Title: Dinocity (NA) Dinowars: Kyouryuu Oukoku e no Daibouken
(Translation: Dinowars: Dinosaur Kingdom Paint Adventure)
Release Date: 7/17/1992
Developer: Irem
Publisher: Irem
Another game that I have played in the past due to renting it as a kid, but haven't really played it since and my memory of how it plays is very slight. This is side-scrolling platformer that also had some internet notoriety due to jokey Youtube reviews, and Irem is a company with a bumpy track record, but I am also partial to platformers of this vintage, so who knows how this will end up!
Background
I have said it before, but the best part of writing this blog has been finding the connections between these games and the weirdest people or pieces of media out there, and Dinocity is a gem in this regard. This is a game based upon a movie I have never heard of: Adventures in Dinosaur City, a 1991 United Kingdom made for TV movie that utilizes make-up and human piloted puppetry that looks very similar to the 1990 Ninja Turtles movie.
 |
| There is a lot to unpack on this poster, but I will leave that to you reader. |
This movie looks wild in terms of design, and you know it is that good type of cheap where they only had the budget for designing dinosaur heads and hands versus full body outfits. A lot of hoodies and leather jackets for these dinosaurs; there is some of that "kids love tough dudes with hearts of gold" design in this movie. Also I love that they seem to be in the same grungy dystopia as the 1990s Mario Bros. movie.
For a child of the 90s, Dinosaurs were really in the cultural water even before Jurassic Park blew up their popularity to the mainstream, and there were a bunch of B-movies and cheap television series of this ilk: Prehysteria! (the movie with the tiny dinosaurs that come to life), Dinosaurs (the supremely upsetting sitcom that couldn't decide if it was for kids or adults), Land Before Time, or We're Back! A Dinosaur's Movie (the movie that realized old carnivals were scarier than dinosaurs). I think the entertainment realized that if they could translate dinosaurs to the screen successfully, then they would have a winning intellectual property on their hands that would both put buts in seats but also sell a ton of toys and merchandise, as eventually realized by Jurassic Park.
And hoping to cash in on the obvious clout from this movie was Irem, who was hired by Smart Egg Pictures, the creators of the film, to make this game. The game follows the same rough story, but the look of the game is much closer to the Japanese box art for the game than the aesthetic of the North American box art, which hews closer to the look of the movie.
We have encountered Irem already on this blog before, with Super R-Type, and we will several times over after this game. They were quite a prolific video game developer throughout the 80s-90s and up until the early 2010s, and while they are still a company, they mainly develop Pachinko games now.
Game
Dinocity is an action platformer of the same ilk as Plok or Smart Ball. You play as one of the two children riding one of their respective two dinosaurs. If you play as Timmy riding Rex, then you only have a close range melee punch attack, while if you play as Jaime riding Top, you can throw little darts at a distance. Rex makes up for the fact that he has no range by being able to attack much quicker than Top and her projectiles. For my playthrough, I chose to play as Jaime, and found it to be a much easier experience.
The goal of each level is to traverse a series of courses, which are usually geometry mazes or one of several platforming gimmicks, to make it to one of the two exit doors. The basic exit door will lead you to the next course, while the trickier to reach exit door will allow you to skip a course or even hit a bonus stage. Eventually, you will face a boss fight, and you move onto the next overall stage of a total of six. Checkpoints are generally pretty generous, but otherwise you can take two hits before dying, and losing all of your lives leads to a game over and starting from the beginning. This is one of those games where you want to find a way to horde lives as quickly as possible.
The difficulty of the game is something I am torn on. On one hand, this is a pretty competent platformer; generally when I died in the game, I was always able to see where I messed up and what I could do differently next time. On the other hand, there are a lot of little design decisions that make it feel cheap in some of the lives it steals. The stage uses a ratcheting scroll to it, so anytime you move the screen forward, you can't return to previous parts of the stage. Several times, this meant that I couldn't get back to the ledge I needed to jump from again, and then had to run out the time. Other times, if it was a vertically scrolling stage, it means the bottom of the screen becomes a killzone.
The platforming itself is pretty fair, though there are some parts where you will most likely die the first time through just not knowing that "oh this platform I jumped on is going to start to dip. and now I can't make the jump forward, and the screen ratcheted so I can't jump back, and okay now I am sinking into this pit I guess." There are some recurring stage motifs and platforming challenges that repeat several times (it must be stated that there are no real themes to each of the overall stages, but instead a group of course themes that they game cycles through) that are pretty fun. One type of stage has you riding on dinosaur bone roller coasters, another has you riding a spinning wheel as it goes along a track, and then there are these castles that have shifting blocks that you have to climb. Overall, some nice variety in the types of challenges, though I will say these do seem very similar in design to other platformers that came a little before this game (especially Super Mario World).
Another weird platforming thing is that you sometimes have to let the child you are carting around off your back so that they can open up paths for you. The teen companion has a higher jump, and you will need them to hop onto higher platforms to let them down for your dino.
The game's enemies are judiciously placed and do not tend to respawn which is a nice reprieve from the Eurotrash platformers of this era which tend to just throw everybody at you at once. There are some levels that are built around clearing enemies quickly, such as a couple courses which place you in an enemy filled hallway that you have to traverse quickly before a guy with a stone wall crushes you. Overall, combat is fine; you can jump on enemies to kill them too, though some enemies take a bunch of hits to kill. I will say your character's sprite is both tall and wide, which makes you quite an easy target for enemies that fly at you from the diagonals.
I will say that the game is a really colorful and appealing looking game. The sprite art, while not the best in the biz, is quite cute and charming. I like it much more than the vibe of the movie and the North American box art.
Finally, the bosses are pretty simple in that they just have one or two attacks that they repeat in a pattern. The designs are really quite strange for some of them too.
The music is really quite farty, whistly, and just not good. My wife asked me to put the game on mute when I was playing it.
Final Verdict
Overall this is a very okay platformer. The game is definitely missing something that would make it a fondly remembered game; it is a little too punishing with sending you back to the start, but with save states it was breezy. It is missing other things like power-ups or upgrades that were common in other platformers at the time, so you never feel like you have any extra tools aside from your reflexes and memory to combat the challenges of this game. These would not only help you tackle the challenging platforming, but also provide a much needed variety to the gameplay when you have to keep playing through it to progress.
If you have a love for this vintage of platformer, by all means check it out, otherwise it's probably okay to forget this one.
No comments:
Post a Comment