By and large, dinosaurs games suck. It doesn't make a lot of sense. Every three year old knows dinosaurs are the coolest things ever to walk the planet. Games revolving around them should, by extension, be just as cool. And yet, in most every case where the two are mated, the results are less "Jurassic Park" and more "Carnosaur."
A game with dinosaurs should be a slam dunk, yet time and time again, dinosaur games are as welcome as a paleontologist at a creationist convention. There are, of course, some obvious exceptions. Bubble Bobble had dinosaurs in it, and they're adorable little chibidinos that you just want to snuggle. Dino Crisis showed us that Capcom could do more than just make Resident Evil, it could make Resident Evil with dinosaurs in it. And of course, Telltale Games is gearing its own Jurassic Park game for release later this year.
Before explaining why most dinosaur games are awful, it might be helpful to look and see why individual games failed to live up to their inspiration.
Turok
Now hold on a minute, the original "Turok: Dinosaur Hunter" for N64 was a great game, right? No. Actually, it was at best "decent," but that's because GoldenEye was half a year away. Turok was released at a perfect time in the console cycle, the time between when people were tired of Super Mario 64 and before Mario Kart 64 was released. In that crazy time, the rule was "anything goes," so games like Turok could be released and sell like hotcakes. I won't lie, I had a copy. I also had a copy of Mace: The Dark Ages, but mostly because it was also a time when people would just buy any N64 game because it fit two important criteria: compatibility with N64 and being technically a game.
In Turok: Dinosaur Hunter, players took control of a Native American stereotype whose duty was to protect Earth from the Lost Lands, a shadowy realm where the rules of time and space were twisted. Because time was irrelevant in the Lost Lands, it was (obviously) populated by dinosaurs. Turok's duty was to therefore prevent dinosaurs from passing the barrier and stalking the Earth. What. A. Jerk. If I were a kid and a T-Rex appeared from a portal in the sky to land in my backyard while being cruelly hunted by a bafflingly under-dressed American Indian, I would be pretty upset. Not because of fear or confusion, but because I would want the T-Rex to go on a spree of destruction, hopefully destroying my school or cartoonishly devouring my least-favorite bully. Turok: Enemy of Fun instead fights dinosaurs in an awkwardly controlled shooter filled with all kinds of late-90s FPS technological clich�s. Pop-in? Have at it. Intermittent slow-down? It's a feature! Obfuscating fog? You're soaking in it. I know I'll take few lumps for talking so frankly about my disdain for Turok, but I don't even care. It had dinosaurs, and it was a video game, and it was not awesome.
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