A Bizarre Horror Staple For Dreamcast
[Casual Review/Anecdote] A look at the odd Dreamcast horror title: Blue Stinger.
Despite it sitting shoulder to shoulder with the Xbox 360 and the Nintendo 64 as one of my 3 favourite consoles the Dreamcast has seldom seen coverage on the Journal, so this month, I’d like to change that.
The Dreamcast is no stranger to great survival-horror titles. Capcom’s Resident Evil 2, 3 and Dino Crisis all came to the DC in perfect ports of the superior PC versions thanks to the console’s on-board Windows CE software and it even received its own -prior to the death of the console- exclusive entry in the RE series in the form of Code Veronica: a divisive Resident Evil title that nonetheless sits comfortably in my top 3 for that franchise. I’m of the opinion that Alone In The Dark: The New Nightmare for Dreamcast is a good game as well. On the more obscure and expensive end of the spectrum we have some truly weird titles like D2, with its FPS elements and Illbleed: one of the only 2 games developed entirely by Climax Graphics. The other game birthed by this studio and the topic of today’s article is 1999's Blue Stinger, one of the Dreamcast’s 15 launch titles here in the UK.
Blue Stinger has never been re-released or remade: this is a true DC exclusive; its developer has been defunct for almost 25 years so I doubt that will ever change and this game isn’t among the best-sellers on the Dreamcast either so today, I hope to introduce you to something you’ve never heard of and perhaps you’ll decide to check it out in future.
What Is Blue Stinger?
Blue Stinger is yet another Sega-exclusive title that’s not easy to define; it’s a survival-horror game that doesn’t try to scare you, an action game where you rarely have the resources to go postal and a third-person shooter with no aiming system and extensive melee options. This clashing trio of genres encompasses everything both bad and good about Blue Stinger. This is a messy experience, often amateurish but it remains consistently fun despite that fact. If I had to compare this game to others you might have played, I’d say Blue Stinger plays and feels like a mix between Dead Space and Dead Rising with just a sprinkle of Code Veronica: you kill mutated enemies for money and can cash in that money for better weapons and more supplies but it also has a quirkiness to it like Dead Rising and the thoroughly weird Christmas-y atmosphere in some areas give it that Willamette feel.
This is quite a long intro, feel free to watch it but the gist of Blue Stinger’s premise is that a meteorite crashes on the Yucatan Peninsula in the year 2000 and leaves a giant crater behind along with a new island: Dinosaur Island, named that because it’s the same size as the meteorite which wiped out the impressive lizards. Kimra, a shady bio-tech company, sets up a facility on the island for its research purposes and it grows into a small city in the 18 years that follow.
One day in 2018 a mysterious bubble appears around the island and the facility is overrun by monsters.
Eliot Ballade is an Emergency Sea Evacuation and Rescue Organisation veteran and gets stranded on the island when the ‘bubble’ bisects his boat and a mysterious entity pulls him ashore. Shortly after coming ashore you meet Dogs Bower -yes, that’s his name, Dogs- and you control the pair for the rest of the game, swapping between the two on the fly as you explore the island. It’s a novel concept that makes what could have been the usual 2-campaign structure a bit more interesting: it’s a bit like Resident Evil 5 only less crap and more technically compromised.
I normally don’t delve too deeply into regional differences but Blue Stinger is one game where its Japanese version is much different from the one the rest of the world got: arguably a whole different genre, in fact.
In the West, Blue Stinger uses a typical sixth generation camera which sits behind the player, trailing you as you explore Dinosaur Island but in Japan the camera flits and pans about the 3D environment from fixed points similar to Code Veronica. If you do plan to check out or emulate Blue Stinger for yourself -and if nothing else, it will be an experience unlike any other I can assure you- then you should should know that each has the effect of emphasising one side of Blue Stinger over the others; Western Blue Stinger feels more like an action game whereas Japanese Blue Stinger retains more of that survival horror DNA. Neither camera system is implemented particularly well so this will have to be a decision based on preference.
How Is Blue Stinger?
Blue Stinger is a notorious ‘marmite’ game among fans of the Dreamcast: you either love Blue Stinger or hate it but for damn sure, you won’t forget it.
There is a lot of fun to be had here but unfortunately, a lot of Stinger’s tediousness is front-loaded. The first 2 hours of the game bombard you with maddening music, an overly long introduction and an obnoxious stamp hunt in a supermarket where you fight the camera more than the monsters but make it through that and things get a lot smoother from then on, particularly if you scrape together enough scratch for some better weapons. The Freezer is when Stinger starts to get better, remember that if you play it.
For about 90 minutes all you will hear is this song on-loop at high volume. Blue Stinger’s audio mixing and design is dreadful, any hope the music had at being enjoyable is obliterated by it playing constantly, drowning out dialogue, sound effects and more; you can’t even escape in the menus, it is overpowering. Nowhere in this game will you find a quiet moment and I don’t mean that as a compliment, it is just too much. I enjoy Blue Stinger but for this reason alone, I can only tolerate playing it in short, 1-2 hour bursts.
At the very least there are one or two nice tracks in here, this one plays in the Brain Area, which is your base of operations and pretty much the only safe place on Dinosaur Island.
Anyway, you didn’t click on this to read about the music in an obscure 1999 Dreamcast horror game, let’s get to the meat and potatoes. I’m never quite sure whether Blue Stinger is ahead of its time or woefully inept which is the kind of ramshackle charm that makes it so fun.
The way forward is relentlessly vague and difficult to find so I’d recommend a guide handy while you play this one; I chose to use one from 1999 on GameFaqs: from the year before I was even born. This omnipresent, linear progression paired with the freedom you have to roam previously unlocked areas and to grind money from the respawning enemies gives Blue Stinger a level of freedom that almost reminds me of many modern games; I’m not going to compare Blue Stinger to the likes of Breath Of The Wild but there is something modern Zelda-like in the way that you can veer off-course at will to gather more dosh and potentially stumble upon hidden boss fights. I’ve been rewarded with all sorts of freebies this way.
Blue Stinger is a bit like Metal Gear Solid in the sense that you’re mostly led around by a supporting character over the radio, in this game it’s Janine: a fellow survivor with a leg injury who stays in the Brain Area. Janine calls every once in a while to tell you what to do but getting it done is entirely down to Eliot and Dogs.
In other horror games the enemies drop nothing and for the most part never respawn but in Blue Stinger they erupt into showers of coins after death and for all the awkwardness of the camera and the troubling lack of an aiming system, this does make killing enemies in Blue Stinger satisfying. Limbs pop off, heads go flying and blood spurts out, it’s quite the spectacle. Enemy variety is strong too with progressively larger and more mutated humanoid creatures making up the bread and butter of your foes alongside mutated crows, fish and even some more wacky dangers like giant hermit crabs using entire vehicles as shells and laser shooting drones.
You’ll be kept happy with a stream of automatic shotguns, gatling guns and karate kicks with which to fight back against the hordes. Weapon variety is not a weakness of Blue Stinger.
Their niches aren’t as aggressively defined as they might be in a modern game but swapping between Eliot and Dogs generally means swapping between a lighter, faster and more melee-focused playstyle and one that sacrifices mobility and flexibility for heavier firepower; Eliot has a few heavy hitters like the Napalm Launcher but his movement speed is cranked up higher and he gets a variety of melee weapons because he needs to make up for his arsenal of weaker guns. Dogs’ shirts are high, damage, high risk melee options and his starting Bowgun is powerful but slow making him vulnerable early on but once you find more weapons and engage mutants in less tight quarters, he really comes into his own.
At the beginning of the game, I was playing as Eliot about 90% of the time but now, about halfway through, that split is closer to 50/50.
Chalk And Cheese
To tell you the truth, Blue Stinger doesn’t play very well: the camera is jank, the aiming is bad and it’s trying for 1 genre but hitting 3 different ones, however, this game is full of that intangible thing we call heart: this is a supremely entertaining experience made by developers who earnestly wanted you to have a good time. Some brief flashes of frustration haven’t at all smothered that feeling for me. As far as cult-classics go, this is as cult as you can get.
You don’t know how deep this rabbit hole goes. Eliot, Janine and Dogs are voiced by the same actors as Sonic, Rouge and Eggman in Sonic Adventure, are you getting what I’m saying? Blue Stinger has foul-mouthed Eggman!
What enhances all these coincidences are the bizarre voice direction choices littered throughout the game. This isn’t bad in a Resident Evil way, where the voice actors sound like Martians mimicking humans from memory, rather, this is bad in a 2011 YouTube Poop kind of way: there are unnatural gaps between voice lines, replies that seem completely out of place and delivery that’s composed of pure ibérico ham. The performances are perfectly fine and the facial expressions are good enough for the era, it just feels like the editor was on a mission to make the game profoundly unserious.
From what I know of the development of Blue Stinger, this Japanese team drew inspiration from Hollywood so there are flashes of genuine brilliance here but so much is lost in translation. Regardless, the bond between Dogs and Eliot is actually one of the best parts of Blue Stinger: through dodgy translation, YTP editing and the trials of wonky gameplay, you still find yourself getting attached to this pair of nob heads: they bicker over Janine, roast each other and each fill their archetype perfectly; Eliot is altruistic and plucky while simultaneously not being annoying and he comes across as a tad full of himself while Dogs is foul-mouthed and grumpy but not to the point where it gets annoying. If Chris Wood-field and Jill Wooden-tine could launch a franchise then these boys could have too.
Stinger’s humour isn’t all at the game’s expense either, once you enter the commercial district you realise that the only entertainment they have is a pub, a strip club and an arcade, that tickled me.
The Ugly Duckling
Is Blue Stinger a top 5 Dreamcast game? Probably not. Is it one of the top 3 survival-horror games on the console? Well, to be honest, it’s hard to even give it that label, I wouldn’t say so. Besides the fact that it runs smooth and never crashes, Blue Stinger is a bit of a disaster design-wise; we’ve talked about the gameplay already but the pacing is a mess too: you spend the entire first half of this game getting to the local pub and jumping through convoluted hoops to get around the barricade between you and that district of the city. The funniest part of all this is that… it just doesn’t matter. Blue Stinger has been forgotten by the general public but it’s a staple among Dreamcast fans, why? Because there’s simply nothing else like it. This game and its lovable stupidity have never been recreated. Many would even call this their favourite game on the platform.
I’ve played better survival-horror games and horror-action titles but there is only one Blue Stinger.
If a few of you choose to seek out Blue Stinger then I wouldn’t be surprised if out of those few, at least half bounce off the game. This absolutely is not a title for everyone… but it is one for me. Blue Stinger has a so-bad-it’s-good reputation but I’m going to be kinder to it than that: this is a good game that was one lock-on mechanic and a better camera away from being a great one.
Games like this are what keep me so in-love with the Dreamcast. It has a library full of exquisitely weird games and diamonds in the rough; love them, hate them, you won’t forget them.
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Not sure if you ever played Deadly Premonition, but your explaining how Blue Stinger makes you feel reminded me of DP. Very jank, but so, so memorable.
Thanks for the article!
This was very entertaining, I'll admit. "Blue Stinger" was a title I've seen a few times, but it meant nothing to me until this review.
I'm not sure how far deep in my backlog I'd have to dig to get around to playing it. But something I often think about, as I hunt for retro hidden gems, is that some of my all-time favorites are deeply uneven, swing-for-the-fences, sui generis games that probably deserve every bit of the C+/B- rating the broader gaming community gave them, but in my house they are A+ gems. Games like E.V.O. on SNES, for example.
So sometimes I wonder to myself, "Is there another E.V.O. out there that I'm missing? And how would I ever find it?"
AI helps with the search some, but the only way to get there, really, is to slowly work through my backlog. Which I've been doing a lot of lately.