Its fur is like filth-caked steel wool, its eyelids appear to be melting, its elongated legs feel just a touch more insectile than they should and its forked tail ends in a lovely little splash of toxic color. Its luminous, expressionless eyes are positioned at maximum creepy-cute relativity to its bony, fleshless jaws, which resemble the snaggle-toothed beak of some of the more frightening pterosaurs. Everything about Parasite Eve's mutant rat achieves mutant rat perfection. We just watched this cutie's birth, and you know we're in for some fun when a game's lowest-level enemies drip this much style, along with some less recognizable secretions. See your ass in COURT, Mitochondrial Eve!!! If you're reading this page the night it's gone up on December 24th, 2015, you may have realized it is now Mitochondrial Eve's eighteenth birthday, and you know what THAT means, guys! Our little girl is finally, at long last old enough to purchase her very own deadly handgun or rifle at almost any Wal-Mart in the United States! This would seal our doom once and for all if not for the fact that she's also old enough to be legally sued.

Partly due to the side-effects of experimental drugs and partly due to an implied genetic mutation, one lucky human woman's mitochondria awaken on December 24th, 1997, as a being calling itself Eve, who proceeds to tear her way around New York City, slaughtering humans in droves and transmogrifying wildlife to suit her exquisitely grotesque tastes. According to the game's narrative, the little dears are actually capable of a collective consciousness that only needs the right conditions in which to 'awaken,' and once awakened, an organism's mitochondria demonstrate an almost godlike capacity to alter the minds and physiology of their hosts. It all starts with mitochondria, the organelles that allow our cells to function and are strongly believed to have once been symbiotic bacteria. Though not actively billed as a horror title, Parasite Eve's premise and aesthetics are nothing but. I'd get the chance to play through this one a couple of years later, but by then, I already knew every veinous, dripping inch of its bestiary like the back of my gelatinous pseudopoda, and my play experience became more of a virtual creature safari than anything else. Back then, one of my favorite pre-internet activities was to be dropped off at Barnes and Noble, Browse the video game strategy guides, and sketch the monsters and bosses from titles I never played or in some cases never would. I was only fifteen when the game released in North America, and for years, it was one of those titles I could only admire from afar. I could use some cheering up after reviewing the death spiral known as the Silent Hill franchise, and what better than a classic game packed with some of the most magnificently gorgeous monsters in the entire video game medium? Squaresoft's Parasite Eve is almost old enough to drink as I write this, but remains a master monsterpiece of creature design with one dark, disturbing story to match.

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