Straight from the #1 arcade hit to your PlayStation game console - the DarkStalkers have been unleashed! All the creatures from your darkest dreams have materialized to wage an eternal war for domination of the night. The fate of all humanity rests on who wins this epic struggle. You control the power of your favorite supernatural monster to combine their special attacks and unique abilities in a head to head fighting challenge. It's a fierce and brutal conflict for supremacy in the monster hit of the year!

• Features 10 devastating monsters including the Vampire, Frankenstein, Bigfoot, and the Mummy.
• Build up power in the SPECIAL meter to unleash enhanced attacks an incredible moves.
• One of the best fighting games ever created featuring massive combos and ultra-precise control.

Discussion
Some monsters live forever, and sometimes their games do too.

You play Capcom’s take on various famous monsters, all of which have incredible animations, stages and more. Part of the game’s charm is the way in which the characters are presented. Unlike a typical human cast, this game’s brawlers are stretched, contorted, exaggerated, and insanely expressive. Lord Raptor, the game’s zombie, has limbs that shape shift into buzz saws, chainsaws, swords, and other crazy weapons.

Besides the animation, the visuals are absolutely bursting with colors. Rich deep blues and greens, bright red hues, and various transparency effects provide gorgeous backdrops for all your brawling activities. Some stages have no less than 10 moving objects while others have amazing elemental effects like Anakaris’ water fountain. Psygnosis took advantage of the PlayStation’s color palette to upgrade the arcade visuals and it shows.

Control is essentially Street Fighter, with some minor tweaks. You have a Special Meter that can enhance your special moves to have more hits and damage. There’s also the matter of exaggeration. If you thought Dhalsim had lengthy limbs, many of the DarkStalkers have limbs that reach across the screen, can go off screen and come back up, or become various weapons of mass destruction.

Rounding out the beauty is the audio and voice-overs. Deep booming male monsters, squeaky female monsters, and a haunting announcer all compliment a fully orchestrated soundtrack. Each of the various limbs, weapons, and physical attacks all sound beautifully, especially through a sound system.

There are some games that truly have cemented their place in time, and DarkStalkers has a permanent place on the gaming shelf.
 

• Variant! See below.
   
• A rumor about this game was personally confirmed to me by a Capcom Rep years ago. Back then, it was merely hinted that Capcom didn't do the home port. It turns out it was a team at Psygnosis that pulled the unthinkable. Relatively known now, but I always remember that moment.
  
  Too bad they couldn't get them the X-Men: Children of the Atom code. : )
   
• The entire cast is based off of famous fictional monsters given the Capcom artistic twist. Later Capcom would bring in Fairy Tale characters like little Red Riding Hood.
   
• One of the most brutally hard 2D fighting games ever. To this day I can not beat the game without a GameShark.
   
• To give you an idea of how much artwork switching is going on in the background, barrels will spill wine, once lit areas will go dark from smashed lights, and in one stage no less than 10 different effects are going on.
   
• The console exclusives were pretty crazy during the 32-Bit era. Sony would throw money behind whatever they could get and Sega would basically penny pinch where possible, aside from other factors. One of the more depressing outcomes was the DarkStalkers library. Sony was given the original as an exclusive, then Sega got the sequel as an exclusive. Darkstalkers 3 was split between the two, but only Japan saw both versions released. The Saturn was already dead in the water when DS3 hit the US PlayStation. The Japanese Saturn DS3 used the 4 Meg Ram Cart for amazing speed and visuals.
   
• Worth 10 Points in the Fighters Edge program.
   
• DarkStalker's 'Special' meter doesn't work in the way you think it would. Rather than a big Super Move like Ryu's Huge FireBall, the meter instead powers up all your special moves. An uppercut would now hit multiple times, a fireball would now be a huge blazing sphere, and more. Gifted players who knew how to milk the meter in between combos could deliver some amazing looking combinations.
   
• The Fighters Edge case displays a Memory Card Icon claiming DS requires 2 Blocks to save data. There is no option to Save anywhere in the game. This is a typo.
   
• One of the original games advertised on the back of the Launch Era PlayStations. It would arrive 6 months after launch.
   
• Placing the CD into your computer CD Drive has the disc coming up as VAMPIRE - the game's Japanese name.
   
• The game is somewhat enhanced for the PlayStation. Psygnosis adjusted various effects and made slight changes (transparencies, more vibrant colors) to take advantage of the PSX hardware.

The FE disc has a much lighter shade of blue and a lot more Copyright text.