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10 GAME CHARACTERS WITH "ATTITUDE"

26/3/2015

7 Comments

 
Picture"Star jumps!"
Sonic The Hedgehog has a lot to answer for. Though the "hedgehog with attitude" was created by Sega as a shameless answer to Mario - emerging from their fuzzy loins as a fully-formed corporate mascot - his success in the early-90s inspired wave after wave of me-too games characters "with attitude".

Sonic isn't what he once was - Sega has failed to keep pace with the times, and the 'hog's star is now more a rusty starfish - but here are just a few of those who wanted a slice of Sonic's anthropomorphic pie, but ended up choking on it. We salute their passing... with a loud, anal rasp.

10. BUG
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Bug's got the gloves, the red shoes, the big eyes, and the nudity - but further adding to his Sonic credentials, he's even a Sega character. While Bug's debut on the Saturn - a side-on platformer, with a sort of 3D effect - was generally well-received, the sequel, Bug Too!, failed to imbue sufficient longevity into the character for the series to go any further. This was despite the inclusion of a couple more playable characters with "attitude" - Maggot Dog and Super Fly. Unfortunately, Bug's faeces-eating smirk (giving he's a bug - we mean that quite literally) makes him immediately unlikeable. 
9. GEX
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No gloves or shoes, but the horribly unappealing Gex does sport a dinner jacket (albeit while remaining naked from the waist down - a look we're surprised the arch-copulist James Bond hasn't ever gone in for). At least, that's his outfit for this needless sequel; on the cover to his previous game, Gex merely lounged against a wall wearing nothing but a pair of sunglasses. Because that's what having "attitude" is all about, apparently. Try telling that to the judge.
8. CONKER
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The first of two squirrels in this list, Conker's "attitude" is an interesting one, as he was originally conceived as a family-friendly character, before Rare had some sort of mid-life crisis, and decided to turn him into a foul-mouthed alcoholic. Inexplicably, the game was passed - scatalogical humour and all - by Nintendo with only the minimum of censorship. As for his Sonic-ness? Gloves, trainers (and a cardigan), and he's leaning against something. "Attitude"!
7. COOL SPOT
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Trainers, gloves, sunglasses, he's on a surfboard, and he's called "Cool" Spot - if that doesn't scream "attitude" (or, at the very least, "desperate") we don't know what does. Unfortunately, Cool Spot is also a corporate mascot for a brand of soft drinks, which slightly detracts from his alleged coolness. You're working for The Man, Cool Spot. Sell-out.
6. RADICAL REX
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No shoes, no gloves, but at least he's on a skateboard, he's called "Radical" Rex, and he's out to "shred prehistoric pavement". Apparently, the game was originally called Baby T-Rex - which tells you all you need to know about the cynical contrivance that led to most of these woefully desperate characters.
5. BUBSY THE BOBCAT
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The day Bubsy The Bobcat returns to the games industry is the day we slice our throats open with a biro. That aside, we've just noticed he appears to have erections for fingers. Disgusting.
4. CRASH BANDICOOT
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It's hard to believe that Naughty Dog wasn't always producing slick, cinematic, third-person action games; once upon a time it was producing slick, cartoonish, third-person action games, like Crash Bandicoot. Though we've included him on this list, we're not actually convinced that Crash is striving to portray "attitude" - for a start he's the only one of these characters to bother covering his genitalia with a pair of trousers. And those manically clenched teeth more suggest sociopath than anything else.
3. CHESTER CHEETAH
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Oh dear oh dear. Chester Cheetah - the Cheetos mascot - is quite the try-hard. He's nude apart from the trainers and the sunglasses, but he rides around on a cheetah-print motorcycle, claims to be "Too Cool To Fool", and lives somewhere called "Hip City" (which, we admit, could actually be the name of a wholesale retailer that provides prosthetic pelvises to the medical industry).
2. ROCKY RODENT
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We remember nothing about Rocky Rodent. But we can see he's got the Sonic gloves and trainers, but he's also wearing a minidress. Interesting. We're not quite sure what to make of his massive, lolling tongue either - but judging from the look on the face of that angry motorist, he's just used it without consent.
1. MR NUTZ
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And so, back to the classic trainers and gloves (albeit fingerless in this case). Presumably, this allows the character greater control when handling his nuts. Yes, it's the most obvious joke we could've possibly made, but we went there. Now spend the rest of your day trying to erase the mental image of a sassy squirrel fiddling with his testicles.

FROM THE ARCHIVE:
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7 Comments
dan de la peche
26/3/2015 08:28:35 am

'arch-copulist' - that's made my day.

Reply
Mr Biffo
26/3/2015 09:14:23 am

We aim to please...

Reply
Bubso The Barp Fish
26/3/2015 10:35:37 am

What's your beef with Bubsy, guy? I remember playing it as a kid and not hating it.

Reply
Bob Miller
7/4/2015 08:55:59 am

I remember playing Bubsy, having bought it cheap, in Woolworths nostalgia fans, rather more than it deserved, because I didn't want to be defeated by what I considered to be THE MOST FRUSTRATING GAME OF ALL TIME.

First he tried to be funny. That was OK except that he tried to be funny every time you had to start again after dying, making dying even more annoying especially in this game, where as Edmund Kean commented "Dying is easy, comedy is hard".

The levels were huge with save points miles apart so it was hard to make progress and very easy to have to go back and do a large part of the level again. Especially as, unlike say Sonic gathering rings and therefore a hit just resulting in losing the rings, 1 touch meant death for Bubsy however much stuff he collected.

Being touched by a bad guy was made all too easy by the fact that the game was really really fast but when he went at his fastest, the screen didn't really keep up with him meaning that your response time was reduced to near impossible to anyone who wasn't a Large Hadron Collider. And I have a very clear memory of trying to jump over something I only had a nano second to react to at which point Bubsy would fly through the air but until he landed miles away I had no idea whether he had touched the damn thing or not and would thus die again in a comedy way or land perfectly fine. Probably on another bad guy who would then kill him instantly anyway. This meant that the only way to play a game, whose chief selling point was its manic pace, was really slowly.

You would of course then get a comedy animation of him dying as well. The collision detection was also terrible resulting in falling through the edge of platforms and so forth and the music was really annoying such that I would just turn it off. Why did I spend so much time playing it? I probably admired his attitude.

Reply
kelvingreen link
26/3/2015 01:33:44 pm

Yeah, Crash isn't one with attitude as such. I see him more of a loudmouth with a tendency toward violent mood swings.

Reply
Superbeast 37
26/3/2015 03:59:00 pm

I'd like to be young again but every now and then I see something that makes me glad the 80's and 90's are over.

This is one of those times.

Why is it that my old man can rant and rave about the 60's with no shame whereas I have this cringe inducing garbage?!

Reply
Mr Smith
28/3/2015 01:42:08 am

It depends on which filters you apply. On the one hand the 1960s brought us The Doors, a most excellent rock band.

But then again, the 1960s also had Jimmy Saville and the Vietnam war, for the whole of it. That's just with random Googling of what happened in the decade.

Right now we're in the shy embarrassed phase of our medium. The angsty teenage years. Everyone is screaming about how games are so offensive right now, and that they need to be detoothed so as not to upset anyone at all for any reason ever. There's also talk about joining some religious commune and being flower people. It's like we've internalised the Jack Thompson rhetoric we were lambasted with a few years ago. We are now our own Jack Thompsons.

Anyway, give it another 20 years, and people will reflect on the 1980s and 1990s, focusing mainly on just the good stuff, glazing over or ignoring the dodgy mascots, copycat clones, and downright cynical gumph that was made. It'll be like all anyone talks about is The Beatles, Rolling Stones, Elvis, and that one weird guy who keeps mentioning The Doors.

Did I mention I like The Doors? Also The Yardbirds, they're ace too.

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