ZEALOT #9: Niche Childhood Platformers
featuring Ty the Tasmanian Tiger & Frogger 2: Swampy’s Revenge
Welcome to this month’s (apologetically near the end of the month) episode of ZEAL! This month we’re doing a pretty simple, but fairly beefy, exploration of two old mascot platformers from J Bearhat and Robbydude’s childhoods!
The videos are divided up into five, easily-digested parts, with the first three being on Ty the Tasmanian Tiger, and the final two being an incredibly broken copy of Frogger 2: Swampy’s Revenge.
Ty, which was Robbydude’s choice, came through during the XBOX era of platformers, and reflects the kind of care and genuine interest in their own intellectual property that defined better mascots; in the first part Robby talks about the game series, the well-crafted PC port, and the potential interest in revival in an era where people care about Bubsy and Gex again.
In part two, we get more into the childhood experiences of playing platformers and IP-driven titles, the cool older teen friends who enabled you, the failures of popular icons, and why Ty doesn’t wear a shirt in the snow levels.
Our final part of Ty features an exploration into the depths of Google Images for obscure fandoms’ obscure fan art, and further discussion of failed mascots ranging from The Noid to Tak.
In part 4, we start up the immediately-broken Frogger 2: Swampy’s Revenge, a failed attempt at bringing one of the oldest gaming icons into a more “modern” style, resulting in frustrating gameplay, confusing direction, and gruesome unique death animations.
In our final section, we wrap up as much of Frogger 2 as we can handle, explore one of the few good levels, and debate where, exactly, the impulse to “revive” classic titles comes from.
And that does it for this month’s ZEAL! Stay tuned next month, when we will be exploring The Simpsons with special guest, Lamezone’s Cate Wurtz! And as always, thank you for supporting ZEAL! If you have any feedback, questions, concerns, feel free to shoot us an email at submissions@mammonmachine.com!
