Dino Crisis: Where Are The Great Dinosaur Games?

For decades games have enhanced their appeal by pitting the player against classic geek adversaries. Aliens, wizards, dragons, pirates, ninjas, zombies – there are many more zombies in our games than would likely exist if the zombie apocalypse actually occurred. Yet while all of the above have flourished as virtual cannon fodder, there’s one other quintessential baddie that has found it much harder to break into the games biz, and that is the dinosaur.

Dinosaur-based games are an extremely rare breed, with perhaps ten notable entries between 1995 and the present day, and these aren’t exactly consistent in terms of quality. There isn’t a single dinosaur-based game on Metacritic with a score over 90. The highest rated game I could find is Dino Crisis 2, clocking in at 86, a score matched by Turok 2. The first Dino Crisis managed a somewhat less convincing 73.

All of these are well over ten years old, and while decent at the time, none would be considered essential to a gamer’s collection in the same way GoldenEye or Resident Evil 2 would.  Worse, recent attempts to bring dinosaurs back into vogue have been pretty disastrous. Telltale’s Jurassic Park: The Game averages between 53 and 60 depending upon the platform, a million years away from their hugely successful Walking Dead series. Meanwhile, multiplayer dino-shooters Primal Carnage and Orion: Dino Beatdown strike out at 67 and 35 respectively.

There are some top-flight games which feature dinosaurs, the most famous of which is probably the original Tomb Raider, but they’re only a small part of a much larger adventure. Whenever dinosaurs are the main event, the games always come up short, either falling apart completely or just lacking that little something to make them truly great.

So what’s the problem? Are dinosaurs simply not all that appealing as an adversary? It’s possible. We generally seem drawn to fighting things that look like us, which is partly why zombies are so popular and aliens are frequently depicted as approximately humanoid in shape. But there are other non-humanoid opponents which have been successfully depicted in game form, like the Xenomorph (that is, aside from one particular game that came out recently).

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It realised that a great dinosaur game should be survival horror with the emphasis on the survival rather than the horror, and had you scavenging and using objects on the fly as weapons to defend yourself against the terrifying beasts.

No, the problem is more the way dinosaurs have been handled historically in games. Consider the various genres listed above.  We have an FPS with dinosaurs in it, a survival horror game with dinosaurs in it, an adventure game with dinosaurs in it, and two multiplayer shooters, with dinosaurs in them.

All of these games fall within clearly defined categories, which have obviously been decided upon before thinking about how to implement the terrible lizards themselves. None of the developers behind these games have paused to think about what the best way to portray dinosaurs in a game might be. Instead they’ve been used as a gimmick to provide a twist on a well-established framework. Sometimes it has worked pretty well, other times it has been a complete disaster.

There is one exception to this rule, a game which I’ve avoided mentioning yet. Jurassic Park: Trespasser put a huge amount of thought into the best way to represent dinosaurs in-game, and was entirely built around accommodating them. It understood the thrill and terror of being hunted, but in a dynamic, open environment rather than the tight, scripted corridors of Dino Crisis. It realised that a great dinosaur game should be survival horror with the emphasis on the survival rather than the horror, and had you scavenging and using objects on the fly as weapons to defend yourself against the terrifying beasts.

Jurassic Park: Trespasser

Trespasser had worked out all elements to make the perfect dinosaur game in 1998. So why, in the fifteen years since its release, have we not seen anything like it? The answer, unfortunately, is because of Jurassic Park: Trespasser.

Although Trespasser put all the right ingredients into the pot for a perfect dinosaur dish, in the process of cooking it the developers somehow managed to set the entire house on fire. It was a phenomenally bad game, and is frequently referred to as one of the biggest disappointments in the history of games. The incredibly cumbersome interaction system, in which the main character rigidly held out her arm like a steel girder and poked at objects in the world with all the grace and accuracy of a Fox News report, made the game almost impossible to play. Meanwhile, the environments were often completely devoid of the creatures that were the entire point of the game in the first place.

Trespasser was such a monumental failure, and remains such a famous one, that no developer has dared attempt a similar endeavour since, despite the fact that the technology is now sufficiently evolved to make the game Trespasser intended to be. Indeed, perhaps the biggest irony in all this is now there are gaming models in existence into which dinosaurs would fit perfectly. For example, the ArmA II mod (and soon to be game in its own right) DayZ essentially took Trespasser’s original design document, crossed out every instance of the word “dinosaur” and wrote “zombie” in the margin. The emphasis on scavenging weaponry, equipment and food while under constant threat from an enemy far more powerful and dangerous than you is precisely the sort of game structure dinosaurs need.

Far Cry 3 is possibly an even better fit. Not only does it have the classic tropical island setting associated with dinosaurs, it also comes equipped with a dynamic predator/prey AI systems perfectly suited to simulating prehistoric wildlife. Instead of Velociraptors and Tyrannosaurs, however, Far Cry 3 features crocodiles and komodo dragons. Just like in real life, these are the closest we’ve currently got to decent, dynamic dinosaurs.

It’s time this changed. There’s definitely a gap in the market for a specifically tailored dinosaur game. And although Trespasser was ultimately a disaster, the idea was a sound one. Despite everything there is some hope. Using the gene sequences of the Source engine, a team of amateur coders are busy reconstructing Isla Nublar and its inhabitants in Jurassic Life – a side-story which runs concurrent to the events in Jurassic Park. With custom AI behaviours, large environments, and some sufficiently terrifying looking dinosaurs, there is a chance it may be just the thing to save this rare species of game from extinction.

Rick Lane is the lead explosives correspondent for a variety of game magazines and websites (honest). You can follow his trail of destruction via Twitter.

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