(To fairly attribute sources: I scanned everything except the box covers. Like the big MobyGames watermark wouldn't have told you that.)

Cammy, you would think, should be fairly simple. And yet the formerly cute girl barely out of her teens has suddenly gained about ten years and 20 pounds of ugly, possibly caught from Dee Jay's potato foot.

Perhaps the artist didn't have time to attend to these details because he was too busy lovingly adding the gleam of saliva to every inch of M. Bison's gums.

And if Game Players doesn't care, Nintendo Power damn well doesn't. I could point out that Guile looks like a 60-year old marine with a field of wheat on his head, but I'm still trying to figure out what's with his legs.

At least NP wisely stuck to using game sprites to decorate the pages of its first Street Fighter feature -- up until the last page, anyway, when..

oh god its all gone wrong

E. Honda looks like some sort of paper mache mask, Zangief has gone hydrocephalic, Blanka is your grandmother on St. Patrick's Day and I think Dhalsim was living under the overpass a few miles from here until the police scared him off.

They didn't learn the lesson for their later feature on Super Street Fighter II Turbo, either.

Cammy's lost a little of the dogface, but she's picked up a few dance moves from Elaine Benes in the meantime.

The rest of the gang, uh.. isn't so lucky. Ken is shocked at his newfound ability to kick in the air, while Chun Li may actually be that cross-eyed Asian chick from Devo's Whip It video.

But hey, this is just from magazines. They wouldn't put anything this bad on boxes, would they?

Okay, so it's not great, and apparently T. Hawk's strategy is to just let Chun Li jump into his fist, but it's not nearly as bad as some--

OH JESUS GOD WHAT IS THAT

IS HE GOING TO RAPE ME OR EAT ME

Then we come to this particular set of character art. Game Players used it to adorn a couple features they did, but it's actually official Capcom art. You can see it used on several SF2 boxes in the US and Europe. I am assuming they were created by Capcom USA because... well, come on.

I mean, this 40 year old man is their Ryu. I've tried for a while now to determine just what face he's making. More than anything it's just... disappointment. I thought being the world's greatest martial artist would make me happy, but really.. I just want to paint.

One of the reasons American publishers would hire a western artist to redo game art was to "localize" the look of the characters and make them appeal more to American audiences.

This is clearly the path you want to take with a character in a qipao called Chun-Li. They'll never notice!

Ken shares Ryu's disappointment, but at least he's got a clearer reason: His pretty Farah Fawcett hair just doesn't have that body and volume he was looking for.

And he's also growing a sixth toe.

But that's nothing on old Blanka. Look real close at the picture above, try to spot the slight error...

Got it yet?

Yes, you're right, human beings do not actually have orange hair and green skin! Oh, and they also don't have two Goddamn right feet. Again, official art, graced millions of magazine pages and box covers and trading cards. And, undoubtedly, the desks of several editors who simply didn't care.

I think my point has been made. I dare you to find a single goofy piece of Japanese SF art!

Uh... I dare you to find two then.