Hey! My name is Josh Download!
This is the first video review I’ve done in about a decade but I’m getting back into it. I’ve been sending a lot of my time making music, instead some of which features during the credits, at the end of the video. It was a lot of fun, I hope you enjoy it to!
Josh is no long a dickhead sixteen year old. But he is a music producer and vocalist from Australia. You can find him on Youtube or on Bluesky.
It’s April and while I wish this was a fool, it isn’t. We’re playing We’re Back! . I own it, but I have not played it. If I have, I don’t remember. It’s a special game to me, though, because it’s the game I bought that broke my modern rule for collecting: Only buy what I like or what appears interesting. I can’t fathom why I spent the 3-5 dollars on this that I did. I have never seen the movie so I have no attachment to the IP. I had no idea what the game was like. I saw a dumb label and said “sure, I need this!”. I did not need it. My reflection upon that stupid purchase led to a year of mostly not buying any Game Boy games.
ANYWAY, upon looking up some gameplay it looks like an extremely average platformer aping the Sonic the Hedgehog style. Not only did this not work out well for many games on consoles, it has worked out extra poorly on the Game Boy. See Speedy Gonzales, one of the first games we covered for some reason.
Here’s D’arcy to tell you more about it
“If you’re a fan of the Gameboy, chances are you’re also right around the age to fondly remember We’re Back! A Dinosaur’s Story, the 1993 animated movie, based on the 1987 book. I remember it being a movie I watched a lot as a kid, and never really clued into how weird a voice acting cast it included with the likes of John Goodman, Charles Fleischer, Walter Cronkite, Jay Leno, Julia Child, Yeardley Smith, and Martin Short. Yeah, from established voice actors to sitcom and late night stars, to news hosts and celebrity chefs.
As much as we could wax nostalgic on the film, which I would love to do, we’re here to talk about the Game Boy game. Now, you might think that this is simply a downgraded port of the SNES or Genesis game. Fair enough, a kid’s film would be ripe for the porting and shoveling, but this game might be even more egregious? Not because it’s worse than the SNES game, I think it’s actually a pretty strong platformer. No, this game is one of many skins – here in North America, it was a tie-in for the film, but literally every possible region has a different variant. From what I can tell, the original release of this game was developed by Beam Software and released in Europe as Baby T-Rex, Agro Soar in Australia, Bamse in Sweden.
The gameplay in all of these versions is identical, with only some sprite work and cutscenes being added or re-worked to fit each release. As such, while some of the surface level stuff works, the gameplay itself has little to do with the movie. The game is a one player adventure, with a two player mode being offered where players simply pass the system back and forth between deaths. It’s all pretty standard stuff: Collect items, move to the right a little too quickly, and feel like you would rather be playing Sonic. You can attack enemies with the brain-grain cereal pickups, but it’s generally easier to just avoid enemies where possible.
It’s a fun game to pop in and try out, maybe grab a copy if you find it on the cheap, but I can’t say it’s going to satisfy you if you’re wanting to bring back memories from the film. If you’re into generic mascot platformers, yeah, check it out.”
The fact that we got a version where the main character DOES NOT ALWAYS have a skateboard is a pretty big bummer.
I like investigating platformers from this era if only to see all of the churned-out crap I didn’t experience as a kid. I expect this to be an amusing one-off evening, but I’ve also been known to get hooked on janky games, so maybe I’ll try to see it through. There are cheat codes, at least! –IF
Yokoi Kids 