Adventures of Dino Riki = Dino crap

I'm gonna deliver a shortie one today. It's an old game called Adventures of Dino Riki (Not to be confused to Adventures of Bayou Billy), made by Hudson Soft, the guys responsable for Bomberman and Adventure Island.

I dunno much about the story and Wikipedia doesn't have info on it either, so I'll just assume that it's the classical hero-goes-to-save-his girl, or something along the lines. The game is a vertical shooter, and a bit different at that. For one thing, Dino Riki has a life bar which consists of hearts, meaning you don't die at the first hit you get. You think that with that, the challenge would be a little soft in this game, right?

Well, not so. Enemies can come in at one swarm at a time and while the game doesn't suffer from slowdown, you'll be hard-pressed to avoid their shots while taking them down and looking out for obstacles. The powerups consists of a Fist item that increases Dino Riki's firepower. He starts out with flimsy stones with decent range, but slow rate of fire and it upgrades from stone axes to boomerangs and finally torches, which is your highest level of your attack. There are also hearts which increase your life bar by one unit (Who woulda thunk it, huh?), meat which restores your life, shoes that increase your movement speed. diamonds that award you points and finally wings that let you fly over the ground. B button lets you shoot and A is for jumping; if you have the wings, you can hold down the button to fly, but be careful because once you use 'em and land, they're gone.


If there are good things, is that the music is simple and nice. The levels have some variety, although the game itself is short and you can actually survive beyond the one-hit-kill in this game.

Now for the bad. Your firepower gets downgraded after you take a hit, Dino Riki's jumping is suspect at best and you have to master the timing and movement when you jump because one wrong move or a mishap and the lil' caveman gets dunked to his doom. The challenge in the game may be troublesome because some of the later enemies will require you to have your best attack to beat them and when you die, you get back to your flimsy stones and that can be a pain in the ass. Jumping through chasms can be tedious and be the cause of many gameovers, so you might lose patience fast with this game.

It's only 4 levels long, but I can't think of something good that may convince you to go all the way with this game. It gets a 5/10 rating, and that's all I can give it. My next review will be a little surprise, so be on the lookout!