Skeleton (Ghosts 'n Goblins - NES)

It's time for another spooky entry, albeit from the same game as last year. But if any of you played that game regularly, you know how hard it was to even get to these guys. The mere mention of their existence in the manual was enough to pique my interest, but it certainly took awhile to see one for the first time. Even with unlimited continues, it isn't until you get to the castle in stage 5 (the second-to-last level) that they even appear.

And they don't just appear like this; no, instead you see some innocent looking skulls littering the ground. But if you get too close, watch out! They spring up, fully formed and wearing loincloths for some reason. Hopping around way more than any zombies, that's for sure. Once they're out of the ground they're much harder to kill, so I suggest just shooting the skulls when you see them. It will make your life much easier.

Speaking of easy, this was probably the hardest sprite I've ever had to put together. Not because it's complicated, but because I simply could not get a decent screen capture. Now usually I just grab an image off the internet and zoom in, but nobody seems to have any shots of the majority of the creatures from the NES version. So I figured I'd just get a screen capture from an emulator. I had to play the game and use the warp code and it STILL took me awhile to get a reference shot. Only that didn't work out too well either (it's rather blurry and some of the pixels are just not that distinct). So there's a good possibility that this skeleton is not pixel-for-pixel perfect. Oh well. When it comes to loincloths, I'm not too picky about the details. I just hope I got his awesome dark red innards nice and accurate...