 If you're looking for the most surprising game on the Super Nintendo, you've found it with Coolspot, a game featuring the mid-90s mascot of soda brand 7up. Now seriously, a corporate branded video game is actually pretty good. Once upon a time, 7up had a charming cartoon spokesperson that was made up of the red dot in the logo, some arms, some legs, and sunglasses. Somehow it worked. He, well, I presume it's a he, starred in a multi-platform video game on Genesis, Game Gear, Amiga, Game Boy, and Super Nintendo. The gameplay here isn't anything new, it's a standard platformer where you make your way across levels to unlock your, uh, spot twins, I guess? With your attack being that you can launch soda bubbles at enemies, which is just as well because anytime I drank 7up, I remember the carbonated bubbles feeling like they were gonna melt my teeth. I don't drink soda, but I don't think I drank 7up at all as a kid for that reason. But hey, they sure kept trying desperately to make me drink their swill because believe it or not, there are at least four 7up games out there. At least four that I know of. There's Cool Spot, Spot the video game for NES, Spot the cool adventure for Game Boy, and Spot Goes to Hollywood for Genesis, Sega Saturn, and PlayStation. I don't know about you, but that blows my mind. And this game being pretty good also blows my mind. I'm not calling it revolutionary or even one of the best 60 Super Nintendo games or anything like that. But this game is fine, it's a good waste of time. And since it's a soulless, corporate branded game designed to sell soda, then naturally the player's expectations, no matter who is playing, are going to be absolute rock bottom. So that goes a long way toward explaining why this game is pretty decent. Buuuut make no mistake, Cool Spot is pretty flawed. There's no save feature and no passwords, jumping is kind of wonky and takes quite a bit to get used to. The sound effects also get kind of annoying after a while. However the music is great, again that's an unexpected surprise. The level design is adequate, the most fun I had playing this game really was with the bonus levels where you bounce up and down inside a 7 up bottle. And yeah if you haven't noticed you gather these red spots too, collect enough and you'll get access to these bonus levels where you can grab some extra continues. I will say one minor touch I really like is how your health is monitored by the spot character's face in the upper left. If you get hit he starts to deflate a little bit. So yeah Cool Spot is fine, it's easy to dismiss this game based on what it is at its core and I can't say I'd blame you for that, but it's a perfectly okay game. You know what I'd say the Genesis version is even better and I think a big reason for that is because the view screen is slightly zoomed out a bit, so you can see more of the level and that helps make up for the wonky jumping mechanics quite a bit and you're able to anticipate enemies and attacks much quicker. I also think this is an instance where the faster processor on the Genesis lends itself to this game's benefit because this version of Cool Spot is just a teensy bit faster and I ended up liking this game a bit more because of that. The sound effects are much more tolerable and also the music here, wow, it might be some of the best on the Genesis, seriously, that's weird to say but it is a great soundtrack. Anyway, Cool Spot is certainly worth playing today but it's not worth going out of your way to track down or anything like that and if you're hankering to play this game I'd say play it on the Genesis, it just plays better and the music is really well done.