GameGirl.com

On my days off, I like to relax and unwind. My favorite way to do that is by playing old video games. Back when I was a kid, I always used to play games when I was home from school with a cold, or because of a snow day. So that's what I try recapture on my days off, those days of fun...and usually it works.

Anyhow, I was getting a bit bored with the usual games (Sonic, Mario, and sometimes Zelda) so I went looking for another game. And I came across one called Cool Spot. I was pretty excited, I had remembered playing that game when I was younger, though it had to go back to Blockbuster before I had made any real progress on it. So I picked that game to play...

For those of you who don't know, Cool Spot is basically a game about the 7-up mascot.

He has to go along collecting Cool Points. There's a set number you have to collect before you can beat each stage (in the earlier stages you have to collect 60, not sure if you have to collect more later) but if you collect all 100 you get a bonus.

The first thing I noticed about this game was...it's actually challenging! I was expecting a simple wussy little platform game, no big deal. Nope. There are a ton of enemies in the game, and many of them are hard to kill (you kill enemies by shooting them with drops of soda) and inflict lots of damage. Which wouldn't be so bad, but it's insanely difficult to find anything to restore your health. Enemies drop health boosts randomly, but sometimes you can go through a whole level without getting any.

The second thing I noticed was a strange lack of product placement for a game meant to be shilling 7-up. I couldn't find one reference to the actual drink in the game! I mean, look at this: That's kind of weird, right? A trip to Wikipedia cleared that up for me though, apparently I have the PAL version. (For Genesis) In Europe and the UK they have a mascot that's different from the 7-up dot, so they removed all references to 7-up. That's too bad, I would have liked to play the original.

I think games that are meant solely to advertise a certain product are a thing of the past. I remember that Burger King had some video games for X-box not too long ago, but I haven't heard of any others. (Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong!) It seems like most companies are sticking to posting flash games on their websites these days. Which is kind of ashame, actually, because games like Cool Spot were a lot of fun.

Anyway, maybe for next week I'll do "Chester Cheetah: Too Cool to Fool."

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