For this month’s Mascot Mania I decided to head to Twitter for suggestions. I received some interesting responses along with the usual Bubsy or Awesome Possum. Trust me, those guys will have their spotlight here on Mascot Mania some day. I was searching for something I’ve never played before. A good friend recommended I give Ardy Lightfoot a go. Having never heard of this before I became intrigued so I asked him what it was. I wasn’t sure if that was the name of the game or just the name of some character from a game. He then directed me to a Wikipedia page so I decided sure, what the heck!

Do you like speed? No, not the drug; as in, going fast? Like, super fast! Blast processing fast even! Speeding along grassy fields, zooming through loop de loops while collecting things and taking out robot baddies along the way? If all this sounds fun to you then boy do I have the game for you! No, I’m not talking about that blue Hedgehog, I’m talking about Socket! The greatest time traveling robot duck thing in all the land! Okay, maybe that’s going a bit too far but in all seriousness I’m not entirely sure what the heck Socket is. Maybe he’s a cyborg duck? Well whatever he is, his game is one of the most blatant rip offs of Sonic the Hedgehog ever and that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

I figured it was time to talk about a better known mascot and one that I actually enjoy. My first two entries for Mascot Mania were lesser known guys and really, for good reasons. I was first introduced to Croc by one of those awesome Playstation demo discs. Official U.S. Playstation Magazine Demo Disc #2 to be exact. Back then these demo discs were a big part of my gaming experience and the import section was a good way to play games we never got. Remember this was 1997 and the internet was in no way what it is today. I’m also going way off track here. I played the Croc demo a lot but oddly I never rented or owned it back then. It wasn’t until the PS2 era that I finally got to play these games and I really enjoyed them. As I was digging around the internet, I found some interesting stuff about the little green gator.

Just like the generations before it, the 90s had its fair share of catchphrases. The Ninja Turtles brought surfer lingo into all of our young vocabularies with words such as “cowabunga” and “gnarly.” Other popular phrases included bodacious, tubular, rad, boss, and bitchin’. For those who aren’t aware, these all basically translate to being cool or awesome. Now I know what some of you are thinking, what does this have to do with video games? This isn’t a lesson in urban slang! Well, someone at Beam Software thought it would be a radical idea to take some slang and mix it with something most kids loved, dinosaurs. As a result we got yet another mediocre at best mascot platformer: Radical Rex.
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Let’s say you work for a game company. You come up to your boss with what you believe is a great idea. “So there’s this dog. He can shoot magical stars and float with his dog eared helmet.” By this time boss man already has a crazy look on his face but you decide to unleash the story on him. “Now now, just listen to this: The planet K9 is being attacked by the Pit Bully Empire. Dr. Kibble is desperate to save his planet so he decides to test a serum out on his son. He then sends his son and a suit I like to call the Wonder Suit to Earth.” After the ten seconds of awkward silence your boss tells you to collect your things and not to return to work. At least, this should have happened, but it didn’t. Why, you ask? Because it was the 90s, you see, and after the success of Sonic the Hedgehog, everyone tried to cash in on the “mascot with an attitude” formula and Wonder Dog was no exception.