Bee 52 (NES) Playthrough

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Published on August 17, 2023 10:36:15 PM ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O35IXjXgIkU

Game:

Bee 52 (1992)

Category:

Let's Play

Duration: 1:55:20

4,893 views

202

A playthrough of Camerica's unlicensed 1992 action game for the NES, Bee 52.

Bee 52 was one of several NES titles created by Codemasters to be sold in North America through Camerica, an unauthorized Canadian distributor that made use of special circuitry in their cartridges to bypass the NES's lockout chip and sidestep Nintendo's exorbitant licensing and manufacturing fees.

You play as the titular Bee 52, who is neither a long-ranger bomber nor a member of a popular music group. He is an employee of the "Really Nice Honey" company, and it seems that his coworkers have all recently disappeared after running afoul of the "Ghastlies." In order to preserve the supply chain and to save his hive's company, Bee 52 sets out to collect all the honey that his fallen comrades could not.

The game plays out as a free-scrolling horizontal shooter, similar in format to Fantasy Zone and Choplifter. The twenty-four stages are obstacle courses made up of large-scale representations of kitchens, back yards, and ponds, each with its own unique features and hazards to overcome, and the goal is to visit the flowers and collect enough honey to fill the jar at the bottom of the screen.

Bee 52 can only hold three flowers worth of honey at a time and will have to regularly return to the hive to make deposits, but he isn't defenseless. Since passive play isn't an option, Bee 52 can fire at standard enemies with an upgradable "spit attack" and he can take down larger enemies, like spiders and Venus fly traps, by impaling them on his stinger.

The graphics are excellent - better than most officially-licensed games - featuring large sprites, vibrant backgrounds, and several impressive uses of parallax scrolling effects. The music is also very good, though it only plays between stages. In-game you'll only hear sound effects, but this serves an important purpose: you need to be able to hear a fast-moving enemy's buzzing wings before it appears on screen in order to anticipate its movements.

And for the first half of the game, the controls are also quite good. Bee 52 feels heavy and you need to take your momentum into account when navigating narrow areas to avoid bouncing off of objects, but before long it comes to feel pretty intuitive. The level designs and enemy placements pose a solid challenge that slowly builds as you make progress.

But once you finish the first twelve stages, the game decides that fun time is over by introducing a fundamental change to your controls. Bee loses his ability to hover in place, and from there on, you'll have to pump the up button to keep him afloat. This makes it impossible to fly in a straight line, and it completely disrupts the curve of the game's difficulty progression. It makes even the simplest of tasks (like collecting honey) a chore as you find yourself being bounced like a pinball between obstacles and traps, and since the unforgiving time limits force you to dart through stages at breakneck speeds, you get few opportunities to properly consider your moves.

For me, this was the point where the game stopped being fun. I really enjoyed the first half, but the sudden change in how the bee handles turns a silly, light-hearted adventure into a ridiculous gauntlet of challenges that the game does nothing to prepare you for. There are no continues, either, so you're forced to grind through the first half over and over as you attempt to come to grips with the later stages. There are a few warp zones, but they do little to mitigate the frustration.

I loved Bee 52, then hated it, and finally came to resent it for wasting my time for no good reason.

Codemasters was already well known in Europe for producing quality computer games, and several of their console carts - games like Micro Machines, Bignose the Caveman, Linus Spacehead, and The Ultimate Stuntman - helped to establish and cement their reputation in North America, but it was probably for the best that Bee 52 flew under everyone's radar. It wouldn't have done that reputation any favors.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.

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