Dinosaur Island (Saturn)

It's been a while since the last post, and unjfortunately, this one's just a short filler post. Sorry!
Anyway, Dinosaur Island isn't really a game, it's more of an interactive cartoon. Everything's in Japanese, but it's not like it's some super-complex story or anything. It's just stuff happening to some kids who live on an island that's also inhabited by monsters.
It's definitely worth a look if you can get it cheap, though (and you probably can: my copy cost about £3 including shipping from Japan!), just for how amazing it all looks. The first generation of CD consoles (the PC Engine and Mega CD) had some severe limitations that really showed when they tried to play video. The worst example of this was the Mega CD Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers game, featuring ugly FMVs playing in a tiny box. One solution used to great effect was making animations using big sprites and such, meaning the graphics could be coloured to fit the consoles' limited palletes and they could be full screen too.
Dinosaur Island takes this idea and applies it to the much more powerful Saturn, allowing for super-clear, high quality animation that also has amazing bright colours. Don't pay a lot of money for it though, unless you speak Japanese, I guess.

Dolphin Blue (Arcade)

Dolphin Blue sounds like a meaningless title, but both words are very relevant to the game. Dolphin, because you spend the game being accompanied by a dolphin buddy, and blue because a lot of the game is set in or on water.
Because of all that water, there are three kinds of segments in DB. There are parts on land (or more often, on the decks of huge battleships), where you fight on foot. These parts are very reminiscent of the Metal Slug games. Before I'd played the game, I'd only seen a few screenshots, and assumed the whole game was like this. The second kind are the parts that take place on the waves, with you riding on your dolphin buddy's back, and the third kind are underwater, seeing you swimming around accompanied by your dolphin buddy. It's in these parts where he comes in most useful, as he'll go around collecting points items that are hard for you to reach, and can be commanded to attacked the enemy by curling into a ball and bouncing aroud the screen, smashing not only the enemies, but their mines, bombs and missiles too.


It's really a shame that this game has never been converted to any home consoles (unless you count those fanmade consolised Atomiswave systems as such), which is the case for a lot of Atomiswave and Naomi systems. I guess if the Dreamcast had been supported longer, it would have made a fine home for them all. Oh well.
Obviously, I like this game a lot. It's fast and fun to play, it looks really nice, etc. One little touch that I love (and was probably not really intentional on the part of the designers) is that the default gun that you have when your power-up weapons run out can fire as fast as you can press the button. So some of the more tense situations are enhanced greatly, just by the physicality added by hammering the fire button as hard as you can (something I also felt regarding the finishers in Bayonetta, especially the ones which had the player spinning the analogue sticks with as much vigour as they could muster(but I don't think many people agreed with me on that)).