you may have gathered this from previous chapters in this tale, but i'm not a fan of dino rex. from the presentation (monochrome dinosaurs that look like their rubber heads are about to fall off) to the concept (dinosaur pit fighting, where cavepeople run around whipping at the ankles of the hapless beasts) to the gameplay (feels how it looks), it just makes me uncomfortable.
but considering the games i've had to play thus far, maybe i'm being too harsh on dino rex. there are some good points to it: the graphics were technically advanced for the time (done in digitised stop motion), and you get some rather nice graphical setpieces where, on a particularly powerful attack, the losing dino will be smashed through a part of the stage.
plus they're all lizards! let's at least look at them. they deserve that much.
>
making the t-rex purple was... a choice. they're on different frames here, but the allosaurus and ceratosaurus are palette swaps (barely even that), and stygimoloch is just pachycephalo with more horns.
still, you can't not like this little guy.
the sound design is... mixed to say the least. the music, featuring much the same bird-calls-and-drumbeats aesthetic as its more famous successor primal rage, is actually rather good, with tunes that are not merely pleasant to the ears but, dare i say it, catchy. the repeated screams from the dinos, however, are excruciating. this game really wasn't anticipating emulation and headphones.
but of course it's all for naught if it doesn't play well. dino rex plays better than fighting masters, i think, but it's a bottom-of-the-barrel versus underneath-of-the-barrel thing. you really do feel like you're ordering your dinosaur around indirectly, via the little human thrashing its ankles, rather than actually being the creature - which kind of makes me wonder if the whole whipping thing was something they stuck in to make the controls seem less bad.
i dunno, this game is trying. as a gaudy arcade spectacle, it's worth a quarter or two. but realistically, it will always exist in the shadow of primal rage for me, which is only partly its fault seeing as this game came earlier. still, i play fighting games to be a titan, not an abused creature in a pit, and the constant reminder that you're not the one in control makes the whole thing a very miserable experience, for me.
and sure, that's a me thing. but this whole series is a me thing, so! onward we go, to 1993.
*record scratch* wait... another lizard game has hit 1992... please stand by
| find me on mass toed don | >> want a banner? use this 
<<