 Sssssssssss- That's drunk! You would think that video games starring corporate mascots would be universally terrible, and you would be pleasantly surprised. There's no incentive for stuff like Coolspot or MickKids to be any good, but they are both pretty decent games that have held up well over time. So, naively, I held out some hope that this game, Izzy's Quest for the Olympic Rings might actually be decent, but unfortunately I was dead wrong. Izzy, no not that Izzy, is a slight spin on the corporate mascot, with this guy representing the 1996 Atlanta Summer Olympics. He's just kind of a blue blob, almost like a cross between the blob from Clayfighter and one of the California raisins. For a very short time, this thing was everywhere. There were video games on Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis, there was one planned for the 32X, which was eventually canceled. There was even a cartoon and a big commercial campaign, and of course there was an actual person in a mascot costume that looked like this. Frickin' yikes, man. Izzy's Quest for the Olympic Rings was made in November of 1995 by a dev team called Alexandria, who also had a hand in the game adaptation of Demolition Man, which is admittedly an okay game. Izzy's Quest, however, this one is bad, but on the bright side it's at least bad in kind of a new way. Like for one, I don't think very many people remember this silly mascot, so there's some novelty there, I guess. And plus, the way this gameplay is just so oddly broken, it's something I rarely see in a Super Nintendo game. I'll get to that in a bit. First, let's get the basics out of the way. You get a health meter and three lives with zero continues to get through nine levels, with no saves or passwords, with the idea being to get back the five different Olympic rings that make up the logo, which have been stolen by evil, anti-Olympic creatures, I guess. I don't know. The gameplay is almost exactly what you'd expect from a game like this. You wander around in huge worlds, one of those collectathons where you're constantly finding coins and medallions and racking up points while you're bouncing on top of enemies. To this game's credit, there's one fun mechanic here. When you find these stars, you morph into a different form. Like a rocket, a hang glider, a hammer, a, uh, baseball player? And of course, a totally radical 90s skateboarder, dude. Unfortunately, these power-ups are not randomly placed. They're predetermined, and they're used to get you past specific sections, kind of like the way it's used in Yoshi's Island. Still, this function makes this game seem like it might be pretty fun, right? Let me answer that for you. No, they do not. Izzy's Quest has some of the weirdest slowdown performance issues I think I've seen in any game, and it doesn't help that the controls have that weird awkward delay to them that makes the entire game seem like it takes place underwater. Now, sometimes with a game like this, you have to be a little patient and let the controls sink in a bit and play the game by its rules, so to speak, but with Izzy's Quest, it's not just the bad controls, the performance is bad. Slowdown comes and goes, the game speeds up out of nowhere, even on sections like this where Izzy is riding his gnarly tubular skateboard. Everything just looks jittery, like the game had too much coffee or something. It is a constant, never-ending issue to the point that I find myself getting a headache playing this one. I've never seen a Super Nintendo game with performance issues this bad, it's to the point where I think there's something wrong with my Flash cartridge or my Super Nintendo or something. Doubling down on the weirdness is that the same issues happen with the Sega Genesis version. It performs better overall, but the gameplay is still inexplicably choppy and slow, and that slowness comes and goes without any rhyme or reason. Another annoying thing is the button layout. There are two jump buttons. The Y button uses the spin jump, which you use to jump on top of enemies, and the A button uses the hurdle jump, which is a longer jump to help you reach platforms further away. Okay, two jump buttons, whatever, but why are they assigned to Y and A? That is stupidly unintuitive. Thankfully, in the options menu you can switch the spin jump to the B button, and the hurdle jump to whatever. My preference would have been the R button, that's what I always do with Mega Man X's dash, but this game restricts you to only using B, A, Y, and X. And yes, two of those buttons aren't even used most of the time. One can be used as an attack when you've morphed into another form, but that's it. But yeah, that's basically the entire game. It uses two jump buttons, one button you use as an attack once in a while, all while dealing with bizarre slowdown issues that pop up out of nowhere, off and on throughout the entire game. That's the most frustrating part for me personally, because I mean, take a look at this part where you're flying as a rocket. Hey, that's pretty cool, no slowdown here. This looks like it could be fun, but way more often than not, you're left wondering if someone accidentally poured some crystal Pepsi on your Super Nintendo console because this game struggles to run even the most basic gameplay sequences. Maybe if those issues were resolved, Izzy's quest for the Olympic rings might be decent. I mean, the morph mechanic is kind of fun, but otherwise you should stay away from this one. All right, I want to thank you for watching and I hope you have a great rest of your day.