Welp I finally got around to installing Flashpoint, and lo and behold I can finally put to rest that memory I had of an anime-pixel-art-style Flash fighting game featuring the Powerpuff Girls

It was apparently called Powerpuff Girls D: Battle in Megaville, and as I remembered it, it also featured Dexter from Dexter's Lab, and whenever you beat your opponent, they'd make this sort of echoey cry/scream. I remember finding the game both very fun and cool — despite not having much of a connection to either cartoon — yet also a bit "disturbing" because these characters are supposed to be each other's siblings, and yet here they are just beating the crap out of each other. I didn't quite understand what the deal with the art style was, but I still understood that it, coupled with the violence, made the game feel more teenage and edgy than the cartoon — and being a preteen at the time, that of course appealed to me. Yet I'm pretty sure I only played the game once and then immediately forgot what it was called, and so I would sometimes think to myself for years later "What was that game?" but simply never bother to look into it until today.

Apparently the D in Powerpuff Girls D stands for "Doujinshi", and the game was based on a Powerpuff Girls doujinshi called Powerpuff Girls Doujinshi written by someone called Bleedman. The game itself upon revisiting it was not nearly as good as I remembered, it was decently fun but the controls were still a bit clunky, and the art and music and sound design were not nearly as "uniform" as I remembered, either (add to this the visual bugs as a result of using Flashpoint). The things about Battle in Megaville that made the game stand out so much as a preteen are obviously just a whole lot of nothing now as a young adult.

It does make me curious about that doujinshi, though, because it looks like it has (or at least had) a pretty sizeable fanbase.