Stinger (NES)
Some genres just never found traction in the United States, as seems to be the case with the cute ’em up subgenre of shoot ’em up games. While serious spaceships shooting down alien menaces caught on pretty well in the West, taking cute ships to fight living mops and radishes in colorful backgrounds didn’t seem to resonate as much outside of Japan, and one of the pioneers of this subgenre, Twinbee, has seen sporadic releases in the U.S. because of this. However, in the early days of the series, America would receive Twinbee’s first console outing, although it was likely given the title Stinger to seem a bit rougher and tougher to American audiences.
Despite the name change though, the story and visuals of Stinger hardly deviate from their Japanese forms. While you have to read the back of the box or the manual to get more than the basics of it, Stinger involves the ridiculous premise of Professor Cinnamon having developed a bio-nuclear sweetener formula that a group of attacking aliens named, appropriately enough, the Attakons from planet Attackon hope to use to turn Earth into a giant ball of cotton candy they can then eat. Hopping into the Stinger fighter aircraft, up to two players can fly across the planet to places like Egypt, the Arctic Circle, and under the Indian Ocean in their bid to save it before they take the fight to space to meet the Attakons head on.
The environments you fly across mostly determine the types of enemies you’ll face, but what these enemies are doesn’t necessarily match the level theme. You’ll only ever fight the turtles and starfish underwater which makes sense, but the Arctic Circle has technological enemies like flying vinyl records, T.V.s, and telephones for some reason, another level features an inexplicable sports theme with unicycles, dumbbells, and volleyballs, and Egypt having clothes hangers attacking you just adds more absurdity to an already absurd game. You can at least see things like a Sphinx or pyramid in the background of Egypt and the backdrops match their supposed location, but the cute ’em up genre is often about tossing the wackiest enemies into a level even though their behavior is often fairly tame. They fly in and might try to bump into you or fire a shot before fleeing, but them being a clothes hanger or dumbbell doesn’t have much to do with how they attack. It does make it easy to remember how the enemy type will behave at least since you’ll definitely be able to recognize them on sight, but there are a few more aspects to enemies that don’t make them straightforward.
One such trait is that, despite mostly being a sidescrolling shooter, Stinger mixes things up a bit when it comes to its presentation. Some levels are horizontal, the player able to move the Stinger around freely within the space of a screen that’s scrolling to the right automatically. However, every other stage changes the setup to be a vertical level instead, Stinger flying towards the top of the screen automatically. These vertical levels tend to have enemies who are a bit more devious than the horizontal stages, foes flying in not just from above but from all parts of the side borders and even appearing behind you, requiring a lot of movement around the middle of the screen to stay safe. Horizontal stages have some foes like this too despite usually having them come in from the right or above, but they are typically safer because they have a ground layer on the bottom that prevents any baddies from flying in from below. However, ground packs its own dangers, with certain foes appearing only on the ground and firing up at you. These exist in the vertical levels as well, but they are peskier there because the orientation of the stage means you are constantly flying over a screen-sized stretch of earth whereas there’s only a strip of it to house these ground-bound foes in the horizontal stages.
These ground enemies are dealt with differently in the two level types. Your Stinger has a fairly decent starting shot, but it packs an alternate fire that is either almost useless or the only way of fighting enemies on the ground depending on if its a horizontal or vertical level respectively. The alternate fire in a horizontal stage is a heart that fires out above your Stinger and barely does damage while the alternate fire in a vertical level drops a bomb that can completely destroy any enemy below. If you get hit on your arms though, you’ll lose this ability in the vertical levels unless you can grab a passing ambulance for a one time repair per life. Lacking that option can make later levels much harder, but there are some upgrades that can make your fighter craft stronger. Like in most Twinbee games, you upgrade your vehicle by firing upon clouds, bells popping out that must then be juggled with weapons fire until they change color. Depending on how many times they’ve been shot, the bells can grant power-ups like increased speed, double shots, helper ships, and even a shield, although shooting a bell too many times turns it into an instant death pickup instead, one that looks like a Japanese man’s face for some reason. The bells provide a split in your attention so that Stinger isn’t solely about gunning down anything that appears on screen without a thought, managing your fire potentially necessary to ensure you can get the stronger shot type by only bouncing the bell around the perfect amount of times. You can also grab power-ups from destroyed stuff on the ground such as shots that fire to your left or right, a spread shot, or a random effect that might just be points but can also be things like invincibility. You do lose all your power-ups when you die, but each life provides a one time boon in that your ghost will emerge that you can snag to get your power-ups back. You can’t chain these to keep power-ups forever, but it can prevent you from being too weak in crucial fights such as the boss battles.
Boss battles are just as kooky in design as regular enemies, with foes like a giant watermelon slice and a boom box appearing at the end of levels. They aren’t particular elaborate outside of appearance though, usually having one attack pattern you need to consistently dodge as you try and land your shots on their sometimes hard to glean weak points. A sound indicator will tell you if you scored a damaging hit, but some fights, without the proper weapon upgrades, drag on as the openings to hit these spots are brief. None of the bosses are particularly bad, but they’re not exciting either, and that’s a general problem with Stinger. Your vehicle will be destroyed pretty easily by almost any shot or contact that doesn’t just take out the bombing option, meaning that Stinger sort of becomes about filling the screen with your upgraded weaponry until a shot slips through and resets the process. It’s not so mindless that you can just sit back and fire away, but it doesn’t seem to ask much of a player besides some attentiveness in shooting approaching baddies or juggling the bells well.
THE VERDICT: Stinger has an interesting and kooky look thanks to its weird plot and the strange appearances of its enemies, but these don’t impact the play really since it’s all surface level strangeness. A few mercies prevent you from being underpowered in this shoot ’em up, but it has fairly straightforward gameplay with quick deaths and enemies who are mostly dealt with through good weaponry rather than smart flying. The bell upgrade system asks for some restraint, at least when you’re weak, and co-op can spice things up especially with the special maneuver where you can line up for a more powerful joint laser attack, but there’s nothing uniquely captivating about it despite having pretty solid shoot ’em up design.
And so, I give Stinger for the Nintendo Entertainment System…
An OKAY rating. Shifting up the level perspectives and having new enemies every stage means that Stinger does what cute ’em up fans probably want the most, and that’s seeing a bunch of weird enemy designs in colorful locations. It is definitely interesting to see what is going to appear in the next stage, it’s just a shame so much of it folds easily to your weapons fire. Stinger doesn’t need to be complicated, but while enemies will move in different ways and fire upon you at different rates, it just feels like the basic level of resistance one would expect in a shoot ’em up. You have to move and shoot to survive but not in a way that will push you too hard or ask for you to consider how you’re firing save when you’re shooting the bells to build up an upgrade. It’s not so easy that a player can breeze through it, but it doesn’t really pursue any interesting ideas that would ask for more than decent flying and frequent shooting to succeed.
The Twinbee series wouldn’t return to American shores for many years after Stinger, and it might just be because the shooting style is just so-so without any significant extra challenges beyond bouncing bells around with your shots. Sure, the cutesie looks would turn some people off, but even those who might come to Stinger for it will find the weird and wacky enemy designs don’t really impact the shape or gameplay of this run of the mill shoot ’em up. While it does mix things up just enough with the level orientations to avoid being boring or bland, Stinger doesn’t pack the extra punch needed to elevate it above the shoot ’em up genre’s quality baseline.