Tom Mason's Dinosaurs For Hire (Mega Drive)

 For some reason, SEGA of America had a strange habit of making Mega Drive games based on comics that no-one had ever read. There was Ex-Mutants, Chakan: The Forever Man, and this one, Dinosaurs For Hire. Chakan's probably the most well-known of the three, though that definitely has more to do with the videogame than the comic. In Dinosaurs For Hire's case, it could have turned out a little differently, as there was a cartoon in development that never came into bring, according to Wikipedia. Then it could have formed a trinity of 90s cartoons about gun-toting dinosaurs alongside Extreme Dinosaurs and The Terrible Thunderlizards.

 

The game is, at its most basic level, a Contra-esque platform shooter, which sees you pick a dinosaur, then go from left to right (or sometimes from bottom to top) shooting soldiers and monsters and vehicles and so on. There are a few twists to the formula though, to the extent that the game almost feels like some kind of experimental take on the genre. The smallest, but most obvious twist is that because the player characters are anthropomorphic dinosaurs, they dwarf all the human enemy soldiers that are running around. That's a nice little touch.

 

But the weirdness starts as soon as the game does, opening with a boss fight against a giant turtle-like monster that's climbing up the Hoover Dam and breathing fire. After you kill it, the credits start rolling before a cheeky little pterodactyl appears and tells you that was just a prank and the game actually starts now. This fight is also the first time that your HUD disappears, which is presumably some kind of resource-juggling programming trick based on the presence of the giant monster here, and the fact that it happens again when other giant bosses are onscreen. One thing you can always say in SOA's favour is that they were always trying different tricks and techniques to get fancy effects out of the Mega Drive hardware.

 

With that in mind, it's a shame that some aspects of the game's presentation are kind of terrible. I'm not saying the game itself looks bad: the sprites and backgrounds are all well drawn and animated, and the player characters are especially full of personality, with little touches like gleeful facial expressions as they blast away when you hold the fire button for a couple of seconds. But there's some little things that bug me, like how all the text in the game uses a font that I assume must be the default in Mega Drive devkits or something, since it can be seen in things like leaked betas, and the notorious homebrew Crazy Bus. I know i'm nitpicking here, it's something that really jumped out at me from the start, and made the game feel a little cheap, maybe even unfinished?

 

I do have a more legitimate complaint, too, though: some of the stage design is really bad. For example, early on there's a stage where the main threat comes from tiny mounted security camera guns, which are constantly firing at you from all angles, and in another game, it might not have been so bad, but in Dinosaurs For Hire, the characters are too big and not maneuverable enough to deal with this kind of situation. Even something as small as a Gunstar Heroes-style fixed aiming mode might have made this stage a lot more palatable. Then a few stages later, you're making your way upwards through a spooky cave, and for some reason, as you climb, if you fall back down below, the areas where you just came from are now an instant death pit, with no kind of warning or signifier that this might be the case.

 

Dinosaurs For Hire is a game that's almost great. I wonder if they ran out of money or time during development and had to rush it out before they could polish up the presentation or sand the rough edges off of the game itself. But either way, if you want to see a game that's more ambitious than it is actually good, then give it a look. Otherwise, don't bother.

Kick Challenger - Air Foot - Yasai no Kuni no Ashi Senshi (Famicom Disk System)

 Kick Challenger is a strange game. Not just mechanically or thematically, but in both respects. For a start, the boxart depicts the main character as a face-having tomato with a pair of two long legs stretching from its underside. This is inaccurate, though, as ingame, the protagonist, while being a tomato with a face, doesn't have legs, instead moving by way of a pair of Rayman-esque detached feet moving presumably though some kind of psychokinesis. I'm not just saying that to exagerrate the difference between representative artwork and what oyu see ingame, either: your two etached feet can move and cross over each other in ways that they wouldn't be able to, were they on the ends of legs attached at the other end to a body.

 

I might have been exaggerating slightly regarding the strangeness of the game's mechanics, on further reflection, "unusual" might be more appropriate. The aim of the game is mainly just to make your way up the screen, kicking the many bugs that try to stop you, and trying to keep out of bottomless pits, rivers, and other hazards. The twist is that this is a game that makes the act of walking itself an actual part of the game. Rather than just holding the direction you want to go in, and then your character walking semi-autmatically, you instead use the D-pad to move one foot at a time, with the A button switching between them, and the B bubtton being used to kick with your currently active foot. 

 

There are some quirks besides the controls, too! Like the weird little holes that sometimes appear when you kick the scenery, in lieu of a power up (and I'll get to those shortly). Put your foot down on it, and you're transported to another location; one that's similar enough in theme to where you were to let you know that it's part of the same stage, but with a different tileset and layout. It kind of reminds me of the front and back sides every stage has in Fantasy Zone II. Power ups are also collected by putting your foot down n them, and most of them come in the form of different kinds of shoes, which do actually get worn by your character while they're in effect, which is a nice little touch. The different kinds of shoes offer abilities like faster walking, better grip on slippy and sloped surfaces, and even the ability to walk on areas that would normally kill you. Other than the shoes, there's a power up that turns your head (which is a tomato under normal circumstances) into a can of bug spray, allowing you to shoot projectiles at your enemies from a distance.

 

Kick Challenger is a decent game. It's fun, it's unique, and it's neither too difficult nor too easy. It won't set your world on fire, but it's definitely worth playing, and you'll get at least get an hour or two of amusement out of it.