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his video adventure game is set in the world of James Gurney's Dinotopia. As portrayed in the books, movie and TV series, Dinotopia is a lost island where not only have the dinosaurs, great and little, survived through the millennia to our time, but also (some of them) have learned how to talk and use tools. Humans and dinosaurs are supposed to live side by side on the island in harmony, but there wouldn't be much of a game if that were true all the time.
Players take the role of Drake Gemini, one of a pair of twins who see their father devoured by a tyrannosaurus. The other twin reacts to the father's death by joining the Outsiders, a gang of anti-dino humans. Drake, meanwhile, is summoned to become the protector of Dinotopia, a job that involves being given a large hammer and many errands to run.
There are 24 levels in the game, and these are set in swamps, villages and ancient jungle ruins. Drake does a lot of traveling on foot, but in certain levels he gets to ride on a flying dinosaur. Strutter is Drake's other mount, a dinosaur-shaped robot that not only carries Drake along but also fights. What Drake does in his travels is explore, complete quests, solve puzzles and fight hordes of dinosaurs and humans.
The fighting all revolves around Drake's hammer. As the game progresses and he discovers the missing sunstones, he is able to upgrade his hammer, making it stronger and giving it more special powers, such as ranged attacks and the ability to hurt several targets at once.
A 2-D realm that time forgot goes 3-D
All role-playing games and many action games have elements of "fetch and carry" in them. The character is sent to get item A from nonplayer character X, but X won't give it up unless the character gets item B from NPC Y, and Y isn't giving anything out unless he has C from NPC Z. This structure keeps the character, and thus the player, moving through the world, exploring and having encounters and (usually) killing things. There is nothing wrong with this structure, but it can be carried to extremes, which, unfortunately, Dinotopia does. Despite the stakes and the world and the plot with the brother, the player never feels as much like the protector of an endangered, magical world as he feels like a delivery man.
One of the joys of exploring in a video game can be getting to the cutscenes, encountering the various NPCs, and working through the dialogue trees to unravel the mystery at hand. Dinotopia has cutscenes and NPCs, but no dialogue trees, since the NPCs do all their talking in the cutscenes. Like all the graphics, the cutscenes look good, if not as sharp as the Xbox allows, but the animation of the humans is jerky, their mouths don't move when they speak, and the long speeches they make often have nothing to do with the matter at hand.
Like the movie and like the TV series, one of the joys of Dinotopia is seeing Gurney's art brought to motion. The video game adds the pleasure of putting the player into the art and making him a participant in the world. It is here that the game is at its best. The dinosaurs are the best part of the game, and there is fun in moving among them.
For me, Dinotopia suffers in comparison to the plethora of tie-in games that have come to stores this year. It reminded me too much of Enter the Matrix and not enough of Knights of the Old Republic. — Eric
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