If you've ever heard of Tattoo Assassins in the past, from myself or others, you may have tried your best to repress the memory. So I'll include each character's attract mode biography to get you up to speed and put their ending in the closest thing to context you're going to get here.

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Yep. A newspaper. For fighting your way through the entire game, you're rewarded with the same ending you'd get out of Paperboy. Admittedly, fighting game endings were never great, with Street Fighter II's simple animations being the high point and dropping off quickly from there. But at least most other games gave you a few token paragraphs to tie up your character's story, not a couple sentences before mumbling "screw it" and heading to the bar.

The two newspapers I've shown for each character are actually two separate endings. The first is the "normal" ending, and is always (vaguely) story related. The second is what you get when defeating final boss Koldan with a perfect round, and usually involves a terse description of your fighter mangling him in some way. This second, harder to get ending is always shorter than the normal one, and doesn't even have a different photo. Tattoo Assassins: Giving you less when you do more.

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Boy, Clinton was a popular guy in the arcades back in the day, wasn't he? Though I can't imagine the suggestion of threatening the current president with an axe would have gone over quite as well with certain groups.

Native Americans didn't do a lot of burning people at the stake, so I'm not quite sure where they were going with the perfect ending.

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Ha ha! Those Japanese! Always serving sushi when not committing ritual suicide, those guys. Note the Dahmer reference, we seem to be building to something here..

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I know it's abundantly clear by this point, but God what a mess this production was. In her bio she hunts for the killer of her best friend -- by the end it's morphed into her sister. Both of them are miserable Lifetime movie of the week plots, so maybe they couldn't tell the difference. And apparently she uses her tattoo powers to sell underwear. For the record, her tattoo power in the game involved making a giant spider jump out of her back and bite people in the face.

But the perfect ending -- oh ho! Let us all cast back fondly to the days when Lorena Bobbitt jokes were funny. Give me a moment to remember exactly when that was.

Have you discovered the theme yet?

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That's right! Tattoo Assassins operates under an alternate title, 1993-94: The Game. Every tired premise, overblown headline and flash-in-the-pan celebrity you could dredge from a Jay Leno monologue circa early 1994 made a labored appearance here, culminating in an entire character modeled after Nancy Kerrigan. Now with bonus ancient catchphrase!

Really, where were they planning to go with this? Surely there was at least one reasonable, thinking human being on the team that could have pointed out that Disney would litigate them into a smoldering crater if the game shipped with this ending. I could understand if it was just the text -- maybe put there as a placeholder until they thought of a fitting parody name. But they also painted in the Mickey ears and put Sleeping Beauty Castle in the background. That's a little much if it were something they were just going to replace later.

Also notice that every female character's perfect ending involves castrating Koldan in some way. The women of the Tattoo Assassins world operate solely on a sexual level. It's all they know.

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Whereas a manly man like Truck would never... uh... wow.

Well hell, he was a biker in a leather vest, you can't really expect anything more.

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They reused Sea Food Today, those scamps.

Luke's normal ending makes reference to "the" double agent he needs to expose, as if there was a specific one he was after. But his bio never mentions it, instead saying that his mission was compromised by a bureaucrat. Maybe the bureaucrat was Hannah's sister. Anyway, the guy was already in jail making Luke's entire ending completely pointless and existing only as a sloppy, roundabout way to make another early '90s topical reference: Aldrich Ames, the real life CIA officer who was convicted of spying for the Soviet Union.

As the Wikipedia article points out, a character based on Ames appears in Metal Gear Solid 2, offering a direction connection between it and Tattoo Assassins handy for the next time you play Six Degrees of Solid Snake.

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Derek is far and away the most boring of the entire TA cast and his ending is no exception.

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Ah, but there's good old AC. Shameful, sad old AC. He's just so happy.

This was another, albeit more general '90s hot button reference, covering the December 1993 Senate Judiciary and Government Affairs Committee hearings on mature game content. The hearings in which congressmen questioned the value of video games depicting sex and grotesque violence and crap like this was what we had to defend. It's amazing we made it out alive.

And that's all of them. Hopefully compatibility will never get better to unlock more stuff, as I've already played more Tattoo Assassins than 99% of the people in the world and I don't need to make it worse. There is one more thing that I didn't bring up in the original article that I'll point out here for the curious: There are cheats (through hex edits in MAME, not the game itself) that allow you to play as the three minibosses Rhina, Deke Cay and Prism, as well as Koldan himself, suggesting that they were intended to be playable at some point. This is supported by the character select screen when you continue after a boss fight, as the sheet around Lyla's back has dropped to reveal the miniboss icons. None of them have endings and their move sets seem sloppy and incomplete, so they probably weren't fully implemented in the version of the ROM that's out now. Be-diapered spirit leader Mullah Abba is also selectable through cheats, though he has no moves or animations at all.

There's only one other option in the player select cheat menu, one that also has no animations or attacks. But it may be the best character in the entire game.