Seriously, it takes the piss. try searching for dinosaurs on Steam and you get Dino D-Day, Primal Carnage, and Orion: Dino Horde. Only one of which actually remembered to put a single player mode in. Because forgetting to put an actual game in your game always works out so well.
I'll just leave this here for no particular reason.
Now, things are kinda starting to improve. We have The Stomping Land coming up, and there's something called Beasts Of Prey that's appeared recently as well. Although admittedly the only reason that doesn't look like a complete rip off of The Stomping Land only with a modern setting is that they actually forgot to put any dinosaurs in the trailer. But even these are online multiplayer titles with no indication yet as to whether there'll be a proper single player mode.
Naturally of course this lack of dinosaur based gaming options is quite frustrating to me, fond as I am of both the science of paleontology and the art of over-analyzing the gaming medium. Because there's a LOT that you could do in terms dino based games that would extremely cool. So I decided to take this opportunity to get some of the ideas that have been floating around my head out and onto paper. So, let's begin.
ROLL FOR INITIATIVE!
It's almost hard to know where to start, but I guess a good place would be with the most obvious: Dinosaur Park Management Sim.
Ever since Jurassic Park came out we've had the odd attempt at this sort of game. But nothing in a long, long time. Barring DLC packs for Zoo Tycoon, but that's hardly a dinosaur focused experience is it? Indeed, if you want something like that the only option you have at the moment seems to be Jurassic Park Builder on Farcebook. All the horrors of a build & wait free to play game, combined with the rather disturbing fact that they seem to think Brontosaurus still counts as a dinosaur.
Dear everyone: Please don't make me keep using this.
In all fairness it's not that bad as such things go, but it's pretty lightweight. I think there's a definite gap in the market for something meatier. I mean. it's not like I even care if it's an off brand knock off of the Jurassic park concept, just as long as it's good and has lots of dinosaurs.
I am a man of remarkably simple tastes. But you have to admit, it does seem like a rather obvious niche to be filled.
Then we could consider some of the slightly more abstracted concepts. How about Dinosaur themed pinball tables? Or match 3 type games? Not exactly packed with educational opportunities I admit, but still perfectly doable. Likewise the various Dinosauria lend themselves well to the Tower Defense genre, having a good mix of speed, attack, defense and HP statistics amongs the various species. However I do feel that we could go one better. Combing different genres, starting from a factual principles before abstracting out into good gameplay thus allowing us to cram some real information in somewhere, and eliminating the need to feature any pesky boring mammals.
Watching Dinosaur documentaries for any amount of time one thing you'll eventually learn about is how herds tend to structure themselves to maximize chances for survival of the overall group, albiet at the expense of the weaker members. What if we took that idea as the basis for a sort of mash up between tower defense and matching type gameplay? Allow me to present a rough sketch of Dino Herd Defender™
Starring Vectorsaurus Rex.
For the full effect please imagine that everything animated as though moving, with little dust trails and an infinitely scrolling background. This is just a sketch to try an illustrate what I'm talking about.
In the middle you have your rows and columns of various herbivores. From the sides come the attacks of a variety of predatory carnivores. The object being to get a certain amount of points or dinos to survive the attack whilst the herd gets to wherever it's going. The player can swap herd members around horizontally or vertically to try and confound the enemies, protect vulnerable youngsters or set up traps and combos. For example say you set up a Triceratops behind a weak, aged Edmontosaurus. The Edmontosaurus is a low cost disposable unit, good for distracting a predator. But once he gets taken out that column moves up, allowing the Triceratops to ram a predator full on. Obviously a Triceratops would have a strong frontal attack. A Stegosaurus would have a strong rear attack. Sauropds could be strong with high hit points but take up multiple spaces on the field. For the predators you could have swarming attacks by various raptor like dinosaurs, hit and runs from a Carnotaurus. Slow and powerful Tyranosaur attacks and everything in between. Hopefully you get the idea. This is just a rough idea, but I think it has potential. Although I am admittedly biased and not a game designer.
IF that's not your cup of tea, then how about some sort of grand strategy game? You could apply the afore mentioned statistics to some sort of RTS type game, certainly.
Especially if someone brings back Dino-Riders
But how about one of those civilization type god games, only one where you're guiding the evolution of prehistoric mega-fauna? The ultimate goal I suppose being to craft a world of sufficient diversity and adaptability that your offspring can survive whatever major extinction events the game throws up at you. Could be interesting.
Of course, if you want something from a more up close and personal point of view then I think I can prove that there genres other than multiplayer FPS.
Remember how in the first Dead Rising game you had the option to take photos of everything? And score points based on what sort of shots you got? Such ideas have been used in one or two games but only really in the Fatal Frame series has it been a central mechanic. Well, let's use something like that.
Picture if you will a large, open tropical island environment. Similar to the sort of thing seen in a certain popular movie series not entirely unrelated to the subject at hand here.
Why, what did you think I meant?
The island is, naturally, populated with various species of dinosaurs and related fauna, all dynamically interacting with each other. The player is then stranded on this island with naught but a digital camera. You then must explore, and use stealth to survive and document the local wildlife. Somewhere on the island is a satellite uplink, allowing you to send the pictures you take to whatever nefarious forces are in charge of all this. Take good pics, get dropped better rewards delivered. In the meantime you have to forage for supplies and no doubt uncover evidence of some sort of conspiracy in the ruins. Keep it 3rd person and add in some funky tree climbing parkour type shit like you see in assassins creed type games and you'll end up with an awesome cross between a Walking With Dinosaurs, the X-Files and Tarzan. WITH DINOSAURS. How is that not cool?
And never forget the best part: There are NO WEAPONS on the island. You can't even hurt the dinosaurs, let alone fight them. At best you can push them down on knock one out for a while. So when you advance the plot enough that a team of red shirt henchmen get dispatched to hunt you down the only weapon you have to fight them with is your knowledge of the island and it's inhabitants. You get to lead them into ambushes by Deinonychus and lure them into the T-Rexes hunting grounds. It would be HILARIOUS.
If you don't fancy something as fanciful as living dinosaurs, then how about we do something based on the paleontological arts themselves? Do you realize that we have the beginnings of the ultimate puzzle game here?
It's pretty straightforward. Find fossils, excavate and prepare them, then assemble the skeletons in 3 dimensions. But we do it properly, like you would in real life. None of this complete articulated skeleton nonsense.
This is actually the least realistic part of the film. And I include the flying T-Rex in that.
You could have difficulty settings ranging from partially articulated skeletons all the way up to tiny bone fragments. Hell, once you finish stuff off you could even have a virtual museum to display it all in. Could be great fun.
Then of course we come to the area of RPG games.
No, Ravensword doesn't count. Why would it?
There's obviously a great deal of scope for using Dinosaurs in an RPG setting. You could use them as the standard monsters in some sort of caveman simulator or fantasy setting. But how about we use them as the heroes?
You could easily do some sort of dinosaurs vs aliens plot. If you can't tie that into the K/T extinction event then you have no business writing anything. But that is kinda obvious. What if there was some other terrible, primeval force that we could pit a heroic band of saurians against in a fight for their very survival?
That's right: DINOSAURS VS CTHULHU. Seriously, why hasn't this been done yet? All the various gribbly nastiness in the Lovecraft mythos is alien, ancient, and patiently awaiting the time when they will rise once more and take dominion over the earth. But did you ever stop to wonder who it was that put Cthulhu down for his dirt nap in the first place? Maybe the reason the stars were no longer right was because old squid face was forced to drop one of them on his enemies. Did you ever consider that?
If at first you don't succeed summon Meteor.
Am I REALLY the only one who gets excited just by thinking about these sort of ideas?
Anyway, there is one final idea I had for dinosaur title. In recent times there has been an upswing in odd games with a comedic emphasis. Often with the comedy resulting from just how wrong you can make everything go, such as Surgeon Simulator and Goat Simulator. Possibly also Octodad, although I haven't played that yet. Anyway, what I'm picturing is very much in the vein of Goat Simulator. A small open sandbox area with destructible environments and various NPCs and whatnot milling about. Only here we'd be a little more structured in that you'd have a number of quests to perform. The quests would all be fairly mundane, everyday tasks. Go shopping, bake a cake, adopt a puppy, change a tyre. That sort of thing.
Only you'd be playing as a T-Rex.
And since you're playing as a T-Rex the control scheme looks like this:
I suppose if you had to give it a genre it would be that of "no-good-can-possibly-come-of-this-em-up. There wouldn't be a single objective in the game that was actually in the conventional sense, but they would at least give you a variety of different things to destroy in a tragic yet hilarious fashion.
And I haven't even gotten onto doing a Primal Rage reboot yet.
I can't believe they edited this out for the SNES version.
Non-humanoid characters can be tricky in fighting games, but it's not impossible to do well. So dinosaur fighters could be interesting.
The only other thing I don't think I've really mentioned is the pokemon clone genre. But I don't have to, as this is actually the one area where some games actually do exist, albeit only on the DS. And whilst most of them are pretty bad, we do at least have Fossil Fighters, which is excellent.
Although whether we actually see the new version outside of japan is another question entirely.
Still, that's a few ideas to be getting on with. You hear that, games industry? Jurassic World is meant to be out next year, so maybe you might want to start working on your cash in ideas now so they don't suck when release time comes around. I'm sure we can work out an amicable deal if you want to make any of the games I've outlined here.
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