At first glance, Baby T-Rex is not an intuitive title to see a rerelease for the Chromatic. Note that, labeling of the rewriteable lime green cartridge notwithstanding, Baby T-Rex is, indeed, merely a Game Boy game, playable on original hardware. The original Baby T-Rex is relatively rare, selling for upwards of fifty dollars, mostly because it was only released in Europe. Bear in mind that Baby T-Rex was relicensed with alternate skins in multiple other regions. If you’re quite determined to play the game itself and don’t mind the licensing, We’re Back A Dinosaur Story is Baby T-Rex for just ten dollars as a used cartridge. This makes the thirty-five dollars ModRetro is asking for Baby T-Rex a bit of a hard sell.
Is the iconic video game figure Baby T-Rex really so valuable to warrant that extra twenty-five dollars? Well, maybe not, although it’s hard not to appreciate just how perfectly he encapsulates the 1993 video game era zeitgeist. Baby T-Rex is cool. He skateboards! And he has to rescue his girlfriend for some reason. Baby T-Rex is no Sonic the Hedgehog, although the gameplay of this title is surprisingly close to it given the limitations of the Game Boy hardware. In the most rewarding sequences, Baby T-Rex has gotta go fast, and while sometimes the obstacles are unfair, at other times, you can get surprisingly far just on further momentum and a vague sense memory of when the next spikes or monsters are going to pop up and shave off one of your five hit points.
Amusingly enough, it seems that mostly insects killed the dinosaurs, on account of the fact that their hitboxes are so small it’s hard to hit them with Baby T-Rex’s tiny projectiles. In one sense, Baby T-Rex shows its age as a platformer of the nineties that can be fairly unforgiving of minor errors. The lack of any updates to the core ROM, save for the ModRetro credit, is surprising in this context. But trying to play the game without save states, I found that Baby T-Rex could be surprisingly rewarding. Yes, it was a bit humiliating having the first level kick my butt so much. Yet once I got the hang of the engine and a better grasp of the layout, I started to finish levels fast. The feeling from that was gratifying enough I didn’t even really want to use the continues. The first four stages are a great warm-up for the rest of the game.
There are, of course, cheat codes if you’d rather not play the game this way. I would recommend writing them down in the cute little manual that comes with the boxed copy of Baby T-Rex. Those little extras alone don’t quite justify the price point, but then, games like Baby T-Rex harken to a time where this might be the only new game you get for several months, so you make the most out of it. Or at least, you’re just playing it in thirty-minute spurts as a sort of mental palate cleanser.
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