Land Before Time: Great Valley Racing Adventure

The Land Before Time: Great Valley Racing Adventure brings together many of the gang from the ever-popular children's movies by the same name. Join Littlefoot, Ducky, Cera, and Spike -you get to pick your favorite one to "be"- in their adventure as they try to find their way out of the Great Beyond. (In the movies, they have the Great Valley, which is their home, and then the Great Beyond, which seems to be what they consider "everywhere else.") The characters are recognizable, but slightly more angular. (As a side note, if your kids are afraid of clowns, be prepared to "click through" the opening credits, as there is a decidedly freaky clown in them. What were they thinking?)

Under "Obstacle Course," you can choose from three difficulty levels and eight different courses. Each course has different obstacles (they add more as you progress.) The easy level merely requires that the player accumulate a certain number of points. In the medium level, it's a race against time. The hard level challenges the player to beat the clock and acquire the given number of points. You must pick up Treestars (what the "dino kids" call star-shaped leaves) to get points, and different colors give you different amounts of points. You can also pick up flowers to go faster or be launched into the air. (The game manual gives neat tips on how to better navigate the course.) There are jumping fish, dropping logs, emerging alligators, and boulders. There are lava pits to avoid and "sled rides" to help you get where you're going, but faster.

The racing part of the game can be played alone or against an opponent. There are eight different courses. If you decide to race a live opponent, you are racing to the finish line while collecting flowers (which again give you "special" powers). If you race the CPU, good luck, I could never beat it. ;o) In this part of the game, you again have obstacles and are trying to collect Treestars, all the while racing against the clock or an opponent. (In two player mode, the screen is split, with one player's "view" showing on top and the other on bottom.)

This game is definitely a "try, try again" title. I usually had to play each course at least three times to understand which way I should try to go to collect the most Treestars. The game is forgiving in that when you do run into the obstacles, you "bounce" as if you've run into a force field instead of "dying" as in some games. The thing I would change about this game if I could would be the inability to go any direction but forward. (You can maneuver left to right, but you cannot go back.) I found myself throwing myself into rocks, in the hopes that I could bounce and retrieve the bypassed Treestars behind me -- which I feel sure was not the original objective of the game's designers. I would also love to be able to slow it down a tad for new (or uncoordinated) players. (I was playing on Easy level, goodness knows how disoriented I would have been on Medium or Hard.) This is definitely a game that you have to sort of memorize to get the required points on each course, for sure. My kids, who are rabid LBT fans, gave it a nine out of ten. I guess that means in their eyes -- it's "dino-mite!" (Sorry, I couldn't resist...)