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Stinger!

Stinger Famicom Box

Stinger - Sounds like a great game to review at the height of spring and heading into summer. Especially with the birds singing, and the bees trying to have sex with them…as is my understanding. It has to be about something with a stinger, right? Perhaps a scorpion, but more likely a wasp or bee, right? After all, this game is a follow-up to Konami's early vertical SHMUP TwinBee! If you made that apiary assumption, though, you’d bee wrong... very wrong... just like me. Having never played the game before, but seeing it included in various lists, this comes as a bit of a surprise. You don’t even get to be shaped like a bee or a wasp (for that, you may want the even earlier arcade vertical SHMUP Funky Bee), but you do get to fly and kill things. But if that isn’t enough, the game's story is very 80s and that is what we’re here to discuss today. What is the story? Well…

Egads! Professor Cinnamon, Earth’s flamboyant genius, has been kidnapped by evil alien bandits from the planet Attackon located a billion light years beyond the Milk way in the violent Ergo Galaxy.

The Attackons snatched the professor after observing his discovery of a bio-nuclear sweetener formula. A formula that, in the hands of such evil-doers, could ultimately be used to change the Earth into a giant ball of cotton candy - the Attackons favorite carnival snack. Luckily, before the professor’s capture, he developed and deployed squadrons of Stingers, a highly advanced jet fighter capable of battling the most fiendish, fearsome life forms. The Stinger is loaded with an arsenal of bombs, cannons, and lasers to smash enemy defenses, plus incredible speed and handling to out maneuver counter-Attackons.

As a member of this elite Stinger squadron, your mission is to blast through the Attackon forces, which stretch from outer space to the South Pacific, and rescue Professor Cinnamon before his formula can be zapped from his brain.

So strap into your Stinger and hang tight. The fate of the world rests on your shoulders, and the situation looks pretty sticky. 

There's certainly a lot to dig into here. It's the '80s of course, so the sweetener formula must be bio-nuclear. And all to change an entire planet into cotton candy? This plan seems both ill-advised and highly improbable. Sure, it might make the whole world supersweet, but how would it even turn into cotton candy? Once can only assume the "fallout" from that "bio-nuclear sweetener bomb" would take the form of long strings of candy substance slowly falling from the clouds. Why is the Professor creating a bio-nuclear sweetener anyway? Does he work for some sort of '80s food conglomerate set on a less expensive way to sweeten foods for the masses, thereby making their go-go '80s Reaganaut capitalists even richer? It doesn’t seem like either side did any planning. Though, perhaps Professor Cinnamon was just pursuing bio-nuclear sweetener for his own mad scientist pursuits. Is there a mad scientist that couldn’t use yet another doomsday device? 

Clearly, if we aren’t the bees (or some other sort of singing insect), then the bad guys must be, right? They must be some hierarchy of bees, wasps, or other sugar-loving insects hell-bent on gaining a massive sugar acquisition via the formula to this sweetener. Except... they aren’t. There are a wide variety of floating enemies, but precious few seem to be bug-like. Some seem to be floating strawberries and donuts, while others appear to be floating miniature houses, spacefaring wooden ships (were they mixing in Spelljammer?) and vintage telephones. (Although at the time, they would just be telephones, albeit older ones - not the glorious handheld bricklike mobile phones popularized in late '80s and early 90s media, but standard average rotary phones!) Perhaps, if the supreme '80s weirdness were limited to one type of nonsensical enemy, we could make a justification. Who would say no to Johnny 5 if he asked for a cup of sugar? The average "bad guy"is just too varied here, though. If the masses aren’t sugar-seeking bugs, then their leaders must be. Except they're just as varied as the average game’s Goomba - which weren't really varied in Mario games... at all.
 

So, who are the leaders here? We have Willie the Watermelon Head, who seems to be some type of anthropomorphic floating watermelon wedge. Already full of natural sugar, and I doubt they need even more. Fang? Fang seems to be some sort of flying faucet with teeth that uses his knob as a helicopter rotor. That's one that may haunt all of our dreams. Sigmund Squidmund - this character may belong on the short lived Itchy & Scratchy & Friends Hour. Perhaps this is some sort of sugar squid? We also have Luther, who appears to be some sort of floating dumpster. Again, we have nothing against robots with some personality, but Luther seems (understandably) depressed. Maybe that sugar could cheer Luther up, at least temporarily. Then we have Master Blaster. No, not the (also) fittingly weird NES game, but some sort of living boombox. Also, every great '80s game needed a living angry sun right? Well, this one gives us Solar B. Threeys, thirsty for sugar because it… burns well? Okay, maybe we can find motives for most of them, but it is a huge stretch in most cases. There is still the Attackon Emperor in Disguise. Now, clearly '80s villains included all sorts of crazy emperors - Lo Pan and Ming the Merciless to name a few (to be fair, Ming had his origin in the original Flash Gordon serials). In this case the Emperor of the Attackons is a space snake?  Well, the Space Pope is reptilian, after all. 

So can we pull any tabletop gaming inspiration out of this crazy game? If there's any lesson here, it's that things don’t have to fully make sense or have a perfect motive to be enjoyable. However, it's recommended that you keep this to a minimum - espeically when people aren't expecting it. Media evolves over time, and that's certainly true for video games as well as tabletop games. While we can accept some ridiculousness, most of us like our games to make sense, at least by their own logic. Unless your players are signing up for something purely surreal, in which case... have at! So until next time, enjoy your dice and your tables - even if they’re trying to come alive and take all of your sugar. 

- A

(I'm going to make you play Parodius at some point, that'll blow your mind. - B) 

Send questions, comments and "we have Fantasy Zone at home!" jabs to neversaydice20@gmail.com.

Famicom Cart Art


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