Radical Rex is a Platform Game for Sega Genesis, Sega CD and Super Nintendo Entertainment System, developed by Beam Software and published by Activision in 1994, with a Windows PC port of the game released via Steam on March 7, 2019. It was known as Baby T-Rex in the development stages.
The plot is simple: An evil gopher-like creature named Skriitch wants to help the mammals rule the world, so he casts a spell on the dinosaurs that turns them against one another to help him achieve that goal. However, main character Radical Rex, a skateboarding, fire-breathing, "too hip to be extinct" T.rex, was unaffected by the spell. So he sets off to rescue the dinosaurs, which include his girlfriend, Rexanne. Strangely, the SNES version features a human wizard named Sethron as the Big Bad, rather than Skriitch.
Tropes:
- Ambidextrous Sprite: Yep. Rex will be perfectly mirrored no matter which way he's looking.
- Artistic License – Paleontology: It's rather unlikely that real dinosaurs breathed fire. However, Rule of Cool.
- Big Bad: Skriitch in the Sega CD version. Sethron in the Super NES version.
- Bubblegloop Swamp: The second level.
- Color-Coded Multiplayer: There's Rex, who is a light-brown T-Rex, and a second player controlled character that may or may not be an actual second character or just Rex dyed purple. It's actually Rexanne.
- Family-Unfriendly Death: Getting dissolved by a giant dinosaur's stomach acids, roasted to death in lava, drowning, or getting impaled on spikes, being asphyxiated by tentacles/sea anemones.
- Foregone Conclusion: It's dinosaurs vs. mammals, for crying out loud!
- Gusty Glade: The Dino Graveyard has occasional gusts of wind, which can be deadly if you're trying to leap over spikes when they occur.
- Idle Animation: Rex will impatiently tap his foot.
- The Many Deaths of You: There must be a thousand and one ways to get yourself killed in this game, and you are likely to hit every single last one of them before you beat the game.
- Mascot with Attitude: This was undoubtedly what the developers were aiming for with Radical Rex.
- Mini-Game: You can enter these between the core levels of the game by collecting dinosaur eggs. The Mini-Game levels themselves are all the same: Radical Rex riding a pogo stick atop seashell platforms to collect more dinosaur eggs. Oh, and he has to stay above the rising acid.
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Nintendo Hard: Not at first, but once you get to level 5, this starts setting in hard, as the enemies get tougher, the element of Super Drowning Skills is introduced, and each of the levels from this point on have bosses. - Ribcage Ridge: Level 4 is a dinosaur graveyard, where you must climb up giant jumbled dino skeletons.
- Save the World: An evil wizard is turning all your fellow dinosaurs against each other to induce their extinction and the rise of mammals!
- Springy Spores: At some points of the game, Rex encounters giant mushrooms that bounce him up when jumped on.
- Title Theme Drop: Hell, the title even drops into view when it starts!
- Title Theme Tune: Radical Rex, at least on the Sega CD, had one worthy of an 80s cartoon show.
- Totally Radical: It's right there in the title. The SNES version has a rather lousy theme song with the lyrics "He's a real cool/real cool/real cool RADICAL REX!", and Rex's soundbites sound like a bad imitation of a stereotypical California surfer dude.
- Womb Level: Level 3 opens with Rex accidentally getting swallowed by a gigantic dinosaur. Three guesses where the level is set — and it's a particularly Squicky example of this trope.
