Hello and welcome to the Load Last Save lab, where today I’m studying what it’s like to be cool. Since I review games for a living, I don’t know what cool is if it bit me in the face, so I decided to call upon the morally dubious powers of human cloning to duplicate myself. That way I can be myself and have a cool version of me to advise me on the ways of not being a square.
In order to get the platonic ideal of cool, I’ll be studying the raddest thing on Earth: 90s mascots. By studying what makes them so effortlessly cool, I can apply it to my clone.
I’ll be looking at a few key points and distilling them all into an overall rating of how totally gnarly they are: Gnarlocity. It’s a rating that comes from a whole mess of formulae and data points, functions, derivatives and even a few chemical reactions. I’ll spare you the entire process, but the more important aspects will be highlighted:
Tubularity: The main coolness factor, decided by things like ‘tude (attitude), inclusion of cool clothing like backwards hats, cool sneakers or, most importantly, sunglasses. The more 90s it is, the cooler it is.
Guy in a suit: The opposite of cool is a square, and executives in suits are the ultimate squares. Any force that opposes cool must be considered, like considering gravity and air resistance when launching a projectile.
The game they’re in will also get a quick look. These games are all terrible, so even in the unlikely event that one scores a 5 out of 5, that means it’s a 5 in this scale. A 5 out of 5 is like a 2 out of 10 on any other scale, so the best any of these games can hope to be is beyond mediocre. If their game sucks too hard, it deducts coolness.
These games are 16-bit platformers. The kind that were made before they invented the concept of level design. Or fun. These games throw you into a massive, labyrinthine level of scattered platforms where you have no idea where to go. You goal is always to collect a number of trinkets for some reason. There’s no real flow to the level, no thought to the enemy placement, no real rhyme or reason to anything. The designers just threw some platforms near each other and let the player decide how to navigate them.
Most of the time, the player’s movement is inadequate to navigate these workplace hazards called levels. It’s either too slow to navigate the massive stages, too fast to get through the small areas, there are constant enemies in the way and there are at least four blind jumps every few meters.
Foot tapping is an important aspect of the characters, as well. These funny mascot animals are all derived from the originator of cool: Sonic the Hedgehog. Since Sonic was all about going fast and attitude, he had an idle animation where he tapped his foot. Being an impatient little shit is cool. Since Sonic did it, its derivatives will, too.
With all that considered, we get the total awesomeness, measured in Gnarlocity, the full summation of their coolness. It’s a scale from one to five, with a handy visual for the layman.
It goes from massive nerd, to clueless adult, then Roger, slightly cooler Roger and then at the end Roger after a dose of 500 Giga Gnarls (The SI unit for Gnarlocity).
It’s a very rigorous scientific process.
On to the studies:
Awesome Possum
Right off the bat you can tell this is some low-effort nonsense. What rhymes with awesome? Uh… possum? That’s it! That’s the game. That’s where the entire idea begins and ends. I’m sure that wasn’t even a half-day of work for them. The game designer’s office was out by 10 am after that one. It’s so generic you can’t even copyright it. You wouldn’t need to, anyways. The idea is so lame no one’s going to want to use it.
Awesome Possum’s righteousness comes from his love of the environment. He’s here to plug the hole in the ozone layer, recycle and bring his own brand of non-violent justice to the evil Dr. Machino. The game might say he’s going to kick his butt, but it’s more of a metaphor, it’s not actual violence. Everyone knows that the coolest people around are the ones who make constant, vocal declarations of how tough they are and how they’re going to kick someone’s butt. Especially when they do it on social media, or give out long hypotheticals of how they would have totally kicked a guy’s butt if he were there.
Just like those guys need to remind you how tough they are by talking, Awesome Possum has to keep reiterating how cool he is, to make sure you know. He doesn’t do anything cool, but he constantly re-affirms himself by saying “I’m awesome!” or “I’m so cool”. It’s like if a self-help book got Tourette’s.
In Tubularity, he gets a zero out of five. He doesn’t have a backwards cap, no sunglasses, he has no style, he has no grace and he doesn’t even have the benefit of a funny face. It’s just a standard 90s animal mascot.
The game gets a zero out of five, too. It’s terrible, even by the low standards of a mascot platformer. The game runs at two frames per second and the graphics look like they were made by someone who hates art. The levels are awful, too. If the rain forest is anything like the levels in this game, it can burn for all I care. I’ll recycle even less thanks to this game.
Guy in a suit rating: Five out of five. This is purely a product designed by committee. It’s part of the 90s environmentalism push that tried to promote recycling by pumping out tons of disposable plastic garbage. Nothing says “I love the forest” like demolishing an acre of trees to print out Awesome Possum boxes. Not to mention the negative association it created with recycling. If you want to get kids to think recycling is lame, get them to play Awesome Possum. They’ll start burning fossil fuels as a hobby.
Hell, if you want kids to avoid something, get Awesome Possum to do it. Make a whole new wave of games where he presents something as cool and no one under the age of 30 will enjoy it. Awesome Possum: Drug Adventure. Your kid won’t even think about smoking the ganja after that one. Awesome Possum: Unprotected Sex. Wait I think that last one is just a Deviantart post. Awesome Possum Kicks Dr. Machino’s Butt? He’ll do something else to that butt. That was lowbrow even by Load Last Save standards.
Foot Tapping: He doesn’t tap his foot, but he’s the most impatient little shit in this list. If you let go of the controller for two seconds, he’ll look around and start saying “Let’s go!” and “Come on!” over and over.
Overall Gnarlocity: One out of five. This Possum guy’s a complete square.
Radical Rex
Dinosaurs are the coolest animals ever, according to most toddlers, so here we have Radical Rex. He’s a dinosaur, so he’s cool, and on top of that his name is RADICAL Rex. He’s double awesome. The only way he would be gnarlier is if he could skateboard-
HOLY SHIT
Now that’s radical, man. It’s practically bordering on tubular. This would blow your mind if you were a boy between the ages of 4 and 8. If his skateboarding prowess doesn’t convince you he’s the raddest, his theme song surely will. It’s a nauseatingly 90s semi-rap where some guy keeps saying “He’s my cool cool Radical Rex”, while a chorus of girls says his name. Radical Rex. Radical Rex. He’s cool, man. He’s RADICAL. He is Rex. He is RADICAL REX. Are you convinced yet? Are you?
I’m not convinced. I won’t listen to this propaganda about how cool Rex is, I can see he’s a dork. He’s round and bubbly, the opposite of dangerous. He has huge, crying puppy dog eyes and the first thing he does when he’s on screen is start dancing like a buffoon. He pops up on his own title screen and cuts a rug like a geriatric at a jazzercise class. He’s about as cool as a W-9 form.
For tubularity, he gets a 2 out of 5. He has a three letter name, which are always a sign of cool, and he skateboards, but he looks like a tool doing it. He looks like a tool while he’s not skateboarding, too.
His game gets a 2 out of 5, too. It’s another one of those terrible 16-bit platformers that isn’t really meant to be enjoyed, more like tolerated. At its best you’re playing as a skateboarding dino. At its worst, it’s Radical Rex.
His guy in a suit rating is a one. This wasn’t the product of a boardroom. This was a napkin doodle by a bored artist. They asked someone to come up with a game character and the artist subconsciously scribbled a dinosaur onto the nearest surface. Someone at the company saw it and went “could he be more… radical?” and they drew a skateboard next to him and the executives saw dollar signs.
Foot Tapping: If you don’t move for a bit, he starts tapping his foot and looking around, as if to tell you to get on with it. The way he looks around is less like he’s impatient, and more like he’s nervous, like you caught him doing something mildly embarrassing and he’s trying to act natural while avoiding eye contact.
Overall Gnarlocity: Two out of five. His teachers constantly praise him on how much of a good boy he is.
Cool Spot
The little circle on the 7-Up logo has been given some shades, cool sneaks and a ton of ‘tude. Now he’s Cool Spot, the hippest cat on the block, and the only thing cooler than him is the crisp, lemon-lime taste of 7-Up.
For such a dumb concept, Cool Spot has some real charm to him. He has the most personality out of all the other mascots on this list, and it’s just generic 90s “cool”, but it’s communicated through his animations and poses very well. He saunters when he walks, snaps his fingers when he shoots and sounds like an excited prairie dog whenever something happens to him. He’s pretty alright, like the crisp lemon-lime taste of 7-Up.
For Tubularity he gets a 4 out of 5. He’s a circle with sunglasses. That’s all you need, really. He doesn’t skateboard or do anything too cool, but he is kinda hip with it. Sometimes clean simplicity wins over convoluted complication, like with the crisp lemon-lime taste of 7-Up.
The game gets a 3 out of 5. It’s the best of the bunch, but you have to remember this is a sorry bunch. It’s like picking from a list of lead poisoning symptoms and saying yeah sluggishness and fatigue don’t sound that bad when compared with seizures and developmental delay. I’m not even saying it’s good. It’s merely bad, unlike the crisp lemon-lime taste of 7-Up, which is good.
Guy in a Suit rating: 6 out of 5. Every other mascot is a product. They want you to the Radical Rex game, the toys, watch the TV show, and such, but that’s the end goal. Cool Spot is a corporate product made specifically to sell another product. He was created in an agency somewhere in New York. The product of thousands of hours of sketching, market research, focus groups and pointless meetings. Over twenty people had to approve every single aspect of his design. There is a binder somewhere that has ten pages specifying what angles you can show him from, and what specific Pantone shade of red he is.
The game itself is full of 7-Up iconography. It’s to be expected of an advertisement disguised as a game, but the weird thing is how abstract it is. You collect 7-Up logos, you play as the red dot from the logo. You pick up other little red dots to free other Cool Spots from cages. The most they show of the product itself is in the bonus stages, which take place inside a giant bottle of 7-Up. I think this is to form a more abstract connection between the game and the concept of 7-Up. They don’t talk about the crisp lemon-lime taste of 7-Up because they want kids who play this to associate the logo itself with fun, so when they see it out in the wild, they gravitate towards it, and any other product that has that same logo.
The counterpoint to this is that I played this as a kid and I don’t like 7-Up, even with its enticing, crisp lemon-lime taste. Is anyone else really thirsty all of a sudden?
Foot Tapping: He taps his foot in his idle animation, but not because he’s impatient, but because he’s cool. He’s grooving to the background music, snapping his finger and tapping along with the beat. At least he gets some personality points there. Almost as unique as the crisp, lemon-lime taste of 7-Up.
Overall Gnarlocity: 3 out of 5. He’s pretty dang cool, but not as cool as the refreshing taste of when I drop this crappy running joke.
Mo Hawk and Headphone Jack
What’s cooler than a mohawk and sunglasses? Public nudity, apparently. Here we have Mo Hawk and Headphone Jack, two cool dudes who listen to rockin’ tunes, run around really fast and wear absolutely no clothes. It’s disgusting, but a synonym for disgusting is sick, and if you go by that route, these two are really sick.
Their character design is simple: just a buff naked dude. Make him yellow so the parents don’t freak out. I think they’re supposed to be made of clay since they deform and melt. Their texture is clay-like, too, thanks to the weird shading and overly detailed rendering they have. I’m not sure what they are, exactly. It looks like a can of tennis balls took up body building. They carry around cutting-edge tape players and they’re always blasting the sweetest tunes. These dudes are so ripped they don’t listen to their music in stereo, they listen to it in steroid. That was awful. I apologize.
If we put aside their weirdness, are they cool? Hell yeah, brother. They’ve got mohawks, which are rad, they wear sunglasses, which are gnarly and they listen to rockin’ tunes, which are bodacious. That’s three horrid slang words in one sentence. Typing that out made me physically ill.
Speaking of physically ill, their game sucks. It’s another garbage 16-bit platformer with massive levels where your goal is to collect stuff. What makes this one special, is that it causes severe motion sickness. The developers saw Sonic the Hedgehog and thought “hey, that looks cool, but what if it made you vomit instead?”. It plays kind of like Sonic; you go really fast, do loop-de-loops and even turn into a spiky ball. That sounds all fine, but the thing is that in Sonic, the camera would stay still while Sonic spun around like a sock in the dryer. Here, the camera spins around with you while you’re in the loops. There are constant gravity shifts and the camera swings around like a maniac trying to keep up with your character. It’s maddening.
For Tubularity, they get a 5 out of 5. This is so 90s I’m afraid I’ll grow a flat top if I stare at it too long.
The game gets a 1 out of 5, which is the rating I’d give severe motion sickness.
Guy in a suit rating is a 1 out of 5. These characters were drawn by some stoner in a surf shop, not a suit.
Foot Tapping: They’re too cool to care about what you’re up to. If you don’t do anything for a while, they press play on their tape player and start jamming out to some rippin’ tunes.
Overall Gnarlocity: 5 out of 5. Woah, dude! That’s insane! These dudes have ‘tude to spare, but they ain’t giving any of it to you, you square.
Bubsy
You know he had to be here. I didn’t include Gex because he’s too obvious, but I included Bubsy? Can’t pass up a chance to take cheap shots at Bubsy. The most notorious “not sonic”, the coolest mascot with the most ‘tude. He quickly became the poster child for annoying 90s mascots, Sonic rip-offs, annoying cartoon mascots in general and the face of horrible, putrid games with Bubsy 3D.
Can we separate Bubsy from his stained legacy and look at him as he was meant to be, a cartoon mascot for children in the 90s? I think we can. I was one of those children for whom Bubsy was for. I liked Bubsy. I thought he was cool. I drew him in my notebooks. I wasn’t very smart as a child, but children are dumb overall, and Bubsy hit the mark and managed to appeal to children. That’s where his entire appeal begins and ends, with literal infants. Anyone over the age of 5 knows that Bubsy sucks. They have an instinctual aversion to him. It’s like if the horrors of Bubsy 3D were so great they went back in time and altered our DNA on a collective level.
He’s a wise-crackin’ jokester with an annoying voice who can’t seem to shut up. His design is alright, it’s just a cartoon cat with an exclamation point t-shirt. He’s serious about his love of punctuation. There’s something incredibly cynical about Bubsy, to the point where he can’t even muster up much ironic appeal.
He had a catchphrase, which I can’t say the same for the others here. “What could possibly go wrong?”. Having a terrible catchphrase was a hallmark of 90s entertainment icons, and it’s surprising that the others don’t have one, other than maybe Awesome Possum’s generic “I’m awesome” or something. Maybe that’s why Bubsy has had more cultural relevance than anything on this list.
His Tubularity sits at a 1 out of 5. He’s not particularly cool, just some cat. Instead of going for the symbols of cool, he tried to embody the attitude, and much like the others, completely failed.
The games get a 1 out of 5. You know they’re bad, they’re bad, they’re really really bad. Much like a lot of the games on this list, they play like a terrible version of Sonic, but Bubsy has fall damage for some reason. Yes, if you drop from too high, Bubsy dies. Whoever thought of putting fall damage in a platform must be doing it from experience, seeing as how an idea that bad can only come from someone who was dropped as a kid. I’m not even going to talk about Bubsy 3D, since this is about SNES/Genesis era games, and you already know about it.
His overall Gnarlocity is… indeterminate? He’s so uncool he loops back around to being cool, but in a genuinely uncool way, so he’s… I can’t tell. Bubsy broke the machine. It’s probably zero. That tends to cause a mess with the readings.
Conclusion
With all this data I’ve gathered, I’ve successfully created the coolest being in the universe: Radical Roger. Yeah, I know it’s like Radical Rex. He has all the traits discovered above, but amplified. A cool, backwards hat, sunglasses and he thrives on a diet of nachos, pizza and other junk food. He’s the ultimate 90s cool guy.
He even took a cue from Bubsy and got him an annoying catchphrase. I mashed a few outdated slang words into the computer and uploaded them into his brain. Tubular, gnarly, bodacious. The classics.
Now I just press this button and… HE’S ALIVE! Now, Radical Roger, give us your totally radtacular catchphrase!
“Tuberculosis!”
There are still some bugs in the system. Hey, is that a cigarette? Drugs are not cool! No one who’s cool has done drugs. Think of your favorite musician, do you think he’d approve of this behavior?
“Teen pregnancy!”
This isn’t going to work.
All of these characters would kneel to Glover in the cool school.
I think this post was very cool, but I wouldn't know for sure, as I am a giant nerd.
What I do know, is that I'd like to see how Zero the Kamikaze Squirrel and Aero de Acro-Bat would rank here. And what about Zool the ninja, and Jazz Jackrabbit?
Or maybe a 3D edition that includes Gex, Croc, Blasto, Rascal and even Bubs... ok no, not Bubsy 3D.