Dino City
73 days until the vernal equinox
I put together a preliminary list of games to play for this back in April. I think I played about half of them.
So I found this game in a Nintendo Power magazine and put in a list of wonky games to play for next year, which will no doubt be completely different by high summer.
By December, I tried playing something for the Turbo-Grafx 16 but TGEmu doesn’t have save states for whatever reason and I didn’t have the time nor the patience to get good at or even navigate a Japanese game. I learned about James Pond in the Deathly Shallows, a mobile game from 2011 that is part of a franchise that has fallen by the wayside. Nothing about that screams "good game" or even "ok game" and I don't know if I can even buy it and I don't think I'll be playing that even if I wanted to. And I just couldn’t bring myself to play Eek! the Cat. So I decided I'd just play this.
I posted this game last, not just because I schedule my writeups around real life, but because it’s the last one I played. You know, because I could have easily switched this one with Ren and Stimpy or even Zany Golf or Wally Bear or Janky Kong.
Emma has the same problem I do. If I take a nap, especially now, in early winter, when the sun sets before 5 PM, I'll get thrown off completely. Best to stay awake for as long as possible, even after an early morning.
This game is very loosely based on a made for TV movie called Adventures in Dinosaur City, not to be confused with a Russian TV show called DinoCity, which didn’t exist when this game was made. And I watched it. Basically, it’s Pleasantville. With dinosaurs. And a lot less social commentary. And not really that good. For whatever reason, they made the human characters teenagers. Even if it would make more sense for them to be pre-teens. Timmy’s actor was 15 when the movie came out. I can’t find anything about the others. We could assume “teenagers don’t look like teenagers on film, we’ve got to use twenty-five year olds.” and we can obviously assume that time passed between filming and release. I can’t find Jamie’s age. The manual says that Timmy and Jamie are friends and not younger brother and older sister.
The animated intro is pretty cool. I say "animated" even though most of it is just still illustrations, aside from one card where they're riding one of those train carts with the lever you push down on.
The version I watched was subtitled in Greek, featuring a letter that looked like a backwards h with a curved stem.
You’d think someone else’s alphabet, I’m looking at you, Georgia and Armenia, would have something similar but no. Not Deseret or Lydian either. Not Coptic, not Etruscan, not Oscan, not Lepontic.
The movie nailed the 60s animation style but their real life dinos were a lot less impressive. You could see Tops' frill wobble.
Also, every dinosaur, caveman and rhamphorynchus (a Jurassic pterosaur with the tongue-twistiest name of any prehistoric creature. Someone wanted to one-up the parasaurolophus) talks with the most annoying voice they could muster.
The plot is that Timmy's father is doing experiments with teleportation and the kids try to watch their favorite cartoon on a big screen TV and inadvertantly get sucked into their world.
Timmy is wearing a shirt with his name on it. 90s? 90s! I dunno if people actually did that. The cover art for this game is really 90s though.
Zetaplays hasn’t gotten around to this. JonTron has and his take is as funny as you’d expect, that is to say, it spends almost a minute on a "joke" of him putting the cartridge in/on various things.
There is one guide on Gamefaqs and it only covers 2 levels with the promise of more in the near future, but that was back in 2003. Nintendo Power only covers four of the worlds. So, what are you going to do?
If you got to this via a direct link to the entry, that's not a burning question. The answer is "Read this, of course!"
In Japan, there are difficulty levels, interestingly enough. Hard is what we get: limited continues and three hearts maximum. Normal is five hearts to start with and unlimited continues.
R to exit is just weird.
You can get this artwork depicting Jamie dressed as Ashley Winchester and bereft one (1) nose.
Rex can punch. He's very obviously a Tyrannosaurus, even if they did probably look like gigantic versions of Final Fantasy XII's cockatrices in real life.
So, there were two clades of dinosaurs, the lizard-hipped saurischia (theropods and sauropods along with the herrerasaurs) and the bird-hipped ornithischia (everyone else), and you know what’s funny, kupo, is that modern birds, who obviously have bird hips, are descended from saurischia.
Tops can throw tools. Both attacks do the same damage as far as I can tell. The choice is obvious. I think Tops is supposed to be a Protoceratops. Although he looks more like a Chasmosaurus in the film.
Obviously you’re not seeing this but the text speed makes me think that you’re calling the Coach’s Hotline for advice.
There will be no Hydrocity debate here. It’s Dino, from the Greek deinós, meaning terrible or fearfully great, and city, from the Latin civitas by way of French. Not a portmanteau of dino and ferocity. And don’t tell me that if they wanted that, they’d have called it Dinopolis, because even the Romans used polis, e.g. Gratianopolis, Constantinople (which is now Istanbul, not Constantinople), Adrianopolis. The movie is called Adventures in Dinosaur City.
I know there isn’t much of a city to be seen here but dinosaurs didn’t have thumbs. Except for Iguanodon and that was just a spike. The monkeydactyl had opposable thumbs but that was a pterosaur which aren’t dinosaurs even though all the prehistoric reptiles get lumped together as if the Dimetrodon wasn’t from a different era and was more related to mammals.
Cindy’s outfit is a lot more revealing and her breasts are bigger in the Japanese version. On the other hand, her facial expression makes her look constipated.
In the movie, Cindy is called Missy.
These guys suck you in. And their hitboxes are huge. For whatever reason, they never show up after this level.
I just really like the colored pencil effect on the trees.
There are five areas per stage but in the game data, it’s sort of stretched out to twenty. The areas have two doors at the end but choosing the door that's harder to reach just gets you closer and closer to a bonus area. I think a few of them switch the stages up.
One face blows ice to freeze the water, one face blows fire to melt the ice. They spin around.
These seals just keep coming.
Jump on top of these skulls to disable them.
The bonus stage doesn’t matter. It takes place on an elevator and you are a dinosaur, not Sonic the Hedgehog. You aren’t fast enough to get most of the things. Just maybe try to get a heart if you need it.
These blocks fall when you stand on them.
There's a really neat nightfall effect that takes place through this level.
As Tops, there is a safe place you can stand and toss tools at the wall to break it. Then hitting the boss is just as easy peasy. As Rex, it's probably a little bit harder.
If you die on a boss, you have to restart the entire area.
And here's the password, should you want it.
Porcupines have only been around since the Oligocene. I mean, uh, it's kinda moot in a game where Pleistocene humans, Cretaceous dinosaurs, and Jurassic pterosaurs all coexist. You can't jump on them either.
In the movie, the Rockies sound a lot like Harry the Bike Guy.
The boats in this game look a lot like giant staplers.
The obligatory jumping fish enemy.
I don't know how I'm supposed to get past these Monty Moles. Even if you destroy one, they just keep coming back. Oh, I can bypass them entirely by jumping down the pit.
The theme of the game is relatively tough stages, and relatively easy bosses. This game was made by Irem, of shmup fame, though I think my go-to example of easy bosses and tough levels is Life Force by Konami.
Password. This differs from the password on Gamefaqs.
Oh, boy, a rollercoaster level.
Having too many Rockies on screen causes slowdown.
Press will try to crush you with his moving wall.
This is like the snake block from Super Mario World.
The wheel moves through the stage and tiny bee enemies attack you.
The bird drops a trampoline enemy that you can use to hit him.
Another password.
I don't know what he's doing.
Unlike the green pincushion enemies, the red one dies when you jump on it.
Though you can't see him, Press is back. You can only hit the fuck me light when the water isn't running. This guy might be the hardest boss in the game. Not that I'm saying a whole lot.
Password.
For a long time, sauropods were thought to be semi-aquatic, too heavy and too sluggish to stand on their own. Later, in the 60s, when video games were still simple things, better science and more findings put the kibosh on that idea.
These bird bosses are, once again, super-easy.
And here's a password for your efforts.
Something I haven't yet brought up is that this game has a mechanic in which you can press R to get off your dinosaur and walk around. As a human, your weapon is a remote control which you can use to freeze enemies in their tracks. It's useful against Press.
The mechanic is underused, as your dino companion taking too much damage or falling down a pit causes you to lose a life. Mostly it's used for getting an extra boost to reach an item or getting through small gaps so you can disable the crushy skull platforms.
Not that that matters since your lives are capped at 9.
This tower shows up in in the movie.
In the movie, Mr. Big is an allosaurus, despite that whole Iguanadon reconstruction nose horn thing he has going for him.
In the movie, he most likely used a mind control potion on the humans.
He teleports, breathes fire if you let him, and when you do enough damage, he shoots off a bunch of sparks when you hit him.
By beating him, we get the fuse.
In the movie, the fuse powered the elevator and so Forry had to fly down with it. But Forry wasn't very good at flying.
This game just kinda forgets Mick exists.
Oh yeah, some time in the game, she misplaced her glasses.
Here are all the enemies with their pathetically dull names.
The boss names are just as interesting.
Here's a demo of Rex fighting Crasher.
You can shrink Mr. Big with your remote control which I guess makes him easier to hit or weaker or something but I didn’t know about this until the end credits.
In the ending screen, Jamie is wearing a clown nose for some reason.
And that's it. I'll probably post next in mid-February at the latest. Most likely February, barring an unexpected trip to the ICA or MFA. Which is unlikely, since I find their special exhibits rather lacking.
burning question: why does touching the side of a spike hurt you? Mega Man, I understand, because the spikes are spikes with spikes on their spikes or spiked balls or set up in ways that you can’t actually touch the non-spiky sides of them.
I put together a preliminary list of games to play for this back in April. I think I played about half of them.
So I found this game in a Nintendo Power magazine and put in a list of wonky games to play for next year, which will no doubt be completely different by high summer.
By December, I tried playing something for the Turbo-Grafx 16 but TGEmu doesn’t have save states for whatever reason and I didn’t have the time nor the patience to get good at or even navigate a Japanese game. I learned about James Pond in the Deathly Shallows, a mobile game from 2011 that is part of a franchise that has fallen by the wayside. Nothing about that screams "good game" or even "ok game" and I don't know if I can even buy it and I don't think I'll be playing that even if I wanted to. And I just couldn’t bring myself to play Eek! the Cat. So I decided I'd just play this.
I posted this game last, not just because I schedule my writeups around real life, but because it’s the last one I played. You know, because I could have easily switched this one with Ren and Stimpy or even Zany Golf or Wally Bear or Janky Kong.
Emma has the same problem I do. If I take a nap, especially now, in early winter, when the sun sets before 5 PM, I'll get thrown off completely. Best to stay awake for as long as possible, even after an early morning.
This game is very loosely based on a made for TV movie called Adventures in Dinosaur City, not to be confused with a Russian TV show called DinoCity, which didn’t exist when this game was made. And I watched it. Basically, it’s Pleasantville. With dinosaurs. And a lot less social commentary. And not really that good. For whatever reason, they made the human characters teenagers. Even if it would make more sense for them to be pre-teens. Timmy’s actor was 15 when the movie came out. I can’t find anything about the others. We could assume “teenagers don’t look like teenagers on film, we’ve got to use twenty-five year olds.” and we can obviously assume that time passed between filming and release. I can’t find Jamie’s age. The manual says that Timmy and Jamie are friends and not younger brother and older sister.
The animated intro is pretty cool. I say "animated" even though most of it is just still illustrations, aside from one card where they're riding one of those train carts with the lever you push down on.
The version I watched was subtitled in Greek, featuring a letter that looked like a backwards h with a curved stem.
You’d think someone else’s alphabet, I’m looking at you, Georgia and Armenia, would have something similar but no. Not Deseret or Lydian either. Not Coptic, not Etruscan, not Oscan, not Lepontic.
The movie nailed the 60s animation style but their real life dinos were a lot less impressive. You could see Tops' frill wobble.
Also, every dinosaur, caveman and rhamphorynchus (a Jurassic pterosaur with the tongue-twistiest name of any prehistoric creature. Someone wanted to one-up the parasaurolophus) talks with the most annoying voice they could muster.
The plot is that Timmy's father is doing experiments with teleportation and the kids try to watch their favorite cartoon on a big screen TV and inadvertantly get sucked into their world.
Timmy is wearing a shirt with his name on it. 90s? 90s! I dunno if people actually did that. The cover art for this game is really 90s though.
Zetaplays hasn’t gotten around to this. JonTron has and his take is as funny as you’d expect, that is to say, it spends almost a minute on a "joke" of him putting the cartridge in/on various things.
There is one guide on Gamefaqs and it only covers 2 levels with the promise of more in the near future, but that was back in 2003. Nintendo Power only covers four of the worlds. So, what are you going to do?
If you got to this via a direct link to the entry, that's not a burning question. The answer is "Read this, of course!"
In Japan, there are difficulty levels, interestingly enough. Hard is what we get: limited continues and three hearts maximum. Normal is five hearts to start with and unlimited continues.
R to exit is just weird.
You can get this artwork depicting Jamie dressed as Ashley Winchester and bereft one (1) nose.
Rex can punch. He's very obviously a Tyrannosaurus, even if they did probably look like gigantic versions of Final Fantasy XII's cockatrices in real life.
So, there were two clades of dinosaurs, the lizard-hipped saurischia (theropods and sauropods along with the herrerasaurs) and the bird-hipped ornithischia (everyone else), and you know what’s funny, kupo, is that modern birds, who obviously have bird hips, are descended from saurischia.
Tops can throw tools. Both attacks do the same damage as far as I can tell. The choice is obvious. I think Tops is supposed to be a Protoceratops. Although he looks more like a Chasmosaurus in the film.
Obviously you’re not seeing this but the text speed makes me think that you’re calling the Coach’s Hotline for advice.
There will be no Hydrocity debate here. It’s Dino, from the Greek deinós, meaning terrible or fearfully great, and city, from the Latin civitas by way of French. Not a portmanteau of dino and ferocity. And don’t tell me that if they wanted that, they’d have called it Dinopolis, because even the Romans used polis, e.g. Gratianopolis, Constantinople (which is now Istanbul, not Constantinople), Adrianopolis. The movie is called Adventures in Dinosaur City.
I know there isn’t much of a city to be seen here but dinosaurs didn’t have thumbs. Except for Iguanodon and that was just a spike. The monkeydactyl had opposable thumbs but that was a pterosaur which aren’t dinosaurs even though all the prehistoric reptiles get lumped together as if the Dimetrodon wasn’t from a different era and was more related to mammals.
Cindy’s outfit is a lot more revealing and her breasts are bigger in the Japanese version. On the other hand, her facial expression makes her look constipated.
In the movie, Cindy is called Missy.
These guys suck you in. And their hitboxes are huge. For whatever reason, they never show up after this level.
I just really like the colored pencil effect on the trees.
There are five areas per stage but in the game data, it’s sort of stretched out to twenty. The areas have two doors at the end but choosing the door that's harder to reach just gets you closer and closer to a bonus area. I think a few of them switch the stages up.
One face blows ice to freeze the water, one face blows fire to melt the ice. They spin around.
These seals just keep coming.
Jump on top of these skulls to disable them.
The bonus stage doesn’t matter. It takes place on an elevator and you are a dinosaur, not Sonic the Hedgehog. You aren’t fast enough to get most of the things. Just maybe try to get a heart if you need it.
These blocks fall when you stand on them.
There's a really neat nightfall effect that takes place through this level.
As Tops, there is a safe place you can stand and toss tools at the wall to break it. Then hitting the boss is just as easy peasy. As Rex, it's probably a little bit harder.
If you die on a boss, you have to restart the entire area.
And here's the password, should you want it.
Porcupines have only been around since the Oligocene. I mean, uh, it's kinda moot in a game where Pleistocene humans, Cretaceous dinosaurs, and Jurassic pterosaurs all coexist. You can't jump on them either.
In the movie, the Rockies sound a lot like Harry the Bike Guy.
The boats in this game look a lot like giant staplers.
The obligatory jumping fish enemy.
I don't know how I'm supposed to get past these Monty Moles. Even if you destroy one, they just keep coming back. Oh, I can bypass them entirely by jumping down the pit.
The theme of the game is relatively tough stages, and relatively easy bosses. This game was made by Irem, of shmup fame, though I think my go-to example of easy bosses and tough levels is Life Force by Konami.
Password. This differs from the password on Gamefaqs.
Oh, boy, a rollercoaster level.
Having too many Rockies on screen causes slowdown.
Press will try to crush you with his moving wall.
This is like the snake block from Super Mario World.
The wheel moves through the stage and tiny bee enemies attack you.
The bird drops a trampoline enemy that you can use to hit him.
Another password.
I don't know what he's doing.
Unlike the green pincushion enemies, the red one dies when you jump on it.
Though you can't see him, Press is back. You can only hit the fuck me light when the water isn't running. This guy might be the hardest boss in the game. Not that I'm saying a whole lot.
Password.
For a long time, sauropods were thought to be semi-aquatic, too heavy and too sluggish to stand on their own. Later, in the 60s, when video games were still simple things, better science and more findings put the kibosh on that idea.
These bird bosses are, once again, super-easy.
And here's a password for your efforts.
Something I haven't yet brought up is that this game has a mechanic in which you can press R to get off your dinosaur and walk around. As a human, your weapon is a remote control which you can use to freeze enemies in their tracks. It's useful against Press.
The mechanic is underused, as your dino companion taking too much damage or falling down a pit causes you to lose a life. Mostly it's used for getting an extra boost to reach an item or getting through small gaps so you can disable the crushy skull platforms.
Not that that matters since your lives are capped at 9.
This tower shows up in in the movie.
In the movie, Mr. Big is an allosaurus, despite that whole Iguanadon reconstruction nose horn thing he has going for him.
In the movie, he most likely used a mind control potion on the humans.
He teleports, breathes fire if you let him, and when you do enough damage, he shoots off a bunch of sparks when you hit him.
By beating him, we get the fuse.
In the movie, the fuse powered the elevator and so Forry had to fly down with it. But Forry wasn't very good at flying.
This game just kinda forgets Mick exists.
Oh yeah, some time in the game, she misplaced her glasses.
Here are all the enemies with their pathetically dull names.
The boss names are just as interesting.
Here's a demo of Rex fighting Crasher.
You can shrink Mr. Big with your remote control which I guess makes him easier to hit or weaker or something but I didn’t know about this until the end credits.
In the ending screen, Jamie is wearing a clown nose for some reason.
And that's it. I'll probably post next in mid-February at the latest. Most likely February, barring an unexpected trip to the ICA or MFA. Which is unlikely, since I find their special exhibits rather lacking.
burning question: why does touching the side of a spike hurt you? Mega Man, I understand, because the spikes are spikes with spikes on their spikes or spiked balls or set up in ways that you can’t actually touch the non-spiky sides of them.