"An excellent appetizer, but where's the main course?"

“Licensed IP” and “platformer” may not sound like a recipe for anything particularly tasty, but during the early nineties a chef called Konami cooked up the most marvelous and diverse dishes from these simple ingredients. Tiny Toon Adventures – Babs' Big Break is one of several excellent games based on Warner Brothers' early nineties slapstick cartoon released by Konami during the late eight bit/early sixteen bit era. Starring Buster Bunny and his friends Plucky Duck and Hampton J Pig, three of the most recognizable stars from the cartoon, the game tasks you with aiding Babs Bunny in her her egocentric quest for a career as an actress. Not only will she shamelessly have the lads running errands for her, as soon as you have cleared a path for her to the acting school, she'll venture off to various locations not in any way related to acting. To be fair, I'm not an actor myself, but I'm quite sure that exploring a ghost house or going to the city are not ideal ways to prepare for your big break.

Nonsensical story and class-skipping ingrates aside, Babs' Big Break serves nothing but pure pleasure. As with most Konami platformers from the era, Tiny Toons looks excellent and features wonderfully responsive controls. The game is a bit slower paced than many of its genre mates for the Game Boy, but once you get used to it, it won't bother you at all. Instead, the lower tempo gives you ample time to truly appreciate the various nice little touches and the cameos by other Tiny Toons characters. For example, on the for platformers all but mandatory train level, the train will enter a tunnel, causing both you and the enemies to be covered in soot that you'll shake off after leaving the tunnel. It may not be more than a small detail, but it's things like this that shows the dedication the developers approached the project with.

Babs' Big Break starts off as any other platformer with a very linear first level where you simply jump on the heads of slow moving enemies until you reach the end of the section. Fortunately, later levels are more diverse, often having different paths to the goal. The pipe maze on the first stage of the City levels stand out in this regard, but there are several other memorable levels to explore. Aside from the jump-on-your-enemies'-heads attack that have been used in every platformer since Mario saved his first princess, you can kill your foes by lobbing vegetables at them. Each of the three characters comes with their own supply of vitamin-packed ammunition and you can switch between Buster, Plucky and Hampton any time you like. Buster can lob a carrot in an arch, Plucky is armed with pineapples that ricochets when they hit an obstacle and Hampton carries melons that he rolls along the ground bowling-style. In theory, this should add some more depth to the game, but since Buster's carrot is by far the most versatile weapon and every character shares the same life bar while moving and jumping identically, there's hardly any reason to switch characters aside from one or two passages on the first part of the forest level where Hamptons better range will come in handy. Besides, you'll be using the trusty old jump attack most of the time, making the entire concept of three characters a bit of a wasted opportunity.

Every level features a section where you'll have to enlist the aid of another character to help you pass an otherwise impossible obstacle. Finding the character will make him or her join you and pop out when you reach the spot where they are useful, at which point you lose control of the game for a few seconds while watching your helper play a small part of the level by themselves. While this is a fun way to get more characters in the game, it would have been fun to be able to actually control, say, Dizzy Devil instead of just watching him tunnel through a mountain. Still, it's a nice touch that will satisfy Tiny Toons fans (if there are any left that is).

Of course, being a platformer, the levels of Tiny Toons are full of gems for you to collect. However, rather than awarding you an extra life after picking up a hundred of them, the gems are spent on playing one of the two different mini games on offer. There's a simple but fun whack a mole game and a button mashing/Game Boy breaking Track and Field type game where you race against some lesser known characters like a junior version of Road Runner. Winning rewards like extra lives is rather easy and ultimately pointless since the game is very easy to beat even without them. The relatively short levels and low difficulty means that you are very likely to breeze through the entire game in little more than half an hour the first time you play it, which is too bad considering how fun you'll have during the time.

Presentation-wise, Babs' Big Break is excellent with SNES-esque visuals that makes the NES game pale in comparison. The big and relatively detailed sprites give each Tiny Toon tons of character with the grumpy Plucky being a notable highlight. The backgrounds are mostly static, but well drawn with a few fun details for the player to discover. Nice sprites aside, tshe main strength that differentiates Tiny Toons' visuals from the pack lies in the small touches. Things like the soot on the train level, the flickering lighting caused by the broken lights in the school basement and the way stationary enemies are slightly dislocated when you pass through a pipe they are standing on lend the game both character and (for a Game Boy game) flair while making it one of the best looking games I've played on the monochrome hand held.

The music is equally nice with a quality rendition of the main theme from the show being played on about half of the levels. The rest of the levels are all accompanied by fitting tunes with the haunted forest's spooky theme and the slightly funky bit-soul from the city stage standing out as particularly memorable. The sound effects are what one could expect from a Game Boy game, a “ping” when you pick up a gem and a “boing” when you jump. Hardly inspired, but functional.

Overall, I can really recommend Bab's Big Break to anybody who like platformers and have access to some kind of Game Boy. While the low challenge and short levels would have made it a complete rip-off to pay full price for it twenty years ago, the two or three bucks you'd have to pay for a copy on an auction site like ebay today is a more than reasonable price for a game so rich in quality and poor in quantity. Like having dinner at a fancy restaurant but only being able to afford the starter, Tiny Toons for the Game Boy will wet your appetite with a few delicious treats, but leave you hungry and yearning for a main course. It's great while it lasts, but it's ultimately unsatisfying. A shame, for the little you do get is a three-star experience.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 02/07/11

Game Release: Tiny Toon Adventures: Babs' Big Break (EU, 1992)