Stinger

Falling in love at first sight. Ah, what a sweet and romantic thing to think of on a day like today, Valentine’s Day. No, I’m not daydreaming of my boyfriend. I’m talking about my secret infatuation with a saucy little sexpot with all the right moves, Stinger. I’ve never been a big shooter fanatic, but as soon as I played Stinger, it just clicked with me. Not only did I know I had found a game that I would love, but I knew it was a beginning. A life-long love with the series known as TwinBee.

Soon the sad reality dawned upon me. Stinger was the bastard child of the series, and never again would I find a pretty little TwinBee game hanging in a sandwich bag at GameStop screaming “Buy me!” After Konami’s poor attempt at Americanizing the game Moero TwinBee! Cinnamon Hakushi o Sukue (“Get Burning TwinBee! Cinnamon's Been Kidnapped”) by changing the title to the utterly unmemorable and unappealing “Stinger”, butchering the story, and removing all the impressive-for-1987 mode options (bye-bye, simultaneous three-player action and difficulty selection), few of us kids watching Double Dare bought the game, let alone enjoyed it.

“I guess it just wasn’t meant to be...” said America... But no! You cannot tell me whom I can or cannot love! This story is no Romeo and Juliet! I will fight on for you, my dear TwinBee...

Maybe it’s Stinger’s reputation that the United States opposes. Originally the game began on Donburi Island, home of Dr. Cinnamon. The renowned scientist, living with his creations the TwinBee ships, was busy studying the science of sweets and candy when all of the sudden evil hungry aliens attacked his abode and kidnapped him. If TwinBee doesn’t take off and save his inventor, the aliens will surely succeed in their dastardly plan to turn the world into delicious cotton candy. Konami, Stinger’s mother, tried to “clean up the game’s act” by shifting the location to Konami headquarters and removing the scene of the pilots conversing (and the song that accompanied it). Despite the hack-job, Stinger retains its quirky insanity-driven personality.

Thinking about Stinger makes me hot. It can do horizontally... and vertically. That’s right, unlike its TwinBee brothers and sisters, Stinger does it both ways. It may be a bit unrepresentative of the series, but it still works very well. The series’ strongpoint is vertical stages, and it shows in Stinger. While the horizontal stages are enjoyable, they lack the depth and intensity of the vertical stages in which you must manually target and destroy land enemies. The horizontal stages are very long, so they can become somewhat repetitive.

Oooh... Stinger’s so wild and experimental. One can’t help but love TwinBee’s innovative powering up system that actually makes you work to improve your ship’s abilities. Puffy nimbus clouds float by and jingling jangling bells pop out when they’re shot. Bounce these bells around for a bit, and to your surprise, you’ll discover that they change to numerous colors. Each different color is a power-up, but watch out, one more shot and your precious power-up will be reduced to a lowly point bonus. Unfortunately, most of the power-ups aren’t too useful, and you’ll find far superior ones as rewards for destroying certain land enemies. The only thing that the bells are truly important for is speeding the ship up from its default sluggish difficult control. With the lethargic speed, you may find it hard to successfully keep the bells from falling off the screen, so by the time you get your ship moving responsively, your thumbs may already be aching a little from pushing the D-Pad with all your might (oh, that bad boy is a masochist too!).

Like all old Konami shooters, Stinger can be either too “hard” or too “easy” depending on whether you’re powered up well or not, but the game overall has very “solid” gameplay regardless of the experience. Okay, okay, enough play on words... Stinger offers two difficulties to play through, and contrary to what most would expect, the harder difficulty has more new things to offer than just extra bullets and/or enemies. The game contains five or six unique enemies for each stage, not counting land enemies, and a different wacky boss with its own attack pattern appears to wrap up each level.

Stinger isn’t much of a looker, but it’s not “woke up next to it with a hangover”-ugly either. The game goes the simple route, and for 1987, it’s good but nothing special. The game is very colorful, which is both a compliment and a complaint. Most of the sprites in the game have no outlines, so at times they can be very difficult to see against the active bright backgrounds. In particular, stages 4 and 5 pain me. In the former, the background is a winter wonderland on which the white bullets of both your enemies and your ship get lost. In the latter, blue and green enemies disappear against the landscape of mountains and rivers.

The personality of Stinger can only be described as total anarchy. The enemies vary from pumpkins to clothes hangers and electric fans to unicycles. The bosses reach even further into the depths of insanity with a watermelon slice, a depressed looking squid, a pissed off water faucet, a stoned boombox, and a three-eyed sun. Anyone familiar with the Fantasy Zone or Parodius series should feel right at home. Oddly enough, however, the scenery of the stages occasionally feels to be at a stark contrast with the enemies. Instead of goofy lightheartedness, some of the backgrounds give off a somber gloomy feeling. I mean, one can’t help but wonder why there are so many churches and graves in the first level... The Egyptian stage brings images of slowly and painfully dying of thirst in the unforgiving empty desert. I’m not even going to begin to analyze why you’re flying over a military base loaded with deadly missiles and bombs in the sixth stage.

Stinger can even be a health risk, believe it or not. When a stage ends, there is a short length of screen you must travel before reaching the boss, and I am completely honest when I say that it could give someone seizures. The screen flashes light in such a way that anybody sensitive to flashing light should not look directly at the screen during this part. It doesn’t really bother me, and I imagine it wouldn’t be a concern for most people. Nevertheless, I feel a warning is in order.

Maybe America’s problem with Stinger is another case of bias against that “rock and roll music”. All the songs in the game are upbeat happy tunes, but it’s highly unlikely that they’ll get stuck in anybody’s head. Then again, one wouldn’t expect a legendary composition to be created by a guy named Charley Sada. With the exception of a few small unimportant ditties, the number of tunes in Stinger could be counted on one hand. There’s a normal default song, a peppier song that plays when the ship is powered up, a frantic boss tune, a cheerful bonus game tune, and a more grand sounding piece for the last stage in order to build up the player’s anticipation for the final battle. All of the songs are rather repetitive, but they are still perfectly tolerable.

The game’s sound effects are what I find really satisfying, though. The TwinBee series just wouldn’t be the same if it lacked the bells and the wonderful clinging sound that accompanies them. The shots of the ship and the explosions of its bombs are equally gratifying.

With so many things to love about Stinger and the TwinBee series, nothing will keep me away from it. It’s time to whoop out the eBay account and the list of online import stores ‘cause I’m getting them all. Fans luckier than myself who have already played many of the TwinBee games say that Stinger is but the bottom of the TwinBee pier, so it’s a Stinger fan’s dream come true. Man, I love being an importer! (Forgive my bad Ninja Turtles reference...) In conclusion... I love you, Andreas! Happy Valentine’s Day!