celerystalker
06-10-2016, 10:18 PM
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When I imported my Dreamcast in early 1999, there was one game I just had to have day one to play, and that game was Power Stone. Still, I wanted a handful of games to try, so four other games rounded out my early purchases: Sonic Adventure, Espion-Age-Nts (Industrial Spy), Langrisser Millennium, and Blue Stinger. I played a lot of all of these games, but Blue Stinger ended up hanging on as my long-term favorite of the bunch, though I would learn from Game Informer several months later that apparently it sucks and I was supposed to hate it. I guess it's my fault for playing it prematurely.
Anyway, Blue Stinger is a survival horror adventure starring Eliot and Dogs, an ESER (Sea Rescue) operative and a stranded boat captain respectively. They find themselves stranded on Dinosaur Island, where Yoshis are running wild and bullet bills abound... or a secret science station that covers the entire island, housing an entire self-contained community of researchers looking to uncover the secrets of the island and find their scientific implications. I can't remember which. Either way, things have taken a turn toward the modestly catastrophic, and, trapped by a mysterious shell that forms around the island, Eliot and Dogs have no choice but to investigate the disaster and try to save anyone left to be saved.
The game is modeled in the Resident Evil mold, but with a few postitive changes. For one, analog control has replaced the tank controls for a faster, more fluid experience. Secondly, all of the backgrounds are fully 3D, textured models instead of pre-rendered stills. Not knocking RE's style, but at least it was ambitious, and also allows for changing camera angles for dramatic effect. Combat is slightly different, as Eliot and Dogs can equip both melée and ranged weapons simultaneously, which allows for easier situational combat without retreating to a menu, and melée attacks are faster with a far greater radius of damage. This ends up really changing the tone of the game from an intense, any enemy might kill you, methodical horror game to more of a horror action-thriller closer to something like Jurassic Park in tone.
Eliot and Dogs can be switched on the fly, and each has his own weapons to fit his style. Eliot favors speed over damage,and has a much larger variety of hand to hand weapons. Dogs favors heavier, more powerful ranged weapons, but switches t-shirts to change hand to hand fighting styles (I like his goofy-ass sumo shirt). This also allows both to appear in story cutscenes together, so there is only one real path to play through. You could call that a bummer, but when you realize that it means you'll get to see the scene where Dogs compliments Eliot on his penis either way, it's not so bad.
Blue Stinger works at giving players variety as well, offering timed events like having to find medicine or Pen Pen Tri-Ice-Lon characters for intensity, and having an insulated community installation allows for a lot of different locations as well, such as hotels, theaters, shopping centers, and even an arcade to entertain the families of researchers. The hi-res look was really impressive for the time, and the game still has atmosphere that I enjoy today. The enemies are limited in scope mainly by the story scenario, but still allow for some cool boss fights based around the game's biological monstrosities. It's a horror game that doesn't take itself too seriously, yet never crosses the line into parody. As such, it's never truly scary, yet gains a sense of adventure that I feel benefits it in the big picture.
As a side note, I also get a kick out of the character designs by System Sacom, as they recall the faces in previous games from the designer like the Mansion of Hidden Souls games and Lunacy. Also, Climax would use some of what they learned here to make the cult favorite Dreamcast game Illbleed, in which a dead Dogs makes a cameo.
I've only played through this in Japanese, but with all of the dialogue in english, it was a breeze. I tried it in the US version, but found that in "fixing" the admittedly fussy camera in the japanese version, they made it quite a bit worse. Still, I've beaten it several times in the japanese original, and love its goofy Christmas set pieces, varied locations, cool backgrounds, and silly acting. It's a fun, imperfect game to play through, and I've always thought that its atmosphere well outweighed its deficiencies.
Played it?
When I imported my Dreamcast in early 1999, there was one game I just had to have day one to play, and that game was Power Stone. Still, I wanted a handful of games to try, so four other games rounded out my early purchases: Sonic Adventure, Espion-Age-Nts (Industrial Spy), Langrisser Millennium, and Blue Stinger. I played a lot of all of these games, but Blue Stinger ended up hanging on as my long-term favorite of the bunch, though I would learn from Game Informer several months later that apparently it sucks and I was supposed to hate it. I guess it's my fault for playing it prematurely.
Anyway, Blue Stinger is a survival horror adventure starring Eliot and Dogs, an ESER (Sea Rescue) operative and a stranded boat captain respectively. They find themselves stranded on Dinosaur Island, where Yoshis are running wild and bullet bills abound... or a secret science station that covers the entire island, housing an entire self-contained community of researchers looking to uncover the secrets of the island and find their scientific implications. I can't remember which. Either way, things have taken a turn toward the modestly catastrophic, and, trapped by a mysterious shell that forms around the island, Eliot and Dogs have no choice but to investigate the disaster and try to save anyone left to be saved.
The game is modeled in the Resident Evil mold, but with a few postitive changes. For one, analog control has replaced the tank controls for a faster, more fluid experience. Secondly, all of the backgrounds are fully 3D, textured models instead of pre-rendered stills. Not knocking RE's style, but at least it was ambitious, and also allows for changing camera angles for dramatic effect. Combat is slightly different, as Eliot and Dogs can equip both melée and ranged weapons simultaneously, which allows for easier situational combat without retreating to a menu, and melée attacks are faster with a far greater radius of damage. This ends up really changing the tone of the game from an intense, any enemy might kill you, methodical horror game to more of a horror action-thriller closer to something like Jurassic Park in tone.
Eliot and Dogs can be switched on the fly, and each has his own weapons to fit his style. Eliot favors speed over damage,and has a much larger variety of hand to hand weapons. Dogs favors heavier, more powerful ranged weapons, but switches t-shirts to change hand to hand fighting styles (I like his goofy-ass sumo shirt). This also allows both to appear in story cutscenes together, so there is only one real path to play through. You could call that a bummer, but when you realize that it means you'll get to see the scene where Dogs compliments Eliot on his penis either way, it's not so bad.
Blue Stinger works at giving players variety as well, offering timed events like having to find medicine or Pen Pen Tri-Ice-Lon characters for intensity, and having an insulated community installation allows for a lot of different locations as well, such as hotels, theaters, shopping centers, and even an arcade to entertain the families of researchers. The hi-res look was really impressive for the time, and the game still has atmosphere that I enjoy today. The enemies are limited in scope mainly by the story scenario, but still allow for some cool boss fights based around the game's biological monstrosities. It's a horror game that doesn't take itself too seriously, yet never crosses the line into parody. As such, it's never truly scary, yet gains a sense of adventure that I feel benefits it in the big picture.
As a side note, I also get a kick out of the character designs by System Sacom, as they recall the faces in previous games from the designer like the Mansion of Hidden Souls games and Lunacy. Also, Climax would use some of what they learned here to make the cult favorite Dreamcast game Illbleed, in which a dead Dogs makes a cameo.
I've only played through this in Japanese, but with all of the dialogue in english, it was a breeze. I tried it in the US version, but found that in "fixing" the admittedly fussy camera in the japanese version, they made it quite a bit worse. Still, I've beaten it several times in the japanese original, and love its goofy Christmas set pieces, varied locations, cool backgrounds, and silly acting. It's a fun, imperfect game to play through, and I've always thought that its atmosphere well outweighed its deficiencies.
Played it?