Starship Troopers

""Bugs, Mr. Rico! Zillions of 'em! I'm-a burnin' them down!""

Starship Troopers has spanned four loosely-related franchises; a politically controversial Robert A. Heinlein novel, a short-lived (and quasi-legal) Anime adaptation, a polarizing Paul Verhoeven film and its sequels, and a CGI animated TV series. There was also a pair of table-top strategy games that had some limited success, a D20 System adaption that nobody remembers, and at least one computer tactical game. All they have in common is the title, a few character names, and the Bug War premise.

Not to be confused with that song by that prog-rock band (which in any case was "Starship Trooper" singular), or the pop hit "I Lost My Heart To A Starship Trooper" by Sarah Brightman.

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The Book
See: Starship Troopers (novel)

The Movie
See: Starship Troopers (film)

The Series
See: Roughnecks: Starship Troopers Chronicles

The Anime
See: Starship Troopers (anime)

The Strategy Game


This 1976 Avalon Hill game used the conflict-zones of the book as a setting, without getting into anything beyond the strategy/tactics of warfare with the Powered Armor and other tech-items. It was one of Avalon Hill's entry level games, meaning that its seven levels could be easily set up and played in under a couple of hours. For a stone strategy gamer it wasn't very satisfying. You had to practically try to lose, for the Bugs or Skinnies to come out the winner.

The First Person Shooter
Simply called Starship Troopers, published in 2005 by Empire Interactive and set after the events of the movie, the FPS game managed to be incredibly fun despite having absolutely no right to be. Of the 9 weapons available, 7 were rapid fire, including the missile launcher. 5 of those were just variations on the Morita Mk2 rifle seen in the movie. The Nuke Launcher also made an appearance, but rare ammo and ever bigger and harder battles meant it was often Too Awesome to Use. Enemies came in two varieties: ones you couldn't kill because you couldn't hit them, and ones you couldn't kill because they had absurd amounts of health and armour and could often only be hurt by attacking tiny, constantly moving weak spots. This also lead to bosses regularly taking over an hour to kill. Both kinds of enemies appeared in droves: the CD case boasts about the game's revolutionary SWARM engine being capable of fielding over 300 enemies at once, but apparently no one told Strangelite, the developers, that this didn't mean they had to always have 300 enemies attacking you at any one point. Expect body counts well into the thousands even in the first level. Cutscenes consisted largely of footage taken from the films, which in turn led to the majority of the game locations looking identical to film locations, despite being allegedly different places.

The Other Strategy Game
Starship Troopers: The Miniatures Game released in 2005 by Mongoose Publishing, is at its core based on the "Roughnecks" series if you must be specific, but basically says Throw It In to elements from just about everything else from the other sources. A Mobile Infantry unit, for example, can be made up of standard Roughnecks troopers, Movie-style "Light" Troopers, Marauder Powered Armored troops, or a mix of all three and then some.