Sting

Sting to the rescue! If you like avoiding the mainstream but love playing a good old fashioned platformer, then this difficult to find little game is well worth the effort it takes to track down. It's pretty much a straight knock off of platformers like Sonic, but it does so with charm, personality, and bags of entertainment. The story revolves around the adventures of a little blue hedgehog (Sonic's sister perhaps?) and finds her travelling through an array of colorful environments, although it's not entirely clear why this should be necessary. In classic platform fashion, she runs around, leaps a bit and dashes at the many enemies which litter her path. In similar style to the Kirby games, you can absorb the power of defeated enemies which comes in handy during later stages, while you can also throw rocks at the bad guys a la Super Mario Bros 2. There are also Sonic-style springboards and the environments you travel through are your standard cutesy platformer-type levels. Adventures of Sting is certainly not shy about where it gets its inspiration from but while this criminal lack of originality has killed many other games in the past, here it seems to work to its advantage and actually results in a curiously enjoyable little title. The game gets off to a great start with its lush visuals which are just bursting with color and personality and with some lovely environments to discover. The controls are easy to pick up, while the platforming itself is largely entertaining and although not overly challenging, maybe this isn't such a big deal. All in all, something of a forgotten gem.