Let’s Play Spot: The Video Game [Strobe Warning]
93Be advised that this video may contains scenes not suitable for people who suffer from epilepsy. Viewer discretion is advised.
The 90s was a time for many things in the video games industry. It was the time when the consoles wars were at their fiercest, with Sega and Nintendo battling it out for dominance in the early to mid 90s, only for Sony to appear out of nowhere to give them both a run for their money. It was the dawn of full 3D gaming in the home and it was the time of video game mascots. If you had a company, you wanted a mascot to represent it in the hopes of achieving even a glimmer of the fame and success that Mario and Sonic did. Mascots certainly weren’t limited to video games but the number of them increased drastically in the 90s and most shared a few common themes. Many of them were anthropomorphised animals and all of them tried to be ‘cool’ with varying degrees of success. Most failed absolutely at being cool and the fact that almost all of them have faded away into obscurity says a lot about how successful they were.
And then there was Cool Spot. Cool Spot was the second mascot for the drinks brand 7up and he, like many other mascots, was meant to be ‘cool’ and appeal to a younger market. He was on par with Chester Cheetah in terms of popularity at the time but the difference between the two is that technically, Chester Cheetah is still around, while Cool Spot has been a non-entity for a very long time. Both of them got video games in the 90s and out of the two, Cool Spot certainly had the stranger ones, with this one being the first.
Spot: The Video Game is basically a version of an older game called Ataxx, though you may recognise it as the microscope puzzle in the 7th Guest. Taking control of blobs on a 7x7 grid, you have to try and hold more of the board then your opponent, moving and duplicating your blobs as well as overwriting your opponents blobs with your own. There’s a level of strategy to the game that can make it very challenging to be good at, be it against a computer opponent or another player. I make no secret of how bad I am at the game, by the way; I don’t think I’ve ever won a match of this game until this video, but that doesn’t stop it being fun in small play sessions.
Even with that, this game has one critical flaw and it’s to do with the licensing of Cool Spot: it’s lazy. What connects this game to 7up and Cool Spot is the most paper thin of things, so much so that you could remove them or replace them with something else and you’d of never known that it was a Cool Spot game. I wonder if this was being developed as something else but at the last minute the developers were paid some money to turn it into a licensed game. I doubt it did much to garner additional sales but maybe I misremember how popular Cool Spot was back in the day, though I doubt it. In the end, the licensing with Cool Spot is a missed opportunity that comes across more like blatant marketing then an attempt to make the game any better, the game itself able to stand up by itself as an enjoyable enough experience, even if I’m not very good at it.
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