I was a massive Rugrats kid growing up (massive in terms of intensity, I was pretty small), as well as being a PlayStation fiend, so some of my fondest early gaming memories come from playing the various Rugrats licensed titles that were available on the PS1. I recall spending countless hours hunting down every last Reptar puzzle piece in Rugrats: Search for Reptar, every Golden Ticket in Rugrats in Paris and… whatever was going on in Rugrats: Studio Tour. So when Limited Run announced it was putting its proprietary Carbon Engine to use on a collection of home console and handheld Rugrats games, well, it’s like it was a’posed to be.
Rugrats: Retro Rewind Collection contains six Rugrats games, spanning releases originally found on the PS1, Game Boy/Colour and Game Boy Advance, with two of the games including handheld variants for a total of eight playable titles. Thanks to the Carbon Engine, each of these is presented as closely as possible to their original versions, so what you’re getting is not a ‘remastering’ of any sort but a warts-and-all representation of what the games looked like at the time. There are some small tweaks for playability included, like instant saves and a handy rewind feature, plus some basic CRT/dot matrix screen filters and options for aspect ratio with or without border decoration.
Included titles:
- Rugrats: Search for Reptar (PSX)
- The Rugrats Movie (Game Boy)
- The Rugrats Movie (Game Boy Colour)
- Rugrats: Time Travelers (Game Boy Colour)
- Rugrats: Studio Tour (PSX)
- Rugrats in Paris: The Movie (PSX)
- Rugrats in Paris: The Movie (Game Boy Colour)
- Rugrats: Castle Capers (Game Boy Advance)
While I can only do so much to make comparisons without owning original copies of these games, relying mostly on YouTube playthroughs derived from authentic hardware, it certainly seems like all of these look and run exactly as they did, for better or worse. As much as I adored the PS1 entries as a sprout, there’s no getting around the fact that they don’t hold up all that well. The 3D platformers of the 32-bit era rarely do, and all the same issues of dodgy cameras, ropey collision detection and grating, repetitive audio don’t exactly do much to help the already-middling platforming and minigames that make up the bigger three titles in this package. But darn it, I still relished every moment of replaying them.
There’s a lot to say for nostalgia in a collection like this, and I’d question why one would pick it up for any other reason, so the objective quality of the included games doesn’t matter so much. It’s telling that I had the least fun with the Game Boy and Game Boy Advance entries, having never touched any of them before. They’re pretty much all incredibly simple, meandering side-scrollers, a staple of licensed video game tie-ins on Nintendo’s early handhelds, but from a purely educational point-of-view I, again, had a decent amount of fun seeing what each had to offer.
I will say, having the rewind function available in some of the more frustrating PS1-era minigames is an absolute game-changer (I’m looking at you, Rugrats in Paris), putting a complete playthrough of each game within reach of anyone. Rounding out the feature set, Rugrats: Retro Rewind Collection also packs a simple music player to listen to the tracks from the games (some of which are genuine bangers) and a digital museum to browse scans of each games’ physical boxes and manuals – sans any platform branding, of course. I quite enjoyed poring over these, noting the imperfections and wear on some of the scanned-in artifacts, and if you’re observant you might even find some helpful scribbles in the Notes pages of some of the manuals.
Relative quality of the actual games aside, this is another great package from LRG that rescues a handful of games that might’ve otherwise been lost to time and licensing. I won’t pretend that it’s impossible to find and play any of these in little to no time or expense, but there’s something to be said about having them curated and preserved with intent for modern platforms, and with the option of physical copies that should outlive digital servers. There’s maybe not quite as comprehensive a list of gameplay improvements or supplementary materials as something like the GEX Trilogy, but the number of games on offer helps make up for that.
This collection isn’t without issues, though. There were instances in some games where controls didn’t quite match up to either the original or newly-packaged versions of games, like during the Outside Space levels in Studio Tour, where the button to shoot lasers doesn’t seem to function and instead temporarily turns off your ability to jump. Not sure what the deal is there, but thankfully those levels are very doable without any laser action. There have also been times where a game’s “retry” option in the pause menu doesn’t actually offer a retry but instead activates the save function, which is kinda the opposite of what you’d want in that moment. None of these really hindered my progress, but they’re certainly odd, and hopefully something that gets fixed up before LRG presses the physical copies of the collection.
I’m also a little disappointed to not see Rugrats: Totally Angelica or Rugrats: Scavenger Hunt on this list, the former being a fourth PS1 entry that I’ve never played and would love to, and the latter being an N64 party game that my partner claims to love but isn’t very good. I’m sure that Totally Angelica was just the victim of rights holders, and the Carbon Engine doesn’t do N64 emulation at present, so it’s through no fault of Limited Run that they’re missing, but it’s unfortunate.
Reviewed on PS5 | Review copy provided by publisher
Great
- Solid emulation with welcome quality-of-life features
- Scanned game boxes and manuals are great to pore over
- Six games plus two variants is a decent package
- The recurring minigolf segments are still fun
Not great
- The overall quality of these games is debatable
- A few small technical issues