Cool Spot : Not Just Another Mario Game

Cool Spot is a game that I love because of its art. When I played it as a kid, I loved the animations and the challenging levels. My completionist gaming outlook got its roots trying to grab all 100 cool spots in every level. Taking a look back after years of studying and working in game design, I’ve grown to appreciate Cool Spot even more.

Cool Spot uses the Y-Axis in ways that no one had done as smoothly or successfully in a platformer ever before. Metroid did a great job at it, but it was pretty “stiff” and not really a textbook example of a platformer. Super Mario Bros. 3 used the Y-axis well, but only in fairly controlled circumstances, and it was easily abused  to skip content (P Wing) rather than be part of the content. Super Mario World is the glowing beacon of Y-Axis greatness within the 2D games model… but Cool Spot isn’t to far from it.

The levels in Cool Spot are laid out in ways that stretch and fill out the flow of the game in great ways. Each level has a specific mood and flavor whether you were strolling the beach, dodging cheese flung by rats inside the walls of an old house, blasting cranky crabs on the docks, or hopping from rubber duckies to model airplanes in a mad rush to the ceiling of a toy store. The artwork was fun and humorous. The animations fit in well with each environment, too.

Cool Spot’s bonus stages are a blast. You have to collect a letter that will spell out UNCOLA (7up’s old tagline) in each bonus stage while grabbing extra points and lives in the process by leaping from bubble to bubble up the inside of a 7up 2-Liter bottle. The bubbles would bounce you upward in ways that you had to be quick to react and have a good memory to navigate. There’s no way to explain it without you playing it yourself, but they are a lot of fun.

(EDIT: 9/10/2014 : Actually, yes there IS a way to explain it! See Video below)

Once you’ve rescued all your fellow Cool Spots, you must travel back home the way you came through each environment. Only those environments are harder this time. This felt really cool to me since I knew how far I had to go to beat the game, and I felt I knew what to expect from each level as I went back through their new enhanced versions. The stages weren’t just rehashes either. The designs of each level was entirely new, even if they did use pre-existing assets for them.

In the end, it is a fun game that I’ve replayed through the years and it still holds up. I recommend it to anyone who still has a working Genesis, emulator, or maybe a GameTap account if its up there.

(UPDATE: 9/10/2014)

I have since played the SNES version of Cool Spot, and I don’t think it’s nearly as good. The controls are much less responsive, and the unforgiving later levels are WAY too frustrating in that environment. The graphics are slightly prettier, but not by much. The levels are sometimes laid out differently in the SNES version as well, and I prefer the Genesis version of those as well. Even the music and sound is somehow worse on the SNES.

A lot of this is likely nostalgia kicking in, but it’s my review, so it’s my perspective.