SydLexia.com - Monster Party: The Dead Spider Controversy

Monster Party: The Dead Spider Controversy

There is a little bit of controversy as to just what the hell the dead boss in Monster Party is supposed to be. The instruction booklet clearly lists it as being a Giant Spider, but it looks nothing like the Giant Spider who appears later on in the game. So is it a spider or isn't? Here are the two basic theories:

Maybe it really is a dead spider. I had rented this game several times back in the day, but I never owned it. And yet, without ever having seen the instruction booklet, I genuinely thought this was supposed to be a dead spider. As I already conceded, this looks nothing like the spider that appears later in the game. However, it did look a lot like a dead tarantula to me. The giant fly hovering over its head certainly helped that assumption along. I was only nine or ten when I played this game, and I had absolutely no understanding of the halo of flies that typically hovers around dead bodies that have been left out in the open. Consequently, I assumed the fly was taunting the dead spider since spiders generally eat flies. Of course, tarantulas don't eat flies and I'm pretty sure I knew that. Still, the instruction booklet validates the spider theory so that's gotta count for something. Unfortunately, it doesn't count for much since English-language manuals written by third-tier Japanese gaming companies often contain all sorts of errors.

The second theory is that this thing is actually a dead dinosaur and the people at Bandai's American offices who were being paid to figure out names for the bosses and levels were total fucktards. This is a pretty solid theory; several of the levels and projectiles described in the manual are blatantly incorrect. Or perhaps it wasn't their fault. After all, Monster Party was toned down from its original prototype version, so perhaps the manual was written before all of the changes were finished. But after having been forced to look at this corpse as a dinosaur, I find it a lot harder to see a dead tarantula. It still doesn't look a whole lot like a dead T-Rex, but it looks slightly more like that than a spider.