Dan Geeks Out: Video Game Review #320: Spot Goes to Hollywood

Spot Goes to Hollywood

PlayStation

Nostalgia Factor:

When I was a kid I absolutely loved Cool Spot for the Sega Genesis. Spot Goes to Hollywood came out a few years later, but for whatever reason I never got around to playing it. I think I had simply gotten it confused with Spot: The Video Game, a puzzle title that I had absolutely zero interest in playing.

In the past few months I have been using my RetroPie to visit games that I had missed out on when I was younger. Spot Goes to Hollywood was one of the first games on my list that I wanted to play, especially now that I knew it wasn’t Spot: The Video Game. Would it be worth the long wait?

Read on for my full thoughts.

Note: I picked the PlayStation version of this game over the Sega Genesis one as I figured the graphics/music/etc. would likely be better on the PS1, but it turns out that these are actually two completely different games – even though they share a lot of similarities. I’ll be reviewing the Genesis version… eventually.

Story:

This game starts with a pretty cool FMV sequence. Our titular character Spot is in a movie theater and is pulled into a movie playing onscreen via the projector beam. The game consists of you fighting through several different types of movie genres as you look to escape the big screen and make it back into the real world.

At the end of the game, if you didn’t collect all of the game’s special stars you don’t get to see the true ending of the game, and are sent back to the very beginning of the game again to collect everything you missed the first time around. Collect them all this time through and you get to play one last sci-fi themed stage and see the real ending of the game.

Unfortunately, I did not collect all of the stars the first time through and there was absolutely no chance in hell I was going to play through this game again to collect them all. If I want to see this game’s true ending, I guess I’ll look it up on YouTube or something.

Gameplay:

Spot Goes to Hollywood takes place from an isometric viewpoint, similar to what you see in Sonic 3D Blast. It retains a few elements from Cool Spot, like your projectile attack and some of the same sound effects. Otherwise, this is a brand new game.

But that’s not necessarily a good thing.

Right off the bat, I knew that something was off about this game. When I first started the game up, I was introduced to a blank title screen with just the words “Spot Goes to Hollywood” on the screen. There were no menu options. Nothing to select. I just sat there for a minute or two, waiting for something to happen. I pushed the up and down arrows on my controller and I could hear sound effects like I was cycling through a menu, but nothing happened on the screen. I pressed x and was taken to a password input screen. As this was my first time playing, I exited back to the title screen. I am going to chalk this up to a rare misfiring of the RetroPie, but for whatever reason it wasn’t letting me see any of the menu choices. I can’t really hold this against the game itself, but it was still an annoyance I had to deal with. Eventually I was able to blindly select what must have been “start game”, so I started the game.

After the cutscene I took control of Spot and started to play. Immediately I was taken aback by the game’s odd controls. Normally I have no problem playing isometric games like this (I’m one of the rare people out there that is actually a big fan of Sonic 3D Blast). But the control scheme is just flat out weird. It’s like Spot is moving on a grid, and it’s almost like you use tank controls to move him around. It’s hard to describe. But it is very awkward. I did my best to acclimate myself to the game’s controls and moved on. Whatever. I can deal.

The point of the game is to make it through each stage – killing enemies, jumping over obstacles, and collecting things along the way. Every once in a while you’ll fight a boss character. Pretty standard stuff. Unfortunately when I first started playing this, I didn’t know that you had to collect 100% of the special stars in order to see the game’s true ending, so I didn’t bother with them. Oops.

The main complaint people have about this game, and one that I share, is how difficult it is to line up your character for even the most standard jumps. I jumped to my death an uncountable number of times in this game. Of course you can use the tried and true method of lining up your shadow over where you want to land, but that trick doesn’t really work too well in this game, especially considering that you may not even be jumping where you want to jump, period. I can’t tell you how many times I lined myself up for what looked like a routine jump, took a running start, jumped in the air, watched for my shadow… only to have it not appear and for my character to fall to his death next to the platform I was trying to jump on. Wut?

If you’ve read my reviews, you should know I’m not one to bicker about poor controls or bad camera angles, as long as the game is still fun to play. Spot Goes to Hollywood severely put this to the test. I was getting SO mad at this game, to the point where it took me several playing sessions to beat it because I kept turning it off out of frustration. You can’t even tell me “get good, loser” because I tried my absolute best to make this work. This game just has absolute shit controls, no way around it.

Graphics:

I may not have been too thrilled about this title’s gameplay, but there is no denying that it looks really good. Bright colors, detailed and crystal clear stages that look like they were plucked straight out of a Saturday morning cartoon, cleverly created characters. I love the stage themes too. Good stuff! Definitely couldn’t have been done on a 16-bit console. I looked up the Genesis version of this game and it looks terrible, so at least this version has awesome graphics going for it!

Sound:

This is another thing I can’t really hold against the game itself since I am pretty sure it is a RetroPie issue, but the game’s stages didn’t have any music. The sound effects were there. There was music during the FMV sequences. But nothing during the actual stages. Very odd. I didn’t even notice it until I had already completed about two or three stages, and then I was like “wait a minute, doesn’t this game have any music?” I looked it up online, and yes this game has music. In fact, it is one of the few things about this game that reviewers have said positive things about. I’m just going to give it the benefit of a doubt here and give the sound department a thumbs up. I liked what I heard, even though I didn’t hear it all.

Overall:

This is a toughie for me. As you can probably tell from what I have written so far, I wasn’t a giant fan of this game. But the game isn’t horrible either. If this was the 90s and I had this game for my PS1, I probably would have played the daylights out of it, and enjoyed every second of it. But the video gaming landscape was completely different back then. Playing this game in present day, it is rough. Real rough.

I got *some* enjoyment out of this game, but for the most part I was not impressed. After I had gotten through a few stages and realized that what I saw was going to be what I got for the rest of the game, it just became a matter of going through the motions so I could beat this game and move on to something else. I can’t recommend this game to anyone else, and I highly doubt I’ll come back and play it again – even to get the secret stars so I could see the real ending. Just not worth my time. Or yours.

Final Score: