps?), and I find that his sprite looks the most like something you would actually see in Pizza Tower!
On the topic of arcade characters that are perfect fits for stand-ins of certain Pizza Tower characters...
Charley Chuck from 1983's Food Fight was, without question, the ideal choice to replace The Noise. One look at this flyer for Food Fight should perfectly encapsulate as to why. He's a little brat who's primary objective is to make the lives of the local chefs miserable. Sound familiar? It should!
Charley has had numerous different designs drawn for him around the time his game debuted, and it was pretty difficult settling on just the right one. I decided to give him a white and red striped shirt which he wears on the Food Fight arcade cabinet, and draw him as similar to the Noise as I could— I even sized him so that he stands smaller than Star, which took a lot more time than I'm willing to admit.
What's particularly interesting is that, fairly recently, Atari announced a Splatoon-like game for their VCS console, and you'll never believe who's the poster boy and what the game is a sequel to. I'm fairly certain that just before the announcement of Food Fight: Culinary Combat, I was the only person who was doing anything with Charley Chuck, and here he is starring in a brand new game some forty years after his initial debut. Not bad, kid!
One must wonder if I was the one who manifested Charley's return into existence...
With Charley Chuck properly introduced, I can move onto who may just be my favorite of this post's lineup...
Crazy Star.
With the success of 1981's Donkey Kong, an officially licensed clone was created for use in Japan only, though found its way outside of the country without the license to do so from Nintendo. This clone's name is Crazy Kong, and to say it's uncanny wouldn't be doing it justice.
Originally, I was a bit hesitant on just designing a 'fake Star' and calling it a day. I wanted there to be some arcade theming to it, and when the idea of a 'bootleg Star' came to mind, I quickly turned to Crazy Kong as a point of reference and Crazy Star is what came out of it (I should also mention that Crazy Kong released in 1981... now that's what I call meant to be)!
Out of everyone featured in this post, I've definitely drawn Crazy Star the absolute most because, as I mentioned before, it's just about my favorite of the Star Tower bunch! My favorite detail about it is that its color palette is made up of colors hand-picked from Crazy Kong itself!
Originally, I had screen-picked its colors from a YouTube video of the clone, resulting in a slightly different color scheme, but once I found a sprite sheet for Crazy Kong, it resulted in the Crazy Star you see in this post! Crazy Star may look unsettling, but in reality it's just as welcoming as Star, and all it wants is to be just like her.
Just like her... just like her... just like her...
Beware... Sinistar from the 1983 arcade game of the same name lives! Yet another instance of the perfect replacement, both Pizzaface and Sinistar are giant evil floating circles, and it was clear to me from the get-go that Sinistar would make a perfect stand-in for the former, especially since half of its name is 'Star'!
Drawing a sprite for Sinistar was both a cakewalk and a challenge. For one, seeing as its sprite is on the larger side, that meant I had a lot more detail to work with. On the other hand, however, I struggled for a while to get a good design drawn for Sinistar. Eventually, my good friend @panurei-derogatory suggested that it would be funny if Sinistar was hyper-realistically detailed compared to the other sprites, and that was something I had a lot of fun with when drawing its sprite!
Anyone who's played Pizza Tower knows that Pizzaface himself is merely a facade, as the true mastermind behind Peppino's misery has been hidden in plain sight since the very start— the comically villainous Pizzahead! I think out of every 'arcade stand-in' I chose for Star Tower, coming up with one for Pizzahead was the absolute hardest, because none of my ideas really seemed to stick the landing.
But then, I thought "What if it was a completely original character?"
And that's where Richard Benito Townsend (More commonly known by his alias 'Richie T.'), the self-proclaimed 'king of video games', enters the scene!
Richie T., who is absolutely not based off of any notorious cheaters in the arcade world record scene, is a washed-up video game master has-been, once highly regarded in his heyday for being an icon in the world of video games before his supposed 'unbeatable world records' were discovered to be fraudulent.
Shunned to a life of seclusion, the ever boisterous Richie T. now pilots Sinistar within a multicade cabinet where he's free to call the shots, daring to go toe-to-toe with Star once she proves herself worthy of being a Supercade Superstar. After all, she's just some girl— she can't possibly trounce the Richie T., can she?
Spoilers: He has no idea.
And with that out of the way, that's just about everything I wanted to touch base on in pertains to this first set of Star Tower characters! As I said before, this post has been a long time coming, and it's ever so wonderful to finally get this out onto tumblr!
You can expect a part two of sorts to this post sometime in the coming months, as there are still more stand-ins I've yet to post... this time, replacements of the supporting characters, such as Gustavo, Mr. Stick, and a couple of others! For now, I hope that you've enjoyed your first real look at the world of Star Tower! 💙✨
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Do you know some not so well known gods ? Or beings ? With. Cool powers? I’m trying to make a oc but I want them to be different than them being like Normal demigod
Hmm... well I wouldn’t say “cool powers” cause I kinda think all the Gods are cool, and they‘re not “powers”. But some lesser known Gods- I linked all of them for you (just click the name) so you can read up on the Theoi info. If you have any questions lmk!
Hygeia - Goddess of good health
Aiglê - Goddess of radiant good health
Akeso - Goddess of curing sickness and healing wounds
Anikêtos - God of the defence of towns and citadels / warding off war
Alexiarês - God of the defence of towns and citadels / warding off war
Klymenê - Titan Goddess of fame and renown
Eirênê - Goddess of peace and the season of spring
Iasô - Goddess of cures, remedies and modes of healing
Likê - personified spirits (Daimones) of prayer
Psamathe - Goddess of Sand and Beaches
Thoosa - (likely) Goddess of swift currents
Eidothea - (likely) Goddess of Sea Prophecy and/or Sea Knowledge
Eurybia - Goddess of Power/Mastery of the sea (specifically the external influence such as moon/stars/seasonal weather/winds)
Benthesikyme - (likely) Goddess of Deep Waves/Waters
Kymopoleia - Goddess of storm waves
Aigaion - God of Aegean Sea storms
Aura - Titan Goddess of the breeze
Arke - Titan Goddess of Messages and the Secondary Rainbow (possibly known as Ithax)
Astraios - Titan God of Stars and Planets and Astrology
Aristaios - God of Bee-keeping, cheese-making, herding, olive-growing, and hunting
Melisseus - God of honey and bee-keeping
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