"Blue hair, anyone? Stinkoman's always got fightings and challenges to keep him busy. Jump and shoot your way to all ends of Planet K. End Boss feature!!" —Videlectrix Stinkoman 20X6 is a side-scrolling platformer game which stars Stinkoman. This game is based on the classic Capcom Mega Man series. It also parodies the poor Japanese to English translations common to video games of that era, similar to those that appear on the current Games Menu. The game is currently unfinished, but on January 6, 2018, @StrongBadActual announced that its final level is scheduled to release in 2018. A further announcement coming on December 28, 2018 stated that the release will be in 2019, and another pushed it back to 2020, concluding after a 15-year hiatus.
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And sometimes you were there for video games. The Brothers Chaps put out a surprising amount of these, mostly exploring riffs or jokes from their cartoons. They were rough, buggy, often simple, and very silly, but darn if they didn't all have heart. There were a lot of different types of Flash Games they put together, but to my way of thinking, the two biggest were Peasant's Quest (Quest (Quest (Quest (Quest...)))), and this. A Mega Man parody based on a 70s anime parody (named after a throwaway line said by a dopey athelete in a fantasy sequence) of a masked luchador named after some characters from NES game Pro Wrestling.
Alright, despite the obvious Mega Man base for Stinkoman's sprite and abilities, the game is generally more straightforward as a platformer. A full level select, Robot Master setup is a bit too ambitious for this game's scope. But it is very much having fun being a silly idiosyncratic supposedly 80s game. There is no logical consistency to what makes up this world, with a character at one point walking across a screen transition from the planet's surface to the moon. Level concepts are played with either because it's the done thing ("Stratosfear!" and "Turbolence"), for maximum silliness ("Dumb Wall!" is a very basic level mechanically, but it's so stupid a high concept that it makes it all the more enjoyable), or a combination of the two ("Negatory!" is perhaps one of the few times I've seen a video game acknowledge stuff like the Minus World, and a great trip to boot). The game is so quick to pivot what it's doing that nothing has the time to grow stale; you can very much tell that the Brothers Chaps ran with whatever ideas amused them, between the level concepts and the writing that at times feels like a joke on a joke on a joke.
So they developed the first 9 levels over the course of 2005, and then it took them 15 years and the pending death of Flash as a platform to finally deliver the long-promised level 10. And they joke about it, but you can reeeeeally tell that the last level came out 15 years later. The jump from Level 9 to Level 10 is astounding in just about every way. Background sprites are suddenly ridiculously more sophisticated, physics feel a little better, level design is longer and more impactful, they got friggin' Toby Fox to compose the last couple stages' music. It's jarring, and in any more serious release would strike me as awkward. But for Stinkoman and Homestar Runner, accidentally hailing the end of an era? It feels perfect.
Flash being dead and Ruffle being an imperfect emulator, I'm not sure if this game has an audience anymore, though I know the Brothers Chaps are working to restore the game. But if you're able to, it's a cute, extremely-out-of-context snapshot into the energy of a lot of Homestar Runner, distilled through the lens of early anime and NES-era gaming.
A wonderful time capsule of 2005 internet humor wrapped inside a parody of Megaman and other early JP games that got poorly translated US releases.
Genuinely good gameplay, wicked hard tho.
Check it out these days and there's a new mode with more reasonable checkpoints etc... if you can get it to play after the death of flash.