Mercer Mayer's Little Critter and the Great Race

Little Critter is a character created by the author/illustrator Mercer Mayer for a series of children's books: he is an animal of unknown species, although his web page says that his species is Little Critter...

Critterville is having a big soap box derby, and you and Little Critter have to find the parts to build your own racer. Once you've selected the model you want to build, you'll travel all around the town performing helpful tasks, trading items, and talking to townspeople in order to collect the car parts you need.

The Great Race is a point and click adventure game, and all actions are performed with the mouse. Critterville has four maps that let you travel wherever you need to go by selecting a location with the mouse - as you move the cursor over it Little Critter tells you what each place is; a click will take you there. As you collect objects that you'll use in some way during the game they will show in the inventory window at the bottom of the screen, and you "use" them by clicking and dragging them where you want. The car parts that you collect are visible when you click on the Soapbox Racers book on the bottom right.

Many objects and areas in the game are clickable hot-spots, giving you small animations of characters singing and dancing, or odd and amusing little events such as a little rabbit girl sighing adoringly over Little Critter when you click on her; a dinosaur toy that burps; machines that rattle and move, etc.

There are six mini-games to play during the course of the game, although they may not all be necessary for the completion of The Great Race - which ones are necessary depends on the racer you've chosen to build. The mini-games include Tic-Tac-Toe (with spiders as markers), matching tools to outlines on a pegboard, a jigsaw puzzle, balloon concentration, Recyclotron 2000 (matching can labels to their slot in a recycling machine), and of course, the Great Race itself, which is an arcade-style driving game that involves dodging cows and other racers as you speed along the racetrack.