Review – Dinosaur King (DS)

Educational games always feel that little bit… peculiar. They’re slightly strange and alien, and not always in a bad way, but there’s always something not quite right. It feels a little like your first kiss (and given most of the target age-group of educational games won’t have had one of those yet, allow me to qualify that analogy a little for you) – it feels nice, and everything seems to be working quite well, but deep, deep down is that innermost fear that whispers up from the butterfly-filled pit of your stomach – “you’re not doing it right, something must be about to go wrong”. You didn’t poke her in the eye with your nose, or get your tongue caught in her braces, or bash foreheads and knock her out cold, but that deep-seated paranoia is still eating away at you (and let me tell you, kids, it doesn’t get any better later in life, you just get better at repressing it). This is how educational gaming feels. You’re pretty sure you’re playing it right, and it looks like the developer has done a good job, but you’re learning at the same time as enjoying a game. At the same time! Not thirty minutes of fun, followed by a fifteen minute lecture to keep your studies up to date, but actual, simultaneous learning and fun. 

Now I’ll be brutally honest, one of those rare beasts that is both educational and fun at the same time, and in roughly equal measure, come around about as often as an episode of 24 where nobody dies (again, one for when you’re older, but it’s well worth waiting for). Usually a game will set out with these lofty intentions, and in doing so, fail on at least one, but more often than not, both counts. Dragon King by SEGA does actually manage to maintain a high level of fun, while at the same time drip-feeding your brain information about palaeontology that would otherwise be painfully dull. The game originated from a SEGA arcade card game phenomenon (in Japan, obviously) called Mushiking (literally ‘King of the Beetles’). Players line up in what looks like something out of Las Vegas, with hundreds of slot machines all lined up together. They input their change and the machine dispenses a random card with a beetle on it (this is actually quite a fair game – even if you lose, you still are given something for playing), you then scan one of the cards in your collection and play a typical card battle (a la Yu-Gi-Oh! and their ilk) against the computer or other opponents in the arcade. Realising this was becoming a big money-spinner in the arcades (but somewhere along the line someone decided that Dinosaurs are cooler than beetles), SEGA implemented a dino-based version of this in the arcades, and the Dinosaur King concept was born. From there, the Dinosaur King arcade/card game spawned an animated television series and now, the Nintendo DS title of the same name. 

Even though the arcade game does have a storyline of sorts, it feels to me as though the DS title makes far more use of the cartoon series than of the card game for its setting. The basic premise for the game is nice and simple – Dr Spike Taylor, palaeontologist and adventuring leader of the D-team, whose members also include his son, Max Taylor and Max’s best friend Rex Owen, have discovered a way to bring dinosaurs back to life (a high-tech ray-gun affair, rather than a mosquito entombed in amber and some borrowed frog DNA). Unfortunately, the evil Alpha Gang, led by the nefarious and quite obviously insane Dr Z (he has an Albert Einstein hair-style, the universal cartoon symbol for lunacy) steal one of these devices and use it to wake dinosaurs up for their evil purpose, taking over the world! Playing as Max or Rex, you and the other members of the D-team must travel the world bringing dinosaurs back to life in order to defeat the Alpha Gang, save the world, and prevent the dinosaurs’ power being used for evil. 

The introduction to the game (in which this whole scenario is laid out before you) is really quite dull and pedestrian. It’s pretty, and colourful, but feels more like reading a comic than a piece of multimedia entertainment. The character’s mouths don’t even move while they’re making long rambling speeches, they just sit there in a constant “I’m really angry!” shouty pose until someone else speaks and comes to the foreground. It’s all just a little bit dull, like working for a cartoon company but only being allowed to flick through the storyboards, never to actually see the finished cartoon in motion. Dr Z turned up, stole the device, threatened to take over the world, swore the D-team would never stop him, and I almost fell asleep – that is, until he woke up a T-Rex. The top screen of the DS filled with a giant, snarling, roaring, fully 3D dinosaur, stomping around the place, snapping his teeth and swiping his tail. I was quite taken aback! We all know the DS is more than capable of some decent 3D graphics (take the recent DS port of Mario 64 as an example) but this really shocked me. The polygon count in the dinosaurs is really very high, and while their range of motion is pre-scripted (you don’t get to ‘control’ a dinosaur as such, it only appears in toe-to-toe battle sequences) it looks absolutely incredible. The arenas the dinosaurs prowl through are also graphically very good, with some objects (giant boulders as an example) being thrown into combat as an offensive weapon of sorts. The utter shock and sudden appearance of such terrific graphics left me a little stunned, and was a little caught off guard when a dinosaur was summoned for me to fight the T-Rex with, and realised I was being dropped straight into a combat tutorial.

To put it into its absolute, simple, base terms, the combat is paper-scissors-stone. To give it its due, to fully explore the combat from front to back, inside out, investigating all the subtle nuances and little secrets it has to offer… it’s still just paper-scissors-stone (with a little bit of maths). Combat appears like a slightly surreal beat-em-up, with two dinosaurs lining up toe-to-toe, ready to rip shreds off each other. Moves are split into three types and assigned one of the basic commands: paper is a throw, scissors is a tail attack, and stone is a charging attack – each dinosaur then has one of these as a ‘critical attack’ (denoted by a star shape around the icon) that roughly doubles the attack strength (should your attack be successful).  The mechanics are as self-explanatory as the three-counting fist-waving kids’ game that we’ve all played before – scissors cut paper, paper wraps stone, stone blunts scissors – pick the same thing, and it’s a tie. That’s it. The player and the computer both pick an attack, and the dinosaurs run at each other – if you pick scissors and the computer picks paper, you strike their dinosaur with your tail and deal significant damage. If you were to both pick scissors, then both dinosaurs clash in the middle and a little damage is sustained by both parties. As you progress through the game winning combat and gaining experience, your dinosaurs grow in strength and statistics, and learn upgraded versions of these base attacks, giving you a greater damage multiplier for a successful attack. During combat, you receive tips and assistance from D-team headquarters that if you pay attention to (and read between the lines a little bit) make combat more than straightforward. For example, at the start of a fight, the advice is invariably to watch out for your opponent’s critical move – if their critical move is scissors, pick stone, and you’ll score an early hit. The next advice will be that they will be trying to neutralise your critical move, so if your critical move is stone, you can be fairly sure they’ll pick paper, so you can pick scissors and score another easy hit. From there, it’s usually safe to let rip with your critical move, and you’ve won in three turns at the very most for 99% of every combat you’ll ever come across.  I’m not sure if I figured this out especially quickly, if it’s a design flaw in the game, or if it’s simply that this was an adult’s approach to the simplified mechanics of a kids’ game, but it can make the combat pretty pedestrian. Still, that gives you more room to sit back and enjoy the stonking dino visuals! 

Unfortunately, when the combat ends, so do the gorgeous 3D graphics, and rather than being transported back 65 million years to a time when dinosaurs walked the earth, you’re transported to somewhere resembling 1993, where Sonic the Hedgehog, not Orinthomimus, was the fastest thing on two legs, and Mario soared high above the Pterosaur in a rather strange raccoon outfit (I think the educational nature of this title must be rubbing off on me). The graphics, as in the opening sequence, are bold and colourful and very in keeping with the style of the brand, but they’re very flat and a little bit crude. Some games can get away with this by being ultimately charming for all their bi-dimensional failings (Yoshi’s Island DS, for example, still manages to be slick and appealing in spite of looking like a SNES release) but Dinosaur King DS just feels like a little bit of a let down on this score, especially considering the effort that has obviously gone into the presentation of the combat sequences. Similarly the quality of the audio presentation is split fairly rigidly across the combat/world divide, with dinosaurs screeching and snarling with gusto and enthusiasm during combat sequences, making the xylophonic 8-bit styling of the music and sound effects sound a little feeble and foolish. The game world is that slightly skewed top-down classic RPG perspective that we all grew to love (or grew used to, in any case), as made famous by Final Fantasy, Chrono Trigger and their ilk back in the early nineties, and while that in itself isn’t a problem, it isn’t that well executed here. The movement is completely based on the four points of a compass principle, with up, down, left, right, and no deviation from these straight lines allowed. Aside from feeling very old fashioned, it seems rather ungainly to have characters making what amounts to three point turns around winding forest paths and down rubble-strewn mines, and increases the time taken to travel from A to B by about fifty percent. You then must wander the world on these four axes, collecting things for people, solving little issues for the locals, all to open up the next path or progress the story onto the next section, and it feels like it has all been done before (remember the world’s longest game of item-swap ping-pong from The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening?). 

Alright, I have a confession to make now. My plan was to try and get through this entire review without mentioning the other Nintendo hand-held collect-and-battle TV-show spin-off game series that if this title were any closer to, there would be a danger of the universe coming to an end in a matter/anti-matter based implosion (“Great Scott Marty… the encounter could create a time paradox, the results of which could start a chain reaction that would unravel the very fabric of the space time continuum, and destroy the universe!”). But I can’t do it, I can’t go any further without saying it – Dinosaur King DS is essentially Pokemon in a Barney costume. There, I said it! It’s out in the open. The pink elephant has left the room. 

Being akin to Pokemon is no criticism of Dinosaur King DS, you must understand. While I personally thought the Pokemon TV series was truly awful, the resultant string of titles for Game Boy and GBA were absolutely fantastic. They were perfectly targeted, smartly executed, and fiendishly addictive, and were everything a collect-em-up/RPG should be, so there’s no shame in SEGA copying that formula verbatim here. They have also brought some great extra touches to the party, especially the stylus-based excavation type mini-game whereby after you have uncovered a new fossil (by a kind of echo-location underground, think the Bone Village excavation site in Final Fantasy VII) you then have a limited time in which to clean and uncover enough of the skeleton using the stylus to determine what it is. It is a simple minigame, but a very clever one, and relies on some common-sense application of reptile physiology (knowing where tails and horns could be if you still haven’t uncovered the whole skeleton but it looks like you can see the whole thing) and a few leaps of faith. It’s a good job it has a timer, as you’ll be playing it a lot, and the time limit keeps it interesting and exciting, and makes it more than just a glorified etch-a-sketch. Where Dinosaur King DS does let itself down is not the presentation overall, but the gulf between the respective levels of the presentation across the title – as you wander around the world map, you can’t help but wonder why they didn’t spend as much time and effort on the rest of the game as they have the combat. It is there then, that I believe effectively ‘cloning’ the Pokemon series has let Dinosaur King DS down – they appear have seen that the old Pokemon titles were incredibly successful and had a formula that obviously worked a treat, and in an apparent effort not to deviate too far from this formula, they unfortunately haven’t improved upon it, which is a great shame. If you loved the original Game Boy/GBA Pokemon titles, then you will no doubt feel a warm familiarity towards Dinosaur King DS, but it won’t bring anything new to the party – your son/daughter/niece/nephew will probably love it, though (and they might just learn a thing or two).

Score: 6/10