Dino Crisis Series Retrospective | An Exhaustive History and Review

i want to start this video by talking about a phenomenon that i'm going to call incompletion mystique essentially it's that pull of curiosity that we have towards media that we view as unfinished our imaginations fill in the gaps with what could have been and we dream up towering achievements of artistic quality that build this mystique of the incomplete this isn't a new concept and in fact it used to be very common before the advent of reliable health care authors would regularly die mid-project and some of the most famous novels and series of all time like chaucer's canterbury tales and kafka's the trial received huge acclaim despite never being finished that mystique is easy to understand in a world where tuberculosis can snatch away an artist but it's taken on a different form thanks to the modern media industry where works are often left incomplete thanks to corporate meddling rather than misfortune tv shows like firefly and arrested development are considered some of the greatest ever made but they languished unfinished for years thanks to the interference of network executives and we're forever left to wonder what alien 3 or lynch's dune could have turned out like had the money men steered clear nowhere is this more pronounced than in the video game industry where corporate meddling reigns supreme and our imaginations run wild at the possibility of what could be if only the fans were listened to i think this phenomenon is actually the strongest when talking about franchises that were once heavy hitters but now life forgotten that mystique and desire builds and builds until someone ends up buying forty thousand dollars worth of nintendo stock to simply ask the board for a new f-zero game now that might be taking things a little far but i do have some sympathy it's baffling that in our modern industry so obsessed with remakes and reboots that we haven't seen a new honor musha game a new prince of persia game or another entry in the legacy of kane series so many fantastic franchises lie dorman and that mystique driven by what could have been is only magnified by how tantalizingly close they feel today we're going to discuss a group of games that best embody this feeling a franchise that is loudly and vocally called for every single time its developer makes an announcement and one whose reputation builds every single time that it's left unmentioned we're going to uncover the rise the fall and the refusal to return that have made this one of the most famous incomplete series of all time this is a lengthy dino crisis retrospective and it's time to find out if life really does find a way we start this video i want to talk about today's sponsor which is nordvpn i'm sure you're well aware that we don't usually have sponsors on our retrospectives but the opportunity came up to work with nord and it's something that i actually use day to day so i felt like it was something that i could actually recommend they're offering a really big discount on two year plans plus an extra month which you get by using the code that's on screen obviously just like everyone else i mainly use it to watch netflix from other countries which has all sorts of stuff that's not available here in the uk what i really like about nord though is that you can set it up on a fire stick or on playstation which means you're not just locked to your laptop or desktop and we mainly use it sitting on the sofa another cool thing you can do is get deals that aren't available in your country you can access sales which are only available in certain places and the best trick is to check flight costs when you're using a different location you'll be amazed how much money you can actually save doing this so yeah it's a great vpn i use it all the time and you should as well thanks to nord for the sponsor now back to the dinosaurs in 1996 the survival horror genre did not exist hell the horror genre barely existed on consoles and the idea that video games could provide experiences just as frightening as movies or television was a mere pipe dream one man sought to change this and in the process defined a genre creating the blueprint for everything we're going to talk about in this video i'm of course talking about resident evil and the brain behind its creation shinji mikami according to mikami's own account he only joined capcom for the free food and claimed to know nothing about game development but considering the quality of his early games it's safe to say this is a humble joke titles he directed like aladdin and goof troop were huge successes on the super nintendo and his attention to design quickly caught the eye of veteran capcom designer takuro fujiwara in 1989 fujiwara had put out an incredibly interesting rpg on the super famicom called sweet home which was based on the japanese film of the same name you play as a group of five characters with limited health and weapons and have to navigate your way out of a haunted mansion where ghosts could permanently kill your party members it was a big hit in japan thanks to its original premise but never saw a release in the west thanks to nintendo of america's focus on family friendly publishing if mortal kombat couldn't even have blood sweet home didn't stand a chance well in 1993 capcom were no longer solely working with nintendo and had a new partnership with sony and their decidedly more teen friendly playstation fujiwara saw an opportunity to remake sweet home and finally bring its unique gameplay to the wider world while also reinventing it as a unique ip it was a big task but who better to take it on than the master of disney platformers shinji mikami at first mikami was reticent to take on the role because in his own words he hated being scared but fujiwara assured him that this was why he'd make a perfect director as he knew exactly what players would find the most horrified that turned out to be an inspired choice as the sweet home remake eventually emerged from the shadows as resident evil and changed console horror gaming forever amazingly the game was originally intended to be first person controlling a lot more like a pc shooter and had an aesthetic much closer to the psychological japanese horror of the original sweet home during production however mikami was influenced by two pieces of media that made him completely rethink the direction they were heading in and would come to define the survival horror genre the first was zombie 2 by lucio falci an italian horror movie that mikami found to be so terrible that he was inspired to create his own take on the zombie genre one with narrative twists and turns and a real atmosphere of tension instead of just all-out blood and guts the second was alone in the dark a pc horror game by infograms which mikami played for the first time midway through resident evil's development unlike the horror games of the past which either focused on over-the-top side-scrolling gore or fast-paced first-person action alone in the dark was a slow-paced atmospheric game where highly cinematic camera angles controlled the player's perspective and set up a host of scares as they were struggling to get to grips with the playstation's architecture this fixed camera pre-rendered background system was seen as the perfect way to make development a little easier and allow mekami and his team to focus on creating their own set of scares with these key elements in place development surged ahead and when it was released in march 1996 resident evil was an international smash hit almost immediately becoming one of capcom's best ever selling games and catapulting mikami and his team into the limelight calls for a sequel came immediately and capcom had huge hopes for just how big this franchise could get surprisingly though this was mixed news for shinji mikami the monstrous success of resident evil was a complete vindication of his ability as a video game designer but with that success came a promotion into a role that he found himself not really enjoying his small team had been massively expanded and instead of working hands-on drawing concept art and designing levels mikami found himself elevated into a high-level producer role overseeing lots of projects but without the ability to directly control any of them resident evil 2's direction was entrusted to another rising star at capcom hideki kamia with mikami suggestions regularly ignored or overturned and when capcom began production of a further three resident evil games he found himself only partially involved spending more time in board meetings than doing what he did best by 1998 he'd had enough and with a small hand-picked team mikami started to put together his vision of what the next step after resident evil 1 should have looked like a highly ambitious and inventive game that took the formula he created gave an almighty fresh spin first revealed at the tokyo game show in 1999 dino crisis made an immediate impact thanks to mikami's involvement and as resident evil 2 had been an even bigger success than resident evil 1 media interest in capcom's next horror game was extremely high when doing the rounds with magazines and websites it was clear that mikami really did see this as the next evolution of the gameplay that he'd put together for resident evil 1. we'd be getting ambitious cgi cutscenes and a grounded story concerned with scientific espionage and inspired by jurassic park and alien the biggest change was of course the monsters shambling zombies and undead abominations have been replaced with a far more realistic threat vicious and utterly inhuman dinosaurs when asked about what prompted the switch in his classic joking style mikami simply replied that he thought dinosaurs were cool but it can't be ignored that just a few years earlier jurassic park 2 the lost world had come out which took the dinosaur setting of the first film and delivered a much darker sequel with a lot more violence and intensity considering mikami's love for that genre and his propensity to be influenced by things he watched and played i think it's safe to say it was a big influence on his decision to make diner crisis he dubbed the change of pace panic horror a nod to the survival horror term that capcom had used to advertise resident evil and claimed that if resident evil was horror in a fun house dynamic crisis was horror on a roller coaster it eventually released in july 1999 to great reviews averaging 84 out of 100 and selling extremely well particularly in japan where it was one of the best selling games of the year by the time its publishing run ended it shipped a massive 2.4 million copies and gone platinum on the playstation one but before we get ahead of ourselves let's dive into the game itself and look at just why dyno crisis made such an impact and why its reputation is still so huge so many years later dynacrisis is one of the purest horror action games ever made with barely an ounce of video game fat on its scaly body and gets straight to the point from minute one we start out with a pretty cool retro pc style mission briefing being delivered as if we're sat at our desk the report comes from an agent codenamed tom who's made a startling discovery while undercover in the borginian republic he'd been tasked with investigating a secret research center on ibis island while he hadn't discovered any evidence of weapons technology that he'd been sent to steal he did uncover an equally valuable prize the research center is being run by the infamous dr kirk whose experimental work on an unlimited energy source called third energy has made him the envy of every government in the world he had been thought dead and the research lost forever but with the discovery that he's alive and that his experiments are going well the united states government goes into full imperial thief mode and they dispatch the special operations raid team to bring the doctor into american custody we meet our gang in glorious 90s cgi as they helicopter over the island and parachute down into the jungle surrounding the facility despite losing one of their group on descent we're quickly introduced to agents gail rick and our controllable main character regina as they immediately begin the hunt for dr kirk and his mysterious research if you thought there would be some tension or mystery about that missing fourth agent remember dino crisis doesn't [ __ ] around and almost immediately we're treated to another glorious cgi cutscene of our missing teammate agent cooper running for his life from a tyrannosaurus rex which easily chases him down chews him up and stands before a full moon roaring in jurassic majesty and it's been minutes before we're confronting our own dino terrors once the team arrives at the research center rick who's the team's electronics specialist heads off to disable the facility's security systems and gail who's in charge of the mission orders regina to sweep the area and work out how to get the power back on so we head over to the backup generator room and after solving a little puzzle to get everything working again the [ __ ] hits the fan regina leaves the room to find gail suddenly missing and is immediately attacked by one of the game's massive raptors you could try and put some bullets into it but these are not soft skinned zombies and the only option is to run away which is far harder than it sounds as they are damn fast and as will incite terror into the hearts of any veteran of the spencer mansion they can follow you in between rooms regina finally does get away from the raptor and heads into the facility quickly meeting up with rick in the control room where they try to work out what exactly is going on and what exactly they should do rick wants to radio in the chopper but as cooper had their communications gear they're trapped leaving only one option continue with the mission and try to locate dr kirk regina agrees to head out into the dinosaur infested facility while rick disables the security shutters and provides radio support you step out of the control room and into the game proper with the facility to explore and dinosaurs to kill the most important thing we need to deal with out of the blocks is the perception that this is just resident evil with dinosaurs because you'd be forgiven for thinking that that's all this game really is after all the premise is almost identical all the familiar mechanics make a return from the fixed camera perspective and tank controls limited ammunition and inventory space puzzles that need to be solved backtracking that needs to be done and a whole lot of memos to read in order to work out the narrative hell we even get a little door opening animation when we go into a different room so it's not a comparison that we can pretend isn't valid thing is i consider dyno crisis to be an evolution of the formula that mikami put together in resident evil 1 rather than a simple rehash if resident evil 2 is the original concept but bigger and more ambitious with more zombies and more areas and more bosses dyno crisis is the same formula but refined stripped of what didn't work and rebuilt with creative new twists a sequel not in terms of narrative but in terms of design philosophy in that sense i suppose it literally is resident evil 1 with dinosaurs but as we'll find out that is a pretty damn good proposition before we dive too far into its design i want to take a little detour and talk about the tank controls and fixed perspective that i'm sure is already putting a lot of people off from ever giving this game a chance i think a large amount of the criticism and fear of this system comes from a fundamental misunderstanding about how it's supposed to work so often you hear that it's clunky or difficult to dodge enemies or frustrating because you might take hits or miss doors in the heat of the moment but that's sort of the point a huge amount of tension in these games comes from the fact that you can't reliably encounter enemies without sometimes taking damage and the movement system is a huge part of that having extremely snappy and responsive controls would massively limit the danger you find yourself in and in a survival horror game which revolves entirely around limited health and hyper dangerous that simply doesn't work to use the most cliche analogy it's like complaining that the i-frames on the dodge in dark souls aren't long enough yeah it's tricky to learn and yeah it does lead to a lot of deaths but that's the whole point you're supposed to get better at it over the course of the game and it's supposed to have a degree of danger baked into it there's sadly been a homogenization of video game controls over the last decade and i think it means that people expect to have a level of proficiency with any game they pick up and that's just not an idea that existed in the 90s standards like shooting being on a trigger or jump always being on an x or a button a relatively new concept and in the era dyna crisis comes from you'd pick up a game and really have to learn how it worked ultimately there will always be people who aren't convinced by this movement system but i think there are a huge amount of clear positives to it and the difficulty that most people have with it is always quite grossly overstated if you can beat a few bosses in dark souls or get past the level and do maternal there's absolutely no reason you shouldn't be able to get your head around tank controls and be racing around the halls of ibis island before you know it so with that out the way let's talk about a few of the ways that dino crisis distinguishes itself from its spiritual father the most obvious is that all of the environments are now fully 3d and rendered with a real-time engine it gives everything a very cohesive look as items and objects that you can interact with don't garishly stick out from the background and instead look natural which encourages you to interact with the world in a more authentic way you check computers and folders for clues and hit wall switches and terminals to open doors because that's what regina would do rather than running around a room mashing x because you're trying to find something to interact with the biggest benefit by far is that the fully 3d environment means that mikami's team could get a lot more ambitious with the camera and we're no longer rooted to a single angle in each zone there are a handful of really nice panning camera angles usually in long corridors or in outside zones where regina's movement is tracked by the camera and they look so good compared to the constant flickering perspective of a pre-rendered background it doesn't sound like much but those little zooms or slight shifts in the camera just smooth everything out and reduce some of the jarring feeling that fixed cameras can sometimes cause when you're quickly moving from place to place the 3d engine also means a lot more of the world can actually serve functional purposes and this is huge for the game's many puzzles instead of simply collecting key cards or coloured gems the facility's many brain scratches are now usually done with their own little 3d mechanics and it can be anything from lowering colored pipes to provide airflow to a machine operating a crane to lift shipping containers out of your way or using 0g experimental machinery each work has its own little puzzle minigame and all are realized in full 3d something that would have never have been possible in resident evil slideshow engine again it just adds massively to your immersion and as ridiculous as some of these puzzles can get the fact that they feel cohesive with the rest of the world prevents them from feeling like a strange side activity it's not just all functional improvements though as the in-game cutscenes look miles better than the puppet show style conversation scenes from mikami's last game we get a lot of different angles with characters moving around and even little chunks of action all enabled because it's taking place within the game area rather than on a jpeg stage it does a fantastic job of maintaining the spy thriller cinematic tone means that the narrative is nicely split three ways between action heavy cgi cut scenes in-game conversations and the text memos that fill in the gaps the element that holds all of this narrative variety together is the surprisingly talented cast of voice actors who put in a frankly sterling job considering the standards in their professions at the time each character is extremely memorable with tons of personality bursting out the lines they deliver and morgenstern's performance as regina particularly stands out magic girl fans out there might even recognize her as the iconic voice of mina from sailor moon well some of that energy definitely shines through in her character as well she's just as strong and capable as any of the male agents but she throws in the odd jokey comment and isn't afraid to call out the nonsense happening around the team for what it is personally i think she's up there with lara croft and jill valentine as one of the most iconic female leads in a playstation game morgenstern's performance has a lot to do with that possibly my biggest issue with the entire game is simply that there's no option for subtitles and the mix during some of the cutscenes is just ever so slightly off which annoyingly does mask some of the lines there's nothing worse than feeling like you have to strain to hear what characters are saying and it's easily the game's biggest misstep luckily it's more than made up for by the rest of the game which is full of clever design and none better than the raptors and dinosaurs that stalk the hallways of ibis island they present a wholly different challenge to the zombies of resident evil and really give diner crisis a very different feel that panic horror phrase might seem like marketing nonsense but the more time you spend doing battle with these creatures the more it becomes apparent the panic horror is actually a pretty accurate description of what these encounters feel like enemies in survival horror games are so often more of an obstacle rather than something that's actively threatening designed to use up ammunition getting a few cheap hits before boss fights which present the real danger dino crisis bucks this trend from the very first moment you encounter a raptor and doesn't let up for a moment even the most basic enemy is extremely dangerous and if you're unprepared even an experienced player will find this a very punishing game indeed as you'd expect they're extremely fast and can bear down on you within seconds of entering a room and have a surprisingly large amount of health taking three or four shotgun blasts and as many as 10 pistol rounds before they die what makes this all the more difficult is that while they can be staggered it doesn't happen reliably and a lot of the stronger enemies can absorb one or two shots while charging you down their standard attack is a bite which takes off about a quarter of your health which is already a huge amount in a game where you only have a small amount of life to work with but the real danger comes from a leaping attack which pins you down on the ground once a raptor is on top of you you need to mash buttons to get it off and there's no limit to how much damage this can do with it easily taking half of your life in one go if your thumbs aren't up to it the threat of this attack and the lack of an ability to stagger means that standing still and unloading shots is an easy way to end up dead the only way to fight them is to pick your shots and keep moving a new system which adds a really interesting dimension to the combat is the bleeding status if you take damage from a dinosaur you'll lose health but will also start bleeding a state that slowly drains your health and leaves a trail of blood behind you slowly losing health sounds pretty bad but it's actually that blood trail that makes bleeding so dangerous as it allows raptors to follow you around the facility they become hunters of human prey and once they've got the scent of your blood they'll chase you down like a reptilian terminator bleeding can be cured by using an item called a hemostat but interestingly it doesn't actually restore any health which means you're always in a dilemma about what to take with you do you take ammo and health to try and fight the creatures head on or hemostats to try and prevent bleeding and remain more elusive you can't do both and will have to make quick decisions if you're going to survive survival might seem borderline impossible considering all these mechanics relate to the most basic enemy and dyno crisis and throughout the rest of the game you encounter them in packs of three or even four and in later sections of the facility they take even more damage and can kill you in a single hit it's something mikami was extremely upfront about claiming in interviews that he didn't think the speed strength and terror of dinosaurs would be properly conveyed if the game was too easy well he certainly wasn't messing around and for most people dynacrisis is going to be a very difficult game that really makes you feel like a soft and slow human in a world of vicious apex predators that being said this is not an impossible game and there is a slew of mechanics that help even things up and give you a fighting chance of actually finding dr kirk and completing your mission firstly dynacrysis doesn't have traditional boss fights and instead of getting progress behind a particularly big monster instead features the t-rex that ate agent cooper as a sort of recurring villain popping up at key moments to impede your progress what's interesting about these encounters is you're not actually required to kill the beast and can just time out each fight by evading its attacks causing a predefined cut scene to save the day what this does is break that gameplay loop of conserving your ammo for boss fights and allows you to do battle with the reptiles of the island free from any guilt that those shotgun bullets would have been better spent elsewhere the most impressive of these new systems is that you can complete the entire game without firing a single bullet and without shedding a single drop of dino blood in an interview with playstation magazine before the release of the game mikami talked about how he wanted to give players the opportunity to be more creative in how they dealt with dino crisis enemies and to give them more strategic decisions beyond just fight or flight this is manifested in a really unique system where through combining items you can make tranquilizer darts of various strengths and use them to put dinosaurs to sleep rather than trying to kill them the interviewer jokingly asked if this was put in for players who might feel bad about killing living creatures but the truth is that this whole system adds a completely different dynamic to the game as the dinosaurs fall asleep almost immediately after being hit this will seem like a pretty appealing strategy considering just how dangerous fighting them can be the only thing is that tranquilizers take up a lot more inventory space than your ammo only containing 3 in a slot versus 15 shotgun bullets and as all the raptors eventually wake up you need to weigh up when it's right to kill and when it's right to use the dance interestingly you also never find darts out in the wild and always have to make them out of your existing items and as they use the same resources as the med packs you're constantly in a balancing act trying to predict what situations are coming and what you might need if you know exactly where you're going and know there's a blue raptor in your way powerful track is perfect but when you're less clear about where you need to go and have no idea where the enemies are that lost inventory space will suddenly feel very debilitating i think there's no exaggeration to say that the thoughtful design behind how the dinosaurs work and the strategic decisions that the player has to make to progress through the game represent the absolute pinnacle of survival horror gameplay design this is shinji mikami taking a formula that was already fantastic and innovating yet again creating a game that's easy to understand but full of a huge amount of nuance if this all sounds a little too daunting there is actually an easy mode available from the moment you boot up the game mikami was apparently conscious that dyna crisis would be very challenging and in a moment of sheer generosity decided that they should include a way to ensure that anyone who bought the game could see the ending frankly though calling it an easy mode is understating it a little as it really runs more close to a modern style story mode where most of the gameplay mechanics taken back c and you really just blast your way from cut scene to cutscene raptors now die in just a few shots from almost any gun and considering you start with a fully loaded shotgun and grenade launcher you'll have no issue carving your way through the jurassic horde honestly i think it's a weird inclusion as we'll find out later fun as the story of dino crisis is it's not really the main reason to play it with all the difficulty stripped out you lose the tension and danger and need to strategize which is really what makes it so good even in normal mode many of the most obtuse mechanics that plagued resident evil veterans have been removed saving is no longer limited by ink ribbons you often have a red destination marked on your map and regina's inventory has been opened up to a items it's already a great deal more playable than many of its contemporaries and while the difficulty is high it's never because of unfair gameplay i appreciate that for some people easy mode is always going to be the way but if you want to experience the game as it's intended with all the clever mechanics firing on full normal mode is absolutely the route you should take so regardless of which mode you're playing on you'll spend the first section of the game exploring the upper level of the facility and will quickly realize that for all its sprawling gameplay design the actual structure of dino crisis is really quite simple the whole game revolves entirely around the mission finding dr kirk and getting off the island which gives dino crisis a sort of beautiful simplicity and you always know what the goal is and what you should be working towards there's no mysterious second act where dr kirk turns out to be a monster or you find a second facility where the raptors turn out to be the good guys it's just a lean and straightforward story about regina and her crew trying to complete their task with the player driving them to the destination thanks to the murderous dinosaurs roaming the halls the security system is in full lockdown and a huge amount of the game involves deactivating various locks to progress deeper into the complex during that first visit to the control room regina notices that the cameras in the underground are turned off so it's a pretty good bet that anyone who might want to be hiding would be holed up down there the only issue is that the elevators that link the upper and lower areas only work with an id card of the correct clearance and it locks behind one of the building's many ddk locks both of these really form the backbone of the exploration the game will give you a destination and you'll need to find the appropriate ddk keys to unlock sealed doors and then use id cards to progress deeper into the game both present a pretty unique spin on the classic blue key opens the blue door trope and like so many other of the mechanics in dyno crisis they both really ask the player to think quite a bit before they progress ddk stands for digital disk key and each lock requires two cards that relate to the same letter it's not just simple keys in a lock though as each ddk log has its own unique code which needs to be cracked requiring a password to be entered before the door swings open now obviously it's well known that i'm a huge fan of puzzles in games so unsurprisingly i found these little brain teasers extremely enjoyable at first they're pretty simple just asking you to remove certain letters or remove rows of letters but as you access deeper parts of the base the ddks really ramp up in difficulty they're never so hard that you won't be able to eventually get them and i won't lie sitting on the sofa trying to work them out with my girlfriend well it wasn't all that different to trying to solve a wordle a perfect little snippet of brain teasing to break up the otherwise dread fueled gameplay the id cards on the other hand are a little more obtuse requiring a lot more thought and attention to be able to work out how to find them that elevator requires a researcher level id card which is sadly not the level of clearance on the card regina finds instead you need to use a fingerprint scanner on a body of the appropriate security level and then rewrite the card using their personal id code this is a lot easier said than done though as regina has no way to identify each of the bodies dotted around the complex there's actually a really clever solution to this problem though in the facilities office you can use a register to check the id codes and use a phone to page researcher paul baker luckily the corp still has the pager on it so by following the beeps you can track down the fingerprints that line up with his code when i worked this out for myself the satisfaction was absolutely immense it's the sort of natural puzzle that you'd find in an old school adventure game and it slots seamlessly alongside the horror formula of dyno crisis taking the keys and locks of resident evil to the next level and rewarding lateral thinking as much as good inventory management or quick reactions so while looking for the ddk cards and the fingerprints we stumble into the lecture hall and after being ambushed by a particularly sneaky raptor regina is saved by gail who appears to be completely fine with that single scratch to show that he'd just been dragged off a cliff clearly he's the team leader for a reason all three agents rendezvous back at the control room and here we're introduced to the most interesting part of dyno crisis the mechanic which separates it from its survival horror brethren in both a narrative and gameplay sense while looking at the underground cameras again gail sees a mysterious figure fleeing deeper into the complex and presuming it's dr kirk wants to immediately head off after him only thing is regina gets a distress signal from a building out to the east and rick who's clearly a little more of a team player wants to check it out in case it's one of your crew the agents argue about which idea is best and rick and gayle end up going their separate ways leaving regina to decide who she wants to accompany mikami outlined in an interview before the game's release that the objective with these choices was to force the player into making hard decisions but without there being clear good or bad options neither choice rewards the player with anything and instead takes the plot on a different branch gale's choices generally take you on a more direct route towards kirk and involve fighting a lot more raptors while rick tends to emphasize puzzle solving and avoiding conflict at all costs if you head out to the east wing with rick you'll learn that the distress call did in fact come from the undercover agent tom but he's in a bad way after being attacked by a raptor in order to save him you'll need to move pipes around to restore power to this area and then complete another puzzle that involves programming a machine to move shipping containers around allowing rick to take the injured tom to safety alternatively if you follow gail down to the basement you catch a glimpse of kirk racing down the elevators and get started on the next id card much quicker than if you'd gone with rick now interestingly despite these choices providing different gameplay opportunities and alternative cut scenes they actually don't really have much impact on the story and only provide very minor differences to the overall direction regardless of which agent you decide to side with in that first choice the injured tom will always be killed by a raptor that surprises him and rick and your decision really only impacts if you see this happen or not if you don't investigate the distress call rick calls regina to let him know that thomas died and you'll later come across his body slumped against a control panel similarly once you're a little further into the building you'll be trapped in a security lockdown triggered by dr kirk and you can make a choice to either fight your way out with gail or try to activate an emergency escape hatch with rick guiding you via the radio once again it's brains are brawn for the player to choose between but in terms of narrative all it changes is if it's regina or gael who eventually captures dr kirk with a regina making it to the loading bay first if she uses the escape hatch and playing catch up if she decided to fight her way there it's an odd system because i think in retrospect it now seems slightly less interesting than it would have been at the time the idea that games can have malleable narratives that we impact through decisions is pretty par for the course nowadays an entire series like the walking dead and mass effect have sold themselves entirely on this concept when we see a difficult moral choice we expect to face big consequences later on so now it feels quite quaint when dynacrisis always circles these seemingly important decisions back around to the main plot mikami and his team must have felt like it was a clever way to give the player some choice between two styles of gameplay completely ignorant that this would one day become something that players expected to also impact the entire direction of the plot what this means though is that no matter what choices you make regardless of if you spend time fighting or solving puzzles you'll always end up at the heliport with rick and a captured dr kirk waiting for gail to come back after he had some mysterious business to attend to well instead of our illustrious leader turning up that pesky tyrannosaurus rex does and in true capcom monster fashion it destroys the helicopter allowing dr kirk to escape and then doing its best to tear apart regina and rick as we discussed earlier despite looking exactly like a traditional boss fight you don't actually need to fight the beast and instead can just run away buying time for rick to fix a service elevator that takes you down into the safety of the underground and into the final section of the game so far i've only really had positive things to say about this strange reptilian horror experience but this elevator ride down to the finale of the game represents a bit of a dip in quality and sadly makes the last hour or so quite the slog to play through despite containing almost all the interesting plot revelations regina and rick quickly discover that the lower section contains a still functional hovercraft which could be used as a way to escape unfortunately though the path is blocked by a strange vortex of energy neither of them have any idea what this is or how to get past it this marks the first point where the game feels slightly aimless rick simply asks regina to search around and see if she can find any clues that would help which is a lot more vague than the crystal clear objectives we had in the upper portions of the facility it leads to a section of game where you really just wander around trying to unlock any locked doors that you haven't opened yet and exploring without a real sense of direction considering we've just come off the back of a pretty exciting climax finding dr kirken battling the t-rex it's a huge handbrake which brings the pace crashing back down but without introducing any fresh mechanics to keep the gameplay flow from getting stale so depending on how lucky you are after either a few minutes or a few hours of random hunting for new ddk keys you'll eventually run into the truant dr kirk and after once again being saved by gail kirk reveals what exactly is going on and why vicious dinosaurs are roaming the building's halls the facility supposedly exists to research third energy an infinite source of power that's created by manipulating pockets of air it's an extremely tricky procedure however and three years ago a tiny mistake in the formula caused a reaction that resulted in the deaths of hundreds of researchers since that time dr kirk had become increasingly isolated slowly moving responsibilities away from his team and conducting most of the research in his own personal laboratory away from the prying eyes that he deemed unworthy of his work and gaining funding by agreeing to sell portions of the information to the governments of the world mere hours before the rey team landed on ibis island he made a startling breakthrough in his research kirk had believed that the third energy reaction was accessing a completely different dimension essentially stealing energy and pulling it into this world but with this final experiment he uncovered the truth behind the phenomenon he had accidentally discovered a way to physically access the past and in the process had created the first ever time machine albeit one he had very little control over this final experiment caused a link to be created between ibis island and a past version of itself one from the cretaceous period millions of years in the past through this portal poured third energy and along with it legions of hungry dinosaurs which appeared all over the facility in a matter of moments massacring the research staff before anyone could even react now i wouldn't go as far as to say it's a twist but i do enjoy that instead of going down the obvious the dinosaurs are mutant experiments route mikami opted to work out a gonzo over-the-top sci-fi way to have the game feature real-life actual dinosaurs along with explaining the game's backstory kirk also tells regina and gail that in order to get rid of the vortex that blocks the path to the hovercraft they'll need to overload the third energy reactor which will absorb up smaller pockets of energy on the island the ever so slight downside of this is that overloading the reactor will reopen the portal on a massive scale and likely suck everything on the island back into the past as it doesn't seem to be any other option the agents decide to go ahead with the reactor plan although gail and rick once again completely disagree on how to achieve this we're given a choice between hunting down the parts we need that are locked away in a container or using kirk's machinery to build our own and this might be the most important choice in terms of your overall enjoyment of dino crisis the gale choice involves a little section of combat where you race over to the storage facility and then a little puzzle where you activate the reactor it's a short but sweet final little blast before the end of the game and keeps things moving at a reasonable pace which feels appropriate after kirk spills the beans on the game's soul mystery the rick choice though well that is probably one of the most confusingly designed sections of gameplay in any survival horror game we need an id card with dr kirk's level of clearance on it and to build both a stabilizer and initializer in order to activate the reactor and all three require some of the most obtuse puzzle solving i've seen in any game in order to forge kirk's id card you need to have his id code which is only available in a researcher memo found behind the reactor but which you travel through a good 30 minutes before you realize that you need to make his card and therefore making it extremely easy to forget about his fingerprints are even more elusive the doctor won't freely give them up so instead you need to find them out in the facility what this requires is heading back to the same room where you found the memo but only after you've tried to activate the reactor now there are bloody fingerprints on the keypad and despite them looking like they belong to the dead researcher lying in a pool of blood next to it they actually belong to kirk and need to be collected it's just unnecessarily obscured requiring multiple visits to the same non-descript hallway and even throwing a red herring at you with the dead scientist the stabilizer and initializer are almost as bad both items are split into four parts which each need to be collected from separate rooms the first is in the parts storage room and is hidden behind a little puzzle where you need to match sounds to a recording it's actually one of dino crisis's cleverer puzzles except that frustratingly the recording is hidden behind a nondescript block in the corner of the room unless you've already read on another separate memo on the other side of the underground that the clue is here there's hardly any way to know unless you decide to just randomly start pushing objects around the same issue applies to the initializer parts which luckily only require two computer codes to retrieve rather unluckily though the computer codes aren't found anywhere in the game and instead you're supposed to work them out by taking a code from a completely different memo splitting in half and then adding zero to each side giving you the codes you need considering all three of these separate elements can be tackled in any order and the memos that provide the information you need are scattered randomly around this huge part of the building but it just makes for an utterly confusing mess of information and objectives that's so hard to keep track of it's such a strange decision to gum up the final section of the game with such a ridiculously complex set of puzzles instead of adding in any new mechanics to keep the game feeling fresh amazingly there aren't really any new dinosaurs added other than a slightly stronger and slower variant of the raptor and instead of feeling like a progression of the mechanics from the first half this latter section just feels like a much bigger dose of exactly the same i do have some sympathy for mikami and his team because the final sections of survival horror games are often the worst part and by giving the player the choice between either a clear run to the final cut scene or a much more complex set of objectives they can choose how they wanted to play out these final moments it's a noble ambition but i'm not sure either option feels that satisfying and i'd like to see a bit more variety brought to the table maybe some new monsters that present a different type of threat or even having to use the vortex to solve puzzles across different time periods choice is great but memorable and thrilling game design is even better luckily dynacrisis saves one of his very best ideas for how its final moments play out meaning we aren't left with a sour taste in our mouths and instead get a last dose of clever mikami design once the stabilizer and initializer are plugged in and the reactor starts to overload the research center begins to collapse and gail is unfortunately pinned under a piece of falling debris allowing kirk to yet again escape regina hauls him back to rick and the three debate one final time about how they should proceed rick wants to immediately leave and gail despite having a broken skeleton wants to go after kirk and complete the mission we're presented with a final choice about how to proceed but unlike before things are not quite as simple as they seem if we side with reg regina knocks out the injured gail preventing him from heading back after kirk and to his inevitable death instead they carry him out to the hovercraft to make their escape as the craft needs fuel rick asks regina to bring some in from the yard and in classic 80s horror fashion the t-rex turns up for a final showdown the boss fight is this crazy running towards the screen crash bandicoot style section where you have to time your shots to stop the monster eating you and if you managed to do this for long enough we're treated to a glorious cutscene where rick fires a bazooka at the fuel station blowing our scaly nemesis apart and allowing the agents to book it off into the sunset the reactor overloads and ibis island disappears into the past presumably taking kirk and the rest of the raptors with it if we signed with gail we get a very different kind of ending regina lets him go and when rick asks what she's doing she replies that she's finally come to understand him he's the ultimate professional willing to give everything for the mission and never deviate for a second if it looks like their objective can be completed by using a tracker which gail plays on kirk during the reactor meltdown we can chase the doctor across a few different locations eventually catching up to gail once again as he holds the doctor at gunpoint sadly this last burst of activity has mortally drained him and in his dying moments he reveals the truth of the mission to regina he hands her a disc containing all of the data relating to the third energy experiments and tells her to hand it over to the mission command when they get home this was the true prize they were sent to recover as the us government had known from the start about the weapons grade potential of kirk's research and wanted to make sure that it couldn't be proliferated and that they would be the only ones able to use it gail was the only one trusted with the true mission with regina rick cooper and tom simply there to act as cover for him completely disposable if required being the ultimate professional though gail didn't want to endanger any of them so didn't tell them about this and tried to achieve the mission on his own which is why he went off solo so many times not because he was a loose cannon but because he was a caring and conscientious leader he collapses to the floor finally succumbing to his injuries but guaranteeing that the mission was a success kirk can't resist a snide comment and regina shuts him up before escorting him back to the hovercraft as the team somebody head out from the port once again our jurassic antagonist rears his head this time in a similarly bonkers sequence where the king of lizards is swimming at such a freakishly fast pace that he's catching up to the hovercraft and you need to blast him every time he gets near in order to outrun him this time everything ends with our heroine throwing a bomb into the monster's mouth and shouting you're extinct which might be one of the finest one-liners i've ever heard in a video game the beast dead the sunset beckons once again and our heroes head home as with all the choices in dino crisis this final decision gives us two conflicting philosophies saving ourselves and our team or sacrificing it all for the mission it is in of itself a clever little binary moment but what really pushes dynacrisis's ending into true classic territory is its hidden third ending there is nothing stopping you from choosing the rick option knocking gail out to be safe and then just going after kirk yourself in this timeline regina is stopping gail not because she's abandoning the mission but because it's obvious that gail can't complete it forcing her to step in much like the gale ending we follow the tracker across a few locations until we arrive at a secret underground hangar where kirk is loading a second helicopter and is about to make his escape this time regina doesn't let the dog even get a word in and hits him with a sweet karate kick knocking him clean out rick immediately calls in asking where the hell regina has gone and she lets him know that she's captured kirk and has found another way for them to get off the island which is pretty convenient as the t-rex has destroyed the hovercraft and rick and gayle are currently on the run they make it over to the underground hangar but the monster is right behind them and as in the other endings we have to do battle with it while the shuttle takes us over to the helicopter hit the beast a handful of times and our heroes make it out we're once again treated to a bombastic cgi cutscene of the t-rex chasing us down this time rick saves the day by dropping a huge bomb that just so happens to be attached to the underside of the helicopter i'm not exactly sure why that's there or what the researchers were planning on doing with it but incinerates the theropod and we fly off into that familiar sunset this time with kirk the third energy data and every member of the team alive well except cooper and tom but we'll forget about them what makes this ending so damn good isn't its narrative payoff though it's that mccammy and his team were bold enough to hide another ending behind decisions that aren't spelled out to the player and instead use it as a reward for those who engage entirely with the spirit of the game it's an incredible instance of the developer allowing the player to express themselves and a really quite amazing moment of player agency that really was very rare at the time in an age of arbitrary good and bad endings dino crisis's final choice really does simply ask you what you think the right thing to do is and then presents three endings that all resolve in a positive way without any judgment the game's final few hours might be some of its worst but this ending is its absolute best moment and finishes the game on a monstrous high point standing well atop the shoulders of its survival horror cousins and showing itself to be so much more than just resident evil with dinosaurs after the credits roll regina delivers a post-mission debrief depending on the ending we get updates on everyone's status everything caps off with her signing off on the mission declaring that she's ready for her next assignment as was ever the way in the world that existed before paid dlc and games as a service finishing the game isn't the end of our time with dyna crisis as there is actually a small smattering of unlockables you can work towards by completing the game within seven hours you'll unlock some alternative outfits for regina and if you beat the game three times seeing all three endings on the same memory card you unlock an infinite grenade launcher mode these are all fun but the main draw for those looking to get full value for money is operation wipeout an alternative mode which you can unlock by beating the game in less than five hours for those of you familiar with resident evil's the mercenaries mode you'll be right at home although as with the rest of dino crisis mikami's team have put their own strategic twist on things depending on the stage you're on you'll load into a game and have a set amount of time to kill a certain amount of raptors sounds easy enough but here you have a specific and limited amount of resources which means you really need to get to grips with enemy location and work out the best way to eliminate them without running out of time or ammo there isn't actually any reward for doing this other than the satisfaction of finally clearing everything dyno crisis has to offer but in a way i quite like that we're so conditioned to chase that dopamine hit of achievements or cosmetics it's quite nice to have a game mode that simply offers up more game without having to dangle rewards at the end of it it's a fun little half an hour to an hour blast once the game is over and that's never going to be a bad thing so as we've already discussed dino crisis was a big hit especially in japan and capcom quickly realized that the game had the potential to be yet another blockbuster horror franchise for them within just six months mikami's work had been hastily ported and a windows pc and dreamcast version were both released albeit to a little less fanfare than the original playstation one the pc port in particular received a lot of criticism as it was quite clearly done on a shoestring budget the controls were hideously unwieldy with you only able to control regina with the keyboard and even more unforgivably no graphical options were included which locked everything to 640x480 and 30fps which had the effect of breaking most of the cutscenes in a lot of the in-game textures the dreamcast version fared a little better although still amazingly scored almost 10 percent worse with reviewers than the playstation version the sega portal actually looks quite a bit nicer than the psx option with much smoother textures and models that elevates the dinosaurs in particular what's really cool though is that the vmu in the controller now acts as a health and ammo counter which means no more referring to your menu to check up on yourself it's a neat little addition and frankly considering it's still exactly the same game i can't work out for the life of me why reviewers would be so much harsher on it just six months later regardless it was clear that capcom had big plans for the series and it was no longer seen as just a side project to keep one of their directors happy just months after dynacrisis 1's release a sequel was greenlit and in the pages of magazines and on internet message boards anticipation began to build to see what was next for regina and the raid team while what finally came was something that nobody could have predicted so let's return to the story of shinji mikami who had once again put together a smash here out of nowhere and was essentially single-handedly responsible for keeping capcom relevant during the industry's complex transition to 3d in the 80s and early 90s they built their reputation on ruling the arcades with franchises like street fighter final fight and strider and had carried this success over two home consoles with hugely popular ports of those games and their money printing mascot mega man ruling the snes and nes the issue for capcom prix mcammi had been that none of these franchises had really translated all that well into this new three-dimensional world and as good as mega man legends and strider 2 were they didn't bring in the big bucks that the company was looking for with dino crisis making a big splash and resident evil now established as capcom's premiere series mikami was once again elevated to a position where he oversaw many projects at a time although now he was given much more creative freedom and the ability to place those who he felt had exceptional talent in charge of them this would lead to one of the most prolific and incredible runs a video game company has ever been on with some of the best games ever made being developed during this time under the watchful eye of shinji mikami resident evil 2 director hideki kamiya would direct and produce devil may cry youn takayuchi who had worked with mikami on resident evil 1 directed honor musha warlords we'd get code veronica steele battillion and phoenix rye with this run finally capped off by mikami himself returning to the director c to put together what i consider to be one of the greatest games of all time a top to bottom remake of the original resident evil finally perfecting that survival horror formula that he'd been working on throughout the 90s now amidst all this booming success with multiple games all being developed in tandem mikami needed to put together a team to work on dino crisis 2 and decided to turn to two young rising stars the first was hiroyuki kobayashi who would handle production duties and who had worked closely with mikami as a planner and producer on both resident evil 1 and dino crisis directing would be trusted to shu takumi an extremely talented designer who mikami had originally wanted to direct diner crisis 1 instead of him at the time takumi had actually started the job and completed quite a bit of work before being dragged off the project to help with resident evil 2 which was going through massive problems and required all hands on deck he'd never wound up returning to his old job leaving mccammy to complete the lion's share of the work but interestingly almost all of takumi's work stuck around in the finished product and was found exclusively in that extremely tight and well-designed first few hours you might think that this partnership would result in a sort of super version of dyno crisis one but amazingly everyone involved agreed that they should take the franchise in a very different direction much more action-focused with kobayashi claiming that he wanted exhilaration and not terror to be the dominant emotion i personally believe that this decision was driven largely because mikami knew that he'd be taking resident evil back to its roots didn't want to have two competing survival horror franchises with both kobayashi and takumi eager to carve out a fresh niche for themselves it was the perfect opportunity to get experimental and see if something different would sell to that end they decided to approach the development of dynacrysis 2 in a completely different manner to every other game capcom had made to that point instead of writing a narrative and developing a game in tandem the story would be created by an outside writer and the development team would focus entirely on the gameplay and systems the concept was that it would allow the designers to focus on what they did best and would take advantage of another new talent at capcom during the development of resident evil 2 when everything was essentially falling apart supervisor yoshiki okamoto made the decision to enlist the help of nuburo tsujimura who was a renowned screenwriter having worked on shows like carmen ryder and lupin iii the idea was for him to tidy up some of the plot and improve the dialogue but tsujimara ended up instead completely rewriting the entire game and giving us the dual plot lines that the game is now famous for this union worked so well the okamoto and tsujimura formed a writing company called flagship which capcom subsequently bought in order to improve the storytelling in their games mikami saw this new purchase as a perfect opportunity to experiment and flagship's first ever job was to put together a story that could be adapted into diner crisis 2. tsujimura with a brief to create something much more ambitious than dino crisis 1 set to work and by september 2000 our motley crew of outsiders and newcomers have put together a complete game ready to ship all around the world on playstation 1. you'd be forgiven for thinking that this sounds like an utter catastrophe waiting to happen a narrative and gameplay that are created in two separate locations a development team that never really put together a game before and a goal of completely redesigning everything that had worked from the previous game but as we'll discover next dynacrisis 2 somehow eclipses its predecessor and manages to be not only hugely ahead of its time but also one of the funnest video game experiences ever put to disc like most classic ps1 games we start proceedings with a pretty bombastic cutscene that introduces our extremely familiar premise and all of our new characters following on from the events of ibis island the us government now has dr kirk's research and at a secret midwestern base they're experimenting with its potential as a weapon of mass destruction but despite being as arrogant as humanly possible dr kirk was certainly correct about nobody else having the ability to manage third energy research and inevitably another accident occurs sending the center a military base and a nearby settlement hurtling back in time we're then introduced to lieutenant dylan morton a new character who along with our trusty heroine regina a part of a special operation team that's been sent back in time to rescue the victims of the accident much like our last game it's a short but sweet premise we're here to carry out a mission and that is to find anyone who might have survived the journey into the past and bring them home what's also short is how long the special operations team lasts as within minutes of setting up camp the entire platoon is attacked by horde of hungry velociraptors who make pretty short work of what is supposedly the us's top people dylan and regina being the indomitable badasses that they are seem like they're turning the tide until we're introduced to this game's reptilian nemesis a huge gigantosaurus that shrugs off their bullets like they're nothing luckily they're saved by david falk an extremely strange cowboy hat-wearing character who we'll discuss in more detail later on and he pretty much uses up all of his life's luck to hit a perfect strike on the beast's eye it buys enough time for regina and dylan to get clear but after a short chase they end up tumbling down a cliff and into the ruins of the military base separated from any survivors unaware of where they are and millions of years from home you'd think in this moment cooperation would be a pretty big priority but dylan and regina despite almost dying mere seconds ago immediately fall out about which gate they should go through they go their separate ways after regina calls dylan a barbarian and we take control of the blonde-haired brute with a mission to find any survivors that we can and very little other clues where to go the game begins and from this moment on it virtually never lets up until the credits roll i'm not surprised if this all sounds very familiar we've got a special ops team that can't seem to get along a disaster zone where they need to carry out a rescue mission and legions of ravenous dinosaurs waiting to get in the way however very quickly it becomes clear that this is a sequel only in very loose terms within moments of stepping out into the jungle into dylan's path jumps a green raptor and then another behind him and then a third from above in dino crisis 1 this would have been a death sentence but in dino crisis 2 it's the very first encounter of the game and with just a few shotgun blasts you'll quickly realize that your running battles with the dinosaurs are going to play out very differently almost every single element of the combat has been completely redesigned to give dynacrysis to a much faster pace and a far more arcade style flow where enemies charge at you from all directions you've got to use quick reflexes and even quicker trigger finger to survive inventory management and ammo conservation have been completely removed you start the game with a pretty powerful shotgun with a hundred bullets and no need to reload when paired with raptors that now only take two shots to kill as opposed to four or five and well it pretty much makes dylan a dinosaur killing machine carving through a whole pack before we even hit the next zone transition your toolset isn't just restricted to a massive shotgun bullets though as you now also carry a sub weapon which in dylan's case is a short-range machete which can be used to get some distance between yourself and any raptors that get a little close it might seem like a big advantage but it's absolutely dwarfed compared to the huge upgrade in mobility as you can now move and shoot at the same time and by hitting r1 you'll spin and lock on to the nearest dinosaur it completely changes the complexity of the game on a fundamental level in dynacrisis 1 every single second of gameplay was designed around the concept that the dinosaurs were faster and stronger than you were which in turn creates all the strategy and tension that makes it such an enjoyable survival horror game thanks to the fact that you're always ready to return fire while moving and with the press of a button can target any dinosaurs that you don't see coming on top of just having so much more firepower as a baseline and that power dynamic is completely switched now you are the danger instead of the dinosaurs it means that instead of carefully planning your route across a building or making difficult decisions about what items to keep dynamic crisis 2 is a game that wants you to be perpetually in the moment this does of course mean that the tension and atmosphere of danger isn't really present anymore and i would say that other than having tank controls and fixed camera angles dynacrisis 2 can't really be described as a survival horror game it would be cliche to describe it as terminator 2 or aliens but that's very much the situation it's pulse pounding it's a tension grabbing and it's anything but scary along with the combat another huge change is that donor crisis 2 has reverted back to the two-dimensional pre-rendered backgrounds that defined the resident evil series completely breaking with the fully 3d world of dynacrisis 1. you might think this is somewhat of a backward step especially considering how much effort was put into taking survival horror into true 3d but this was actually done for a very specific reason and really is the enabler that allows the rest of the game to work in simple terms fully 3d environments take up a lot more resources and this had a limiting effect on the amount of enemies that we could face in the first game we only really ever fought at maximum maybe two or three raptors at once and while this worked fine for the slow-paced strategic gameplay the remixed power dynamic in dynacrysis 2 requires a lot more action to be happening on screen and therefore can't afford to waste power rendering a fully 3d desk or bookcase feels weird to say this because it was an element that i really appreciated in the last game but it really doesn't make a particularly big difference the pre-rendered shots of the jungle and bass are all very highly detailed and the way that paths have been laid out means it's always extremely clear where you can move and where you can't i'd almost say in certain areas it actually looks better than the 3d hallways of ibis island which really is a testament to what a good job the level designers have done a really nice touch that helps the world not feel quite so static is that on certain screens you'll see other non-combat dinosaurs just going about their business existing in this crazy ecosystem we get to see a stegosaurus and her child walking in the distance and there are constantly little compsognathus darting around on the path it helps make up for that lack of a tactile environment and creates this sense that you're the outsider in a kingdom of lizards rather than in the last game where they were invading a very human world of metal and machines so obviously with these fundamental changes to how the combat works most of the gameplay systems from dino crisis one have also had to be thrown out and in its place takumi and kobayashi have created what might be one of the funnest arcade shooter systems i've ever played as killing an individual raptor is now no longer all that hard dynacrysis 2 derives its challenge from an all-new combo system that asks you to chain kills in order to rack up points that scale the bigger the combo you can put together there is no way to put it other than that this is incredibly addictive the satisfaction of blasting through raptor after raptor and seeing that combo chain go up really can't be underestimated it feeds this almost primeval need we have to see the numbers go up in video games and ties into the arcade style gameplay perfectly making you want to get into combat rather than run away from it if this all sounds a bit simplistic there is some degree of strategy still involved if you wait until the last moment to shoot or machete and attacking dinosaur you'll get a counter bonus which not only massively increases the points you get but also one shots most of the monsters in the game again it sounds like a simple mechanic but it means that you're always needing to weigh up blasting from a distance or letting enemies get close for maximum reward on the flip side though if you clear a zone without taking a single hit you'll be rewarded with a huge dump of bonus points although you need to have killed at least one enemy and it scales with how many enemies are in a specific zone giving you larger amounts the more danger a zone presents so you want to fight to get your combo up but you also want to take no damage for the bonus but you want to let enemies get close in order to get counters which means you're always in this adrenaline pumping state of blowing enemies away and dodging attacks by the skin of your teeth it is absurdly fun and if there's any takeaway from this video it's that you absolutely need to experience this combat system if you haven't already as it's just as much fun in 2022 as it was back in 2000 after exploring the jungle as dylan you'll eventually come across a building called the water tower where you'll discover the first save point and this is where dynacrisis 2 introduces the other side of its combat system at each of the save points is a shop where you can spend the points you've been accumulating on recovery items ammo refills and most excitingly new weapons and equipment upgrades while it's fun trying to get a high score for the sake of self-satisfaction there's nothing quite like getting a huge chunk of points and knowing that it's gonna mean you have double the ammo or that you'll be able to buy a hyper-powerful electricity gun later on there are some really meaningful upgrades like a suit that prevents the bleed status or licenses that dramatically increase how long your combo lasts so it's something you'll have in mind whenever you're fighting through a zone once again pushing you into combat in a way that rewards high skill instead of careful survival this gameplay loop really is a sort of proto character action game and considering that just a few years later capcom would birth the genre properly with the release of devil may cry i think it's safe to say that a lot of influence was taken from dino crisis 2. at its core it's an action game that's rewarding you for beating its encounters in the most stylish way possible and the combo system is only fractionally removed from the gradings that dante has given in dmc the loop rewards you with points that you spend on more ways to fight more stylishly and really the satisfaction comes from not just beating the game but beating it and looking good it's an interesting link to draw and considering hideki kamiya and shuntakumi were close friends both starting at capcom in the same year i think it's safe to say that calling dyno crisis 2 a sort of precursor to devil may cry really isn't all that far fetched so as you and dylan explore the opening areas of the game you'll quickly realize that despite the special operations team setting out just a few weeks after the third energy incident it seems like almost everybody is dead and the building lies in complete ruins reclaimed by nature in a way that would normally take decades further into the complex dylan discovers a memo that reveals what happened third energy being the fickle force that it is had actually sent the rescue team back in time but not to the correct date and through environmental clues and more memos we can read how they had been fighting a losing battle against the dinosaurs for over 10 years before dylan and regina arrived to add to the confusion while looking for any survivors were attacked by these biker looking people who wield a kind of crazy futuristic beyblade gun and despite dylan's pleas they don't answer any questions and flee as soon as he gets near who are you clearly all these revelations are a bit much for dylan's poor barbarian brain and eventually he ends up trapping himself in a room in the research facility luckily for him on the other end of the radio is regina and despite her lack of surprise at his situation she agrees to come and get him here we're introduced to another one of dino crisis 2's fundamental mechanics which is that at set points you'll switch between our two heroes with each having their own weapons and equipment that varies how you'll approach each zone unlike dylan regina has an electric baton which she can use to open locks and get through specific doors but she can't pass through the vines which only dylan can cut down gameplay operates in pretty much the exact same way each time you switch with the characters even sharing the same recovery items and upgrades so it means that while you're playing as a different character it doesn't really feel like two distinct routes while the paths you take are technically different you'll end up in many of the same locations upon getting back to dylan you'll quickly realize that you need to go and collect a specific coloured key card in order to unlock the door and let the chump out this is likely to give trauma flashbacks to players who struggled with dynamic crisis 1's complex ddk and id card system but this is another area where dyno crisis 2 opts for a more streamlined approach instead of a lengthy jaunt around the facility checking memos and making notes you simply look for a door that only regina can open and inside is the key cards you need having to pick the matching coloured key is about as complex as the puzzles get and when paired with a surprisingly little amount of backtracking in general it makes for a game that's very linear and really just wants you to blast it from a to b focusing mainly on combat rather than navigation now that being said there is one little puzzle style moment that i did really enjoy after regina frees dylan they return to the boat but find it's been trashed presumably by the helmet-wearing mystery people and they need to find a battery in order to get the ship up and running again control switches back to dylan and we head off to the upper levels of the research center to see if they have what we need just as we reach our destination though a little dinosaur hops out and steals the key card right out of dylan's hands and we need to work out a way to get it back off the little critter by reading memos dotted around this area we can learn that the researchers called these tiny dinosaurs compies and they had real issues with them stealing small shiny objects and using them in their nests it was an annoying problem but it actually led to a much bigger one as other dinosaurs hunted these compies for food and this new dynamic in the ecosystem was drawing raptors towards the humans in order to get the key card back we have to close certain ventilation hatches and then chase the compy into one of the cages that had been built to try and solve the problem much like the coloured key cards it's not a particularly difficult puzzle especially when compared to the late game puzzles from dyno crisis 1 but i really enjoy how it actually uses the dinosaurs and through solving it we learn more about what happened to the people that we're trying to rescue it's a clever little moment of storytelling wrapped up as a brain teaser and it's a huge shame that there aren't more of these moments in diner crisis too with the battery in hand dylan returns to the boat and they set out towards edward city in search of anyone who might be left alive we hit the controls on the boat and are given a choice of locations to head to it's a tiny moment maybe just a few seconds long but it has such a big effect on making this time-warped area have a real sense of scale to it rather than being trapped in one location walking through the same halls over and over we're traveling around a huge variety of environments that are justified by having us travel large distances between them along with new zones opening up we're also treated to the first of what will be a great deal of unique action set-piece moments it quickly becomes apparent why the researchers had such difficulty linking up with each other as the waters are absolutely packed with hyper-aggressive plesiosaurs and dylan has to man a machine gun turret and protect the ship while we travel to our destination it's a fun little on rails moment and amazingly it controls quite smooth considering it's completely different style of gameplay any challenge is non-existent but it's just more over-the-top dinosaur horror action and these moments never stick around long enough to become tedious as the entrance to edward city is locked we'll need to take control of regina and explore the third energy facility and this marks the moment where diner crisis 2 begins to get a little crazy the first thing you'll notice is that the outside section of this area is by far the best place to grind points in the entire game while running along these gangways plesiosaurs will burst out of the water but as they die with a single bullet you can rack up a pretty huge combo and a massive no damage bonus from the amount of enemies that spawn it by doing this just two or three times you can easily end up with over a hundred thousand points which means a colossal increase in power a suddenly you're immune to bleed damage have a powerful rifle with thousands of bullets and an inventory full of the most powerful healing items you'd think giving the player such an absurd boost in strength might unbalance the game and frankly it absolutely does unbalance it and makes you virtually unkillable but dining crisis 2 sidesteps this problem by having a second half that heads in a very strange and very different direction after a brief bit of exploration we find that the researchers had managed to keep the underwater reactor going for 10 years until one day engineers went down into the lake and never returned it caused the electricity to shut off which was the beginning of the end for the survivors and to make matters even worse the engineers had the access keys to edward city which effectively separated the communities for good as that's where we're heading regina has to don a diving suit and head down into the lake herself which starts a rather unique little section of the game movement underwater works pretty differently as while regina walks a lot slower she can now jump which means suddenly zones have a lot more verticality we're moving up and down and not just on a flat path which is something that's really impressively executed considering the game operates entirely on flat pre-rendered backgrounds with a camera that you can't control in fact really this whole section works far better than it has any right to underwater levels are often some of the most mind-numbingly frustrating parts of any game and that's usually because either your movement is heavily restricted like in ocarina of time or skies of arcadia where you plod around a snail's pace or it's because you've got far too many angles to move in like in kingdom hearts where the 360 degree plane just doesn't work with the game's systems as enemies can attack you from any angle and are much faster than you this section could easily end up as a frustrating mess but that simple addition of the jump adds just enough to make this section feel like it has its own unique rules the areas are all quite wide and open which means leaping to dodge out of the way of an incoming attack is fairly easy and you thankfully have unlimited ammo so you're never completely helpless i'd even go as far as to say that this section is actually pretty fun and there's a really good sense of atmosphere to the whole sequence there's a great water effect that runs over the screen and the lack of music and silent stalking aquatic dinosaurs almost bring back some of that creeping dread from the first game you feel miles out of your comfort zone but in that beautiful survival horror way instead of in a frustrating zelda water temple way the area caps off with the boss fight against a truly gigantic plesiosaurus and while it's not particularly difficult the whole thing is conducted with these really low camera angles that make the monster seem extremely imposing when it's coming towards you the whole thing does make absolutely no sense though i've got no idea what this monster is supposed to be eating or how it even ended up in this locked room but as a spectacle which is all it's really trying to be it's a pretty awesome boss fight anyway with the beast dead we get hold of the edward city keycard and immediately are radioed by david falk the cowboy hat wearing guy from the intro cutscene he's apparently found survivors but needs backup urgently and so we immediately set off to the rescue david if you thought the journey into edward city might be a return to the arcade run and gun action well you're very wrong as instead we get another sequence of action set pieces that keep things moving forwards about 100 miles per hour firstly we have to get through this volcano maze which is full of a unique dinosaur that has to be knocked onto its back with a mine gun before you can damage it navigate your way through here and we're straight into a completely different sequence where you have to swap between the characters cooling down missile strikes to protect you from a horde of allosaurus this lasts about 10 minutes and then you're thrust immediately into another turret section where you're on the run from two raging stegosaurus it's absolutely breathless makes the earlier part of the game in the research facility look like silent hill by comparison it's just one hyper-charged bombastic sequence after the next each with unique mechanics that burst into the game and then disappear as quickly as they arrived i can see how this probably looks like a mess of ideas but just like with the boat journey nothing ever outstays its welcome and if you can't find a shred of enjoyment while blasting two huge dinosaurs with a missile launcher well you probably weren't enjoying the game to begin with so eventually we reach edward city and are treated to another action-packed cutscene regina and dylan are surrounded by raptors and everything looks pretty finished until they're saved by none other than our strange third wheel the cowboy known as david falk he's inexplicably piloting some kind of battle helicopter and fires indiscriminately blowing up the velociraptors in a hail of missile fire we don't really get to spend much time with david but i think it's clear from just the few times he's on screen that he is an absolute maniac and i've no idea why the u.s government would want someone who's likely insane on a mission of such importance he very clearly fires the first round of missiles from within the dense jungle undergrowth so i'm going to presume he's had absolutely no training and has no idea how to operate this machine this theory is proven mere seconds later after rushing back to edward city to try and protect the citizens who are now under attack we rejoin our characters with the helicopter completely destroyed as david has clearly crashed it this bozo then moans that all the survivors died and that they weren't able to save them i'm not being funny but maybe crashing the hyper-powerful air support might have something to do with that anyway with the last survivor dead and the mission failed the three decide that all they can do is search the city for data about third energy gates and try to find a way back to their own time they split up once again and we take control of dylan with a sprawling ruined city spread out before him much like in the last game dino crisis 2 suffers with a similar dip in quality near the end of the game unlike in its predecessor though i don't think it's down to a lack of ideas weirdly is really because it just has too many going into this section of the game especially after the riotous back to back to back set pieces i was expecting things to slip back into that arcade horror action flow from the start of the game we'd explore edward city fight some dinosaurs find some keys and learn about how the survivors tried to stay alive for the 10 years that they were stranded it seems like such an obvious place to go next especially considering capcom had proven with resident evil 2 and 3 that they're the masters of the urban horror environment well instead dylan gets into a miniature tank and begins fighting a horde of tyrannosaurus rex while navigating around the city it's just i mean it's fine from a spectator perspective it probably looks pretty funny but when you're actually playing the game it's kind of an annoying part you're locked onto this rail which means you can't really dodge or maneuver all that easily and the tank has a single cannon which you pretty much just mash non-stop it's just all a little clumsy which isn't a great look when compared to that finely tuned arcade combat we've got to go all the way back to before the underwater sequence which is about a third of the entire game in order to find the last lengthy series of normal dino crisis 2 gameplay and while these distinct set pieces are great things to throw in every now and then to add variety it's kind of hard to argue that they aren't forming the majority of the gameplay at this point even more frustratingly that is it for edward city as in that is literally all we do while we're here and the game never returns to this location the whole thing's wrapped up in about five minutes and all we have to show for our visit is a gas mask which regina and dylan find lying on a broken highway the last place we can go is to the missile silo back in the jungle through a section filled with poisonous gases that we can now bypass thanks to that convenient gas mask you do a touch of backtracking and a smidge of fighting but very quickly we're thrust into a boss fight against that gigantosaurus from the start of the game regina has to defeat it before a damaged third energy missile blows up and destroys the whole place now i was actually pretty jazzed about this as because of the set pieces i was stuffed with health packs i'd never needed to use and had a hugely upgraded rocket launcher that i was just desperate to unleash on something sadly while this looks like a boss fight it's actually yet another action set piece the only way you can damage the beast is by activating these taps and igniting the gas that comes racing out once this is done four or five times it collapses in a charred husk and you head on to deactivate the missile and avert disaster once again in isolation it's not remotely bad and looks incredible from a visual perspective especially for a playstation 1 game but it's impossible to ignore the nagging feeling that we're not getting the best of dynacrysis 2 in this second half the absolutely needed to be a longer section of exploration and combat with more upgrades to unlock and for the pace to just let up for a moment and allow some of these huge moments to actually sink in it's sort of like sensory overload where so many things are happening at once and so quickly it's hard to really appreciate any of them if you can believe it this is followed by yet another cutscene and another unique gameplay moment the gang decides that they have no other option but to simply head down the river but quickly realize they're trapped at a lock dillon gets out to provide cover fire for david and we get a maybe 45 second on rails turret section that's gone in the blink of an eye our theory about david folk's ability is then also confirmed as once the gay is open an allosaurus appears and he selflessly pushes dylan out of the way ending up between its jaws it's just the strangest death scene i've seen in a good while we spent hardly any time with him to form any kind of emotional connection and his actual relationship with dylan and regina is a complete mystery in fact i'd argue that considering he crashed the battle helicopter and left the survivors to die he was actually a massive liability to the mission considering he gets eaten by an enemy that regina and dylan have killed multiple times by this point his death simply leaves me wondering how this guy ever ended up on the task force to begin with the insanity doesn't end there david's comically pointless death provides the spark that takes us into dynacrisis 2's final and most bat [ __ ] crazy moments so throughout the game we've had a running battle with the helmet wearing mystery people and by this late point in the game we're not really any closer to working out who they are during the jungle section regina captures one and after de-masking it she discovers that it's a young girl who's extremely distressed and refuses to explain exactly what she wants or where she came from weirdly when dylan comes to see the girl she calms down and almost seems affectionate to him as there's nobody in the lost research group of an age that matches hers our heroes are just as confused as we are and when the girl eventually escapes the chance of working out who these people are seems lost at the end of the edward city zone things get even stranger during another attack by a different helmet wearer the girl comes to dylan's rescue saving his life and in the process dropping her necklace before disappearing again amazingly it's the exact same necklace that dylan's dead sister wore and her death was what prompted him to join the military so he's unbelievably confused as to what is happening well after washing up on a riverbank after david pushed him away from the allosaurus dylan once again meets the young girl who beckons him to follow her to home with no other option he agrees and we find our way deeper into the jungle and into what might be the craziest twist in any horror game as we fight through this zone the environment begins to get progressively more technologically advanced at first it's a few overgrown metal panels on the floor but pretty quickly we're racing around a citadel of complex machinery and deactivating huge electrical pylons to enter into what the girl calls home inside the building dylan approaches a machine that begins to play a hologram and the entire story is turned completely on its head the holographic figure who's the superintendent of this building explains to dylan that he is actually not in the cretaceous period and is actually millions of years in the future standing in a facility put together by highly advanced humans turns out that in dino crisis one when dr kirk discovered third energy and the ibis island facility was shifted back in time the ecology of the past was disturbed and the natural progression that would lead to the present day was thrown off course it created a crisis that threatened humanity's existence and the only solution that could be found was the noah's ark plan a specialist team would travel back in time gather all the required flora and fauna and then take them far into the future where they would be protected from the crisis and could be returned when the danger had passed the only issue was that the plan didn't exactly work out and unsurprisingly the specialist team found they couldn't co-exist with the dinosaurs ultimately being wiped out leaving only the superintendent and a small group of injured children they were placed in healing chambers that were originally intended for dinosaurs and this transformed them into the mute reptile defenders that dylan and regina encounter throughout the game everyone in dino crisis 2 the researchers the citizens of edward city and the rescue team had all actually traveled into this future and had spent that 10 years fighting against creatures that humans were trying to save and children who didn't even realize they were human anymore as if this wasn't enough of a mind [ __ ] the superintendent then reveals that he is none other than a future version of dylan the very mastermind who came up with this plan after having heard it from himself and returning to his own time with it turns out the nameless girl is paula his daughter who protected him because of how similar he looked to her father and who wore a replica of his sister's necklace presumably as a symbol of the second grey love in his life this is all a lot to take in especially as it's pretty much exclusively delivered in this final section of the game and seemingly comes absolutely out of nowhere it's actually the development of dino crisis 2 which is to blame for this as when tsujimura put the story together he was told exclusively to focus on the premise and the conclusion which is why basically all of the plot is found in just a handful of minutes at the start and end of the game quite big chunks of his narrative were also trimmed out in the final version including an entire subplot about an illness that time travelers develop which prevents them from interfering in the timeline unfortunately all that means we're left with a pretty crazy revelation which as with a lot of time travel stories doesn't really make a huge amount of sense why couldn't the humans from the future just immediately move the dinosaurs into a safer time period why would no other humans able to come and help them why hadn't the crisis destroyed life in the present day that dylan and regina had come from as if those paradoxes weren't enough the game serves up an almighty head scratcher in its final moments that gigantosaurus that regina iv turns up again and as dylan we have to activate an orbital satellite to blast it once and for all unfortunately in doing so the facility that they are in is destroyed and while it's collapsing paula is trapped under some debris regina who's now magically found her way into the facility implores dylan to come back through the time gate with her but he won't leave his future daughter to die regina swears that she'll come back and rescue him and dives into the portal just before it collapses dylan and paula are left behind in the future with the facility blowing up around them this whole ending sequence is just bonkers a completely new plot line that appears in the final 10 minutes huge revelations and twists and then a cliffhanger that pretty much throws all of it out the window presuming that dylan and paula don't die which it kind of looks like they may have done considering the entire building blows up doesn't dylan need to travel back in time in order for the plot of dino crisis 2 to even happen it's a mess if you think about it too hard and frankly i think it's pretty obvious that this is a narrative that was written in a very fractured way and then carved up even further to fit around a separately developed arcade action horror game really i think fractured is the best way to describe dino crisis 2 unlike its predecessor which was a highly cohesive vision of what resident evil would be like if the monsters were much more powerful than you dynacrysis 2 has so many ideas all crammed into its relatively short run time that it often just completely loses sight of the things that it does well those early sections of the game are so damn good you're exploring the jungle fighting hordes of raptors chaining combos and buying upgrades solving little puzzles and feeling out the game's world and mechanics it's some of the finest action gameplay found on any console with ideas far ahead of its time the issue is that we simply don't get enough of this and the second half desperately needed more substance and less brief set-piece moments it really feels like if we just had a section exploring edward city encountering a few survivors and maybe getting a few more hints about the noah's ark plan and future dylan well that ending might not feel quite so abrupt and the second half feels so utterly breathless it makes for a strange game because i categorically recommend dyno crisis 2 and had a great time playing it but it's very clearly a game that doesn't live up to its potential and despite the huge team of talented developers behind it i think it lacks that singular focused vision that made the first game such a big success so while the main game might suffer from an overabundance of ideas an area where this philosophy absolutely shines is in the game's extra modes which take that arcade action combat and dial it up to 11. once you've beaten the game you'll unlock the dino coliseum which is a sort of vr mission style arena where you fight waves of dinosaurs even without the exploration and story driving you forward this is still really fun especially as the whole point of the combat system is to build bigger combos and this is really just a pure expression of that trying to clear waves without taking hits or just getting the highest score possible is a simple goal but it lets that arcade influence shine through what's particularly cool is that every time you beat the game your extinction points are totaled up and you can use them to buy different characters for the colosseum all which bring different weapons to the table as cool as it is to play as gale and rick the real enjoyment comes from the slew of weirder characters that have been included you can play as the tank from edward city and if you can get enough points together you could unlock every single dinosaur in the game now this is where the dino coliseum really shines because amazingly every dinosaur controls differently and has unique attacks you can charge around as the velociraptor gore enemies at full speed as a triceratops and even play as that huge gigantosaurus which hardly even fits in the arena it's impossible to not crack a smile while playing this dinosaur royal rumble mode and when you're doing battle with the allosaurus as a tiny compy well that's when you know you're playing a good game it doesn't even end there though once you've bought two dinosaurs for the colosseum you unlock another mode called dino duel basically a mini fighting game starring the lizards and it is just fantastic it controls terribly and it's horrifically unbalanced and i really just don't care it's not meant to be a competitive sport and just serves to add in an extra portion of stupid fun once you've cleared the main game i'll be honest when i was playing through these modes i actually felt a little sad not because they're in any way poorly designed but because it reminded me that there was a time when games were full of content that didn't take itself so seriously we've lost all these silly extra modes along with the cheats and weird unlockables that add so much replayability to games they were originally included to extend the game's run time and now that's something which is handled exclusively by dlc and content gating and that's just such a shame playing a game over as an alternative character or with some funny modifier on are some of my favorite memories of older games and it's sad that younger players don't get that same experience from modern titles much like its predecessor dynacrysis 2 was a big hit with fans and critics which considering quite how different it was is really pretty impressive it generally scored around an 8 or 9 out of 10 and sold very well considering it actually released after the playstation 2 had come out by the end of its publishing run it sold almost 1.5 million copies which while much lower than dynacrysis 1 was still considered a big success compared to its budget and its relatively quick development cycle in fact internally it was seen so favorably that director shuter kumi was given the option to work on whatever he wanted next with a small team he began development of a legal detective adventure game that he'd been dreaming of since he was a teenager it would eventually release in 2001 as ace attorney and go on to be one of capcom's most popular franchises as for kobayashi while he'd take the lessons that they'd learned from dynacrysis 2 and together with hideki kamiya they'd put together devil may cry before going on to create the sengoku basara series much like with the release of the first game if dino crisis was going to continue a new team would have to be put together and capcom saw this transition to the next generation as the perfect time for the franchise to finally break away from its survival horror roots and spread its wings into other genres thanks to the series pretty impressive sales numbers capcom didn't want to let go of this golden dinosaur egg just yet but without the talents of mikami and takumi directing things the franchise started to veer off in some pretty wild directions in 2000 ign reported that british company m4 were developing a handheld version of dyno crisis for the game boy color and unlike its playstation counterparts this would be a top-down adventure game rather than a fully 3d survival horror and would separate its exploration screens from its battle screens in the style of an rpg as weird as this sounds capcom were extremely impressed with the demo that m4 put together but they had another plan for this work while all this had been going on a portable version of resident evil 2 had also been in production but capcom were unhappy with the results so they asked if m4's dyno crisis game could be repurposed as a resident evil title this led to the strange release that we now know as resident evil gaiden an odd adventure game sequel to resident evil 2 starring leon kennedy and using that exploration screen battle screen system that had been originally designed for dino crisis oddly enough that wouldn't be the last time that someone would attempt to take mikami's dino horror formula onto the game boy color as just a few years later capcom would commission spanish company fluid games to put together another interpretation of the ps1 classic this aimed to be much more faithful with fixed images acting as backgrounds and would apparently replicate almost everything about the original but with only the hardware of the game boy color to work with the game's design document claimed there would be many more types of dinosaur to fight and four playable characters and generally just sounds unbelievably ambitious well it seems capcom didn't buy into the vision as this was also cancelled meaning that despite two games being in development we never actually got to see what dino crisis would look like on a handheld now while neither of these projects bore any fruit it was clear that capcom were now willing to go outside of their core development teams to further the franchise and our next game is a result of this new direction by 2002 resident evil had become so big that it had spawned a legion of spin-off games of all various genres one of which was the gun survivor series this was capcom's attempt to take the arcade success story of series like time crisis and house of the dead and make it work in living rooms with plug and play like gun peripherals the first was released in 2000 on the playstation 1 and was called biohazard gun survivor what's notable about the game is that unlike its arcade counterparts you're actually not on rails and can move around levels freely while using the light gun peripheral to aim it was considered a pretty interesting premise and famitsu gave the game a 31 hour 40 which considering its tiny development team was far better than capcom had anticipated plans were quickly made to port the game to the american and european markets but unfortunately in april 1999 america was in a state of shock after the columbine high school massacre and politicians were making hay blaming this shocking violence on video games it led to capcom making the baffling decision to still release gun survivor in the west but without any lie gun compatibility meaning it was entirely controlled via the ps1 controller and duly felt absolutely awful to play it reviewed and sold terribly and led to a strange situation where the franchise was successful in japan but not in the west despite being almost identical even when its sequel released gun survivor 2 code veronica with the compatible light gun on the playstation 2 it wasn't enough to salvage the series and yet again it sold and reviewed very poorly outside of japan capcom weren't about to give up yet though and in 2002 a crossover between gun survivor and dino crisis was proposed in japan it would be simply called dino crisis gun survivor but that terrible reputation of the franchise had in america and europe led to these associations needing to be hidden and so it was retitled dino stalker now i'm confident that thanks to this most people don't even realize that there is a light gun dino crisis game and i don't blame them as from the front cover and gameplay you'd never realize that this is anything to do with the last two games we've looked at much to my surprise and i'm sure yours this game is actually indelibly linked to the last game and in a way is really a narrative sequel to dino crisis 2 clearing up some of those strange unanswered questions that the cliffhanger left us with although ultimately asking just as many more it's an enigma in a way a sequel to both gun survivor 2 and dino crisis 2 but marketed as neither and thus pretty much completely forgotten by our collective memory now you wouldn't necessarily know it's linked to dyna crisis from its premise alone which begins very much in spin-off territory we play as mike wyatt a world war ii fighter pilot who's embroiled in a dogfight over the pacific ocean his plane takes a hit and while attempting to eject to safety mike is thrust through a kind of strange digital portal on the other side he pulls his parachute and while descending a large rifle appears in his hand and a flock of pterodactyl will begin to attack him which starts the game it might look like your typical light gun affair but once we're down on the ground the gameplay really opens up and we're introduced to the main conceit of dino stalker just like in gun survivor dino stalker has a lot of levels that take place off rails and allow you to walk around freely fighting dinosaurs at your own pace and collecting pickups hidden around the levels this gives the game a really different feel to those classic arcade light gun experiences as because the player is in control of movement the whole game runs a much slower pace at the bottom of the screen you have a radar that acts as an alert to movement around you and as most of the dinosaurs will raw before they attack it gives you a few precious moments to work out where exactly the attack is going to come from the encounters can still get pretty hectic though with huge amounts of raptors and pterodactyls swarming around you but everything is paced a lot more like a traditional action game with zones that trigger specific enemies to spawn instead of a whirlwind charge from screen to screen now it might sound like a lot to ask of a genre that's generally speaking pretty simple the gun survivor was actually renowned for taking elements from resident evil and reworking its ideas to work with the plastic gun controller in gun survivor 2 we'd be chased by nemesis have to explore zones looking for keys and weapons and even fight alongside ai companions like in the original games comparison in dino stalker you plow through an all too familiar formula of picking up items that extend your time limit and shooting health refills with the only strategy coming from deciding if you want to pick up another weapon or not it's odd that of all the mechanics in dyno crisis one and two the counter system the ddks inventory management and bleeding the only system that's been incorporated into dyno stalker is the combo system from dino crisis 2. and considering there's no shop to spend your points in it feels completely redundant dyno crisis 2 created a wonderful mixture of the fun of chasing high scores and the reward of buying upgrades and i can't believe that something similar wasn't attempted here it's disappointing because the idea of blending real-time first-person combat with a more comprehensive home video game experience is an appealing idea it's just not what we have in dino stalker which is a very basic representation of what the genre can be now so far despite my criticisms i'm sure it sounds like a perfectly serviceable albeit unambitious light gun game and from a design perspective that's not wrong unfortunately though dinosaur has a few monstrous problems that will make the experience almost unplayable for some people the first is the actual controller itself namco's gun con which is a typical plastic gun with a set of buttons on the side and a d-pad behind the hammer for games like time crisis and virtua cop it works absolutely perfectly as you'll only use the buttons in menus and then for 99 of the game you're pointing and shooting in dino stalker though you of course walk around freely while aiming and that means having your thumb up behind the gun only the most double jointed of players will be able to find this remotely comfortable and it means playing dino stalker for anything other than extremely short bursts is genuinely an exercise in physical endurance luckily we do have the choice to change controls to a two controller setup where you control movement with a dual shock in your left hand and aim the gunk on in your right but this is hardly ideal when the whole point of this genre is supposed to make you feel like an ice cool dead eye you can of course opt to play only with the dual shock in a more traditional fps setup but the aiming feels extremely off with no way to adjust the sensitivity the problem is as the alternatives involve either losing your thumb or holding two controllers at once this was how i opted to approach the game which brings me on to my next big criticism as you can probably tell the field of view is very tight and when you move around there's quite a dramatic head bob which you can't turn off when combined with the free turning and dodging that you have to do when enemies are spawning all around you and well i found it to be utterly motion sickness inducing it's not something i usually struggle with in fps games but for some reason in dino stalker it was so bad that by the time i'd finished playing the third level i was pretty much ready to spew my guts out and had to have a pretty massive break before i could return to it the whole experience of playing through this game just became a complete slog trying to manage the nausea inducing movement and the hideous control scheme is a price way too high considering that it does almost nothing original from a gameplay perspective and as we're about to find out the story absolutely doesn't make up for it so after fighting his way through the jungle mike wyatt emerges into a clearing where he meets paula who obviously isn't exactly in a chat and after they're interrupted by a few boss fights mike sets out to track her down and try and get some answers about where exactly he is this leads to what might be the only part of the game which i found enjoyable which was this little on rails boat section that works a lot like the hovercraft set piece in dyno crisis 2. as it's all on rails all you have to focus on is shooting and reloading and when the game simplifies itself to this state it's actually fun to play albeit in a very basic sense so after falling down a waterfall mike wakes up in a desert full of all manner of debris and angry dinosaurs turns out he's trapped in a place called hyperspace which is a kind of in-between dimension where things that get lost during time travel end up the mysterious voice on the other end of his radio implores him to find paula and after another boss fight against the same boss no less mike tracks down our mute heroine after their attempt at charades doesn't provide any clues to what's going on paula activates mike's wristwatch computer thing which promptly lets us know the actual plot of the game so we get a brief recap of the noah's ark plan from dino crisis 2. there's a crisis in the past and the dinosaurs had to be moved to the future to protect the natural timeline well as we know things didn't exactly work out but as it turns out the future humans actually had a plan for this they created a powerful computer called mother which could take over the job in the event of the humans being unable to complete their mission only issue is that of course the mother computer malfunctioned and instead of sending the dinosaurs back to the cretaceous era it moved them all into hyperspace which created yet another timeline crisis to make matters even worse in order to protect the creatures mother took dna from all the strongest dinosaurs and created trinity a unique creature that would act as a central nervousness for the beasts coordinating their survival efforts and ensuring that hyperspace would be their domain the voice explaining all this on the other end of the radio reveals himself to be none other than dylan morton our hero from dyno crisis 2 who sounds very much alive and a lot more eloquent and educated than the barbarian we spent time with so mike and paula set out to meet up with him but instead end up being chased by trinity and the horde of dinosaurs that it controls they leap into a nearby jeep and we get another surprisingly playable on rail section but all we have to do is shoot dinosaurs and don't need to worry about the sickness-inducing movement we even get what looks like it might be another dino crisis 2 throwback as part way into the level triceratops bursts out to give chase but weirdly instead of blasting it while it tries to ram the car it instead runs through barrels which are then somehow propelled towards you considering this is all taking place at about 70 miles per hour i have no idea how the triceratops is actually doing this and it just makes the whole scene look ridiculous eventually our protagonist crashed their jeep while gunning it through the jungle and was thrown immediately into a boss fight with trinity now call me basic but dynacrisis one and two really understood that when it comes to dinosaurs size really does matter and every single big boss encounter involved going head to head with some sort of monstrously large lizard trinity by comparison is just such a strange design it's so small and it darts around hiding from you which makes it far more of an annoyance to kill rather than feeling like something genuinely threatening it's just another perplexing design choice as almost every other boss fight in this game is suitably imposing except for the big named antagonist that the characters actually spend time talking about anyway with the beast dead dylan finally appears but only as a hologram apparently he's trapped in the far future and needs mike to help paula debug the mother computer which will finally send all the dinosaurs back to the cretaceous period and solve the timeline crisis for good mike is obviously still baffled by all this and wants to know why he has to do any of it well according to dylan paula couldn't carry out the mission on her own so he needed to find someone that could bring some extra firepower only thing was he felt guilty taking someone when the mission could easily lead to their death so he chose someone who was about to die anyway and seeing as mike was about to be shot to pieces it made perfect sense except it doesn't really make perfect sense at all and leaves me with far more questions than it resolves for starters i really don't understand dylan's character despite looking exactly like how he did in the last game even sporting the same military gear his personality is completely different and instead of the brash soldier that we spent time with he's now a sort of calm and collected super genius while we know eventually dylan will become the superintendent of the noah's ark plan it was implied that this was something that took place over the course of a great many years with him appearing as a much older man in the finale of diner crisis 2. this change for dino stalker just makes him feel like a completely different character and we're robbed of seeing the development that would have made the twist so interesting in addition to this i really don't understand dylan's seemingly godlike control over time travel we never get an explanation as to why he can't just enter hyperspace himself and fix the mother computer why the best man he could come up with was to kidnap a world war ii pilot clearly they can leave the future as paul is in this dimension but i have no idea why she'd be the one to carry out the mission and not the guy with the long track record of killing dinosaurs given dylan is clearly younger than the old dylan who was still trapped in the future this story should resolve with the plan failing in order to not contradict the story of dino crisis 2 but surprise surprise that doesn't happen and we're left with a complete paradox that doesn't really provide a satisfying conclusion to the cliffhanger from the last game so the need to travel into the crater of a nearby volcano in order to reboot the mother computer and of course this involves fighting one last boss now if you needed any more evidence about dinosaurs gameplay mediocrity it's right here in the final fight which i really just don't understand the thought process behind firstly i have no idea why the final fight wasn't against trinity and instead for some reason we're just fighting the t-rex again making it the second time that the games reskinned a boss instead of designing something new it's also just the most frustrating thing to actually play through the arena is so dark which makes finding your bearings extremely hard and as the t-rex is super quick and also has incredible range on its bike the fight is practically impossible without using a few resuscitations it feels like one of those arcade final bosses that's designed to eat up quarters but as it was never released in the arcade i've got no idea what the point of having such a huge roadblock right at the end of the game was if you do manage to beat it everything ends with my compuler stepping inside the computer and paula tapping away on the keyboard which presumably sends all the dinosaurs back to their proper time and restores hyperspace we'll have to assume that though as none of this is actually ever shown instead of that actual payoff we get an incredibly strange cutscene where for some reason mike has to be sent back in time to die and him and paula share a final embrace apparently having fallen deeply in love despite her not being able to speak and them only having known each other for about four hours after he's sent back paula decides she's going to meddle with time a little more and uses the mother computer to teleport away all of the bullets that would have killed mike leaving him to live out the rest of his life and only suffering from the occasional dinosaur related ptsd flashback the whole plot really is just emblematic of the story issues that this series has been cursed with since we discovered the noah's ark plan back in diner crisis 2. for time travel plots to work you need to have really clear rules about what's possible and what isn't a dino crisis is just completely unconcerned with doing this it worked back in donor crisis one because third energy was seen as something too dangerous to tamper with and the dinosaurs were the effect of this meddling since then we've had time traveling soldiers time traveling zookeepers a computer that puts dinosaurs into an alternative dimension and characters that can seemingly edit the past at will when we don't understand the rules it's hard to feel invested in the solutions we end up left with far more questions than the plot can ever answer why does mike have to go home when paula can tamper with the past at any time why is dylan trapped in the future but paula isn't and just what the hell is going on with regina and why wouldn't she be the one that dylan pulls into hyperspace amazingly this plot was actually penned by tsujimura and while there's no concrete evidence i'd be absolutely unsurprised to find out that content had been once again cut from his original version when you consider that the game had a tiny budget it's easy to imagine that the capcom executives were expecting time crisis with dinosaurs and not a dense time travel thriller designed to conclude the story from a full console game if we're being brutally honest it's just not a very good game as a light gun shooter it lacks a lot of the style and fast pace that makes games like time crisis so fun and as a follow-up to dynacrysis 2 well it's in an extremely weird place where huge amounts of the story are related to the narrative of that previous game but almost entirely in unsatisfying and tangential ways when it released much like the other games in the gun survivor franchise it was met with very negative reviews and currently has a 50 out of 100 on metacritic making it the worst performing game in both of the series it belongs to amazingly this wasn't the end for gun survivor though for the next game in the series they adopted a different approach and it was outsourced to cavea a newly formed video game company led by a young rebel developer called yokotaro he'd obviously go on to produce great things with the drakengard and near series but he gets a brief cameo in this video for finally managing to put together a game that blended adventure exploration with light gun mechanics in 2003 caviar put out resident evil dead aim which while not a perfect game finally sees the design philosophy behind dino stalker executed in a way that actually works nausea inducing first person were swapped out for third person and this little change makes the whole game actually feel like a resident evil game by comparison most people don't even realize that dino stalker was a dino crisis game and after having experienced it myself i think it's probably best if it remains that way in early 2003 another strange project was released by capcom dino crisis dungeon in chaos a java game for mobile phones that took the dungeon crawling of games like ultima underworld and blended it with the dino horror of the playstation games the plot once again concerns a rogue nation performing experiments on third energy and we play the role of a special agent sent to shut down their reactor and save the world all while under attack by a host of reptilian dangers each level is its own randomly generated maze and you need to explore the hallways killing all of the dinosaurs before you can advance what's particularly odd is that you can really feel the influence of turn-based dungeon crawlers on dungeon in crisis as you can't see any of the enemies and all combat takes place in this sort of pseudo battle screen where you have to use the numpad to shoot enemies and use special moves outside of hunting for dinosaurs and collecting optional health and ammo pickups there isn't really much else to say about this game it's an early 2000s java tile which are notoriously simplistic and just like with dino stalker i wouldn't be surprised if even hardcore fans of the series had no idea that this existed what people desperately wanted was a true console sequel to dino crisis 2 and no amount of spin-offs were going to satisfy fans desperate to see a real conclusion to the cliffhanger we were left with much like with every other main entry in this video dynacrisis 3 begins life with shinji mikami although this time in a much less direct way while capcom had been on one of the greatest hot streaks of all time mikami was not completely satisfied and a lot of this had to do with the hardware that they were developing for and the huge difficulty that capcom's teams had with the playstation 2. in simple terms the playstation 2 was notoriously complicated to develop for and while sony's marketing advertised the power of the emotion engine cpu the reality was that it was backed up by a host of secondary chips which all ran at the same time and made maximizing the power of the console very tricky this complexity drew a lot of critics and the most vocal was our shinji mikami he loudly and publicly criticized sony for providing capcom with poor quality dev kits over complicated instruction manuals and then for refusing to provide help when they needed it this frustration eventually became so pronounced that capcom signed the infamous capcom 5 deal with nintendo agreeing to develop four new ips and the resident evil series exclusively on the gamecube now obviously we all know how this worked out the gamecube flopped and capcom eventually ported everything over to the ps2 unable to resist the huge player base but it's in this environment that the development of dyno crisis 3 began in 2002 microsoft had released the xbox a big money competitor to the ps2 and were desperate for exclusives to try and break the japanese market where sony and nintendo already had massive presence capcom wanted to get something out in order to take advantage of what they saw as a fantastic new console and dino crisis was seen as the perfect franchise to lure fans in big enough that it would get attention but not so big that they'd be taking a financial risk by making it an exclusive with mikami hard at work on resident evil remake and then resident evil 4 immediately after hiroyoki kobayashi was promoted to siri's executive and just like with dino crisis 2 kobayashi wanted to use this new title as a way of blooding up-and-coming talents at capcom directing duties were given to tatsuro oyama and hiroyuki maruhama who only had a sole directing credit between them 1997's deep fear on the sega saturn luckily for them the team wasn't devoid of experience as kobayashi would be producing and tsujimura returned once again to write a crazed plot of time travelling dino horror given how dino crisis 2 had begun in almost identical fashion there was little reason to be concerned and development went smoothly unfortunately in september 2001 the united states was rocked by the twin tower terror attacks and as with many other video games including ones we've covered on this channel before dynacrisis 3 was massively affected by this horrific change in atmosphere around the globe originally dynacrisis 3 had been set to take place in a sprawling urban environment that had been taken over by dinosaurs that were pouring through tears in the fabric of space-time other than a single screenshot that was shown at the 2001 xbox conference there isn't a huge amount of information available about this version but we do know that it was due to feature ai companions and would have most likely directly followed on from dyno crisis 2. with the timeline tears a consequence of the noah's ark plan going wrong sadly though it was felt by the development team that this setting really wasn't appropriate given news stations were broadcasting pictures of a devastated new york all around the world and they agreed to totally change the game taking a different approach that definitely wouldn't cause any upset well this new approach was about as different as is physically possible and in an interview with gamespot in 2003 kobayashi announced that dino crisis 3 would now be set in space the reason for such a large change well he didn't really give one stating that the game didn't even have any influences other than the team wanting to challenge themselves in all honesty it's a strange development cycle to try and write about as we'll soon discover along with the complete change of setting there are so many odd design decisions that went into the creation of this game and it's just so hard to find out what actually drove any of them was it an experience experimentation gone wrong it's certainly not clear from the few development interviews we do have which really leaves us no other option but to dive into the game and work out for ourselves if you've heard anything about dynamic crisis 3 before it's likely to do with this absolutely awful reputation whether it's in magazine articles website retrospectives or youtube videos it's pretty much universally accepted that this is a very bad game and it's 51 out of 100 critics score and 3.6 user score on metacritic would indicate that it's not just the commentaria driving this opinion this is an objectively poor game now i'm not here to provide an iconoclastic reappraisal that proves all of these takes are wrong but i do want to start things off by saying i'm going to be really trying to give this game a fair shot i'd never played it before and purposefully avoided any other reviews or videos in order to give myself as unbiased a take as possible and i was surprised to find that once i did dive into them a lot of the criticisms are actually really trite complaining about the same things everybody else does and not really judging the game on its actual merits and faults so while i'm not here to tell you it's amazing i am here to give you the truth dynacrisis 3 is a frustrating and strangely designed experience offering almost nothing for fans of the original two games but it's also got some interesting ideas that are worth discussing and i don't think it quite deserves the reputation it has as the mistake that killed the franchise as was intended by the new development team dynacrisis 3 presents a complete break from the grounded science fiction of dino crisis 1 and 2. and instead takes us into the far future into a world of space opera influenced astro horror set in the year 2548 a special operations and reconnaissance ship has been sent to the planet jupiter to investigate the sudden appearance of the once lost colony ship the ozymandias it hasn't been seen or heard from for almost 300 years but has now suddenly reappeared in the solar system eerily floating in orbit unresponsive to any communication as the special operations team sets out to board the ghost ship suddenly the silence is broken as the ozymandias opens fire destroying the safer cruiser before turning its guns on the shuttle the majority of the team is either outright killed or flung into the depths of space and we find ourselves with a trio of survivors patrick sonja and mccoy who managed to get on board the ship and begin to investigate what exactly is going on while mccoy doesn't last all that long and within moments of the game getting inside the hold he snapped up between the jaws of a huge mutant dinosaur pallid and grey with a hide full of holes revealing the sinewy innards beneath obviously this is terrifying but salvation arrives in an equally disgusting form from the upper section of the hold pause these horrifying dino maggots which flood over the monster burrowing into its skin and devouring it from the inside out a quivering mass of flesh lies before patrick and sonja before the maggots burst out again and head straight for our protagonists now i've seen so many trite complaints about how absurd this dinosaur space setting is and it's something that i just can't get my head around this whole sequence the mystery of the ozymandias its destruction of the special operation ship and these horrific looking dinosaur monsters tearing through each other it's the perfect sequence of space horror with our characters isolated away from help and trapped with inhuman beasts i think the majority of the fan dislike actually stems from the fact that we're not playing as regina and we're also clearly not going to be getting a resolution to that cliffhanger from the end of dino crisis 2. now this is a criticism i can understand as it is odd to see a dino crisis game without our red-headed heroine and for time travel and third energy to not really be playing a large part in the story in that respect it definitely doesn't feel like a dino crisis narrative but from a tonal point of view there's a big dose of isolation vulnerability and mystery which are all hallmarks of the series the problem is that huge number three on the box art if that wasn't there implying it was a follow-up to dino crisis 2 and was instead called dino crisis resurrection or something else to distinguish it from the last two games i really doubt this setting and style would have been such a big problem despite the huge narrative break the overall structure of the game is actually really rooted in these two earlier dyno crisis titles and the third game really feels like an attempt to blend the standout elements both into a single package the whole game takes place in a single setting the ozimandius and we spend our time exploring its hallways unlocking doors and slowly progressing across the ship with backtracking and puzzle solving both playing a big part in this respect you can really feel the influence of classic survival horror games like dino crisis one you'll be constantly checking your resources referencing the map and tracing routes around a large singular space that being said the combat is kind of like a hyper-charged version of dyno crisis 2. you need to dodge enemy attacks which come thick and fast and ammo conservation is far less important than quick reflexes similarly it uses the exact same combo system where longer kill streaks reward higher points which can then be spent at save points to upgrade your kit and buy health and ammo you might think these two different faces of dyno crysis 3 seem contradictory but honestly since the game came out we've had a flood of horror titles that managed to pair high-intensity action with an atmosphere of genuine dread titles like resident evil 4 and the evil within both show that this could be done well modona crisis 3 never hits anything remotely like those heights it does show that kobayashi and his team weren't insane to try and make it happen in fact in a lot of ways the game reminds me of a kind of badly made dead space with sections of isolation and exploration on an abandoned spaceship punctuated by adrenaline pumping moments of action where you're fighting for your life again dyna crysis 3 isn't a patch on visceral's masterpiece but the fact that better developers would attempt similar things really highlights that this game isn't a complete lost cause so the main objective once patrick escapes the dino maggot horde is to get to the main bridge and see if he can work out who's controlling the ship and this lengthy section introduces all of dino crisis 3's notorious mechanics the single biggest difference between this game and its forebears is that on the a button we now have a pretty large jump and navigating around the osmandius requires a pretty surprising amount of platforming now before anyone starts to panic by platforming i don't mean lengthy super mario style gauntlets of reaction based jumping as instead dyno crisis 3 takes huge influence from metroid prime's more slow-paced style of leaping around as the ship is split into distinct rooms jumping tends to happen in short bursts where you're either solving a quick puzzle or getting over to a door thanks to this the whole game has a lot more verticality than we've ever seen before and as everything is returned to full 3d you really have to consider a full 360 degree environment when you're working out where to go obviously positioning jumps in a third person 3d game is not something that usually screams player enjoyment and so to balance this out patrick and his companions have a jet pack that can be used super mario sunshine style to slow your descent and correct for an over or undershot leap having the jetpack burst into life on the squeeze of the right trigger has a real tactile satisfaction to it as you can use it while running to give yourself a little boost it's something you'll be constantly using and it really does feel like quite a well incorporated part of the game similarly another new idea that works surprisingly well is the wasps which replace the sub weapons from dino crisis 2 as your secondary mode of doing damage they're effectively a stock of drones that you can activate on the y button and each have a unique purpose in combat the first we unlock is the tempest which homes in on an enemy and hits them with a burst of machine gun fire and later will have access to the juggernaut which produces a stun and the road which doesn't home in but explodes doing massive damage you can only have one equipped at a time but can send out up to five and again it's surprisingly satisfying to send out a swarm of tempests or work out which one suits the enemy that you're facing when all these mechanics are working together you can see that dyno crysis 3 legitimately has potential it has a cool horror sci-fi setting and when you're jetpacking out the way of attacks and using drones to wipe out enemies it can really feel quite fun the issue is that dino crisis 3 is marred by a few major issues that really ruin the game's flow and then on top of that it has a ton of smaller problems that just consistently prevent you from ever having a good time playing it every time what feels like an enjoyable game might be starting another problem rears its head and reminds you of that brutal 51 out of 100 metacritic score the biggest issue by far and easily the most criticized part of dinan crysis 3 is its camera which as i'm sure you've been able to tell from the footage so far is absolutely awful for some reason and there is no official word as to why this was done the development team opted to keep the fixed camera angles from the previous games despite the game ditching tank controls and adopting action platforming as its main form of gameplay now it's not a given that these two things are incompatible as there are plenty of games that go for a fast-paced style while also taking away control of the camera god of war 1 is probably the most famous example but the way the two teams have implemented their respective cameras couldn't be more different where god of war uses big wide shots that let you take in the whole area or panning cinematic shots in moments of inaction dino crisis 3 completely botches almost every single angle and puts together what can only be described as one of the most obstructive video game cameras of all time in any given room there might be upwards of five or six different angles that all flick instantly between each other as you move around and as the movement is based on player perspective you can end up completely disorientated and running in seemingly random directions thanks to the skittish camera what takes this from frustrating to borderline game ruining is that the vast majority of the camera angles seem to be focused around facing patrick front on rather than showing the room that we're entering this leads to a huge amount of large areas that are impossible to see properly because the camera is literally pointing in the wrong direction facing where we've come from rather than where we're going in hallways it looks ridiculous but in wide open spaces it's utterly debilitating now one of the biggest complaints i've seen in most videos is that this makes almost all of the platforming impossible and while that is a criticism that makes sense on paper i think in practice it isn't actually all that bad the game has a first person mode and i think you're supposed to use this to survey each room and then use the jetpack to help you make the jumps outside of a few specific rooms where a combination of enemies and moving platforms can become pretty obnoxious i never actually felt like the platforming was all that bad in fact it often reminded me of the ps1 tomb raider games where you'd similarly have to complete some quite tricky platforming sequences without being able to control the camera and with only a first-person mode to assess the distances now obviously our expectations of third person platforming have come quite a ways since tomb raider and while dyno crisis 3 certainly doesn't feel good it's definitely not unplayable where we edge into that territory is in the combat which despite the cool jet pack and sci-fi drones is pretty relentlessly awful the problem is an obvious one with the camera almost exclusively aimed at patrick you can't actually see any of the enemies you're supposed to be fighting and as all of the space raptors attack with either ranged blasts of electricity or with a huge charge that you're supposed to dodge well you can see how this might be somewhat of an issue almost as if they knew the camera wasn't functional in these situations all the guns work via an auto-aim unfortunately this means when you aren't being brutalized by attacks that you couldn't possibly see coming you're just firing off screen clueless about what you're hitting or if you're even hitting it it also means that you can't control what patrick is aiming at meaning there's no way to get him to attack the charging dinosaur and not the tiny laser drone on the other side of the room it's not so much of an issue in standard combat where you need to kill everything anyway but in boss fights where you can't get patrick to hit a weak point instead of all the endlessly spawning trash well it makes it feel like the game wasn't even play tested if it all sounds frustrating as hell well it absolutely is and things get even worse when you factor in the game's ridiculously overtuned damage numbers which i'm sure would make from software developers feel guilty you die in about three hits from a basic raptor and considering your face four or five at a time and in packs of upwards of 20 it is physically impossible to avoid dying when the camera doesn't give you the slightest chance to save yourself the combat from minute one is brutally difficult and just offers you absolutely no quarter you're limited on how many healing items you can carry and for some goddamn reason you have a cap on how many points you can collect before you have to spend them at the shop which artificially punishes you for actually managing to survive any combat and limits how much reward you get for overcoming the game's obstacles i'm never usually one for this but if you do for some reason want to actually experience dino crisis 3. i heavily recommend putting it on easy mode which still presents quite a challenge but doesn't feel as brutally unfair the main enemy here is the camera so giving yourself every advantage is highly advised so on the way to the bridge patrick runs into captain jacob rainshaw the leader of the special operations team who's fortunately also survived and is happy to provide a bit of direction to our aimless wandering as far as he can tell there's nobody on the ship other than the dinosaur monsters and despite the ship's mother computer being fully functional it's not answering any of his questions or providing any information the fact that the osmandias has a mother computer really is the extent of dyna crisis three's links to the previous games the ship is also powered by a third energy reactor and there's a single file that references a professor dylan morton but these don't really make it feel like a cohesive part of the series in fact i'd say their use of the mega genius dylan character from dino stalker who in this universe apparently also invented space travel it's probably the worst part they could have chosen to build on anyway so the main goal at this point is still to get to the bridge and to do so we need to rearrange the layout of the osmandius you see the ship functions like a transformer moving parts around to allow for different functions to take place or to protect sections during space travel apparently it was influenced by the 1984 film sayonara jupiter which is set entirely on the minerva base a transforming space station orbiting the gas giant which was popular in the capcom offices this genuinely is a really cool concept and it's integrated into the survival horror style exploration in a clever way as the ship has obviously been through some sort of crisis it's been rearranged to lock off certain sections and the vast majority of the puzzling comes from finding the required items to be able to transform the ship and allow forward progress in these early sections it tends to be as simple as activating a control panel watching a cool little transformation cutscene and then progressing through the newly opened paths but later in the game they actually get quite creative with this mechanic you'll be moving multiple parts around at once manipulating the ship like a game of tetris there are parts we need to backtrack with new equipment to change up areas you've already transformed it's a really well executed take on that traditional key system making the whole game feel like one big dungeon and actually providing a thematic reason for our progress to be gated from a design perspective dyno crisis 3 does so few things right but this is absolutely its best feature not enough to save the entire experience but definitely worth giving some credit so after a spot of transforming and trying not to be ripped apart by hammerhead dinosaurs patrick sonya and jacob eventually reached the main bridge where as his series tradition a hologram lets us know what exactly is going on around a hundred days after the osmandius left earth it was hit by a huge blast of cosmic radiation most of the crew were terminally affected by this and as the medical team couldn't work out a way to deal with this sickness the colonists and mission were doomed the captain in a moment of desperation programmed the mother computer to take the dna of the colonists and try to recreate human life in order for the colonization mission to still succeed patrick and the captain are obviously dubious about the chance of this actually happening but before they can delve any further into this mystery the computer alerts them to a human life sign further inside the ship patrick heads off to investigate and the captain and sonia stay behind to try and work out exactly what mother has been doing for 300 years once again it seems like most reviews criticized the narrative for being overly silly and that makes me wonder if they even played dino crisis 2 at all all sci-fi horror games tend to have pretty out their plots by their very nature and i actually think the concept of the unexpected dangers of space spoiling a colonization mission and our characters investigating what happened is quite intriguing the issue that really ruins the narrative side isn't its premise but simply just that it's utterly obvious where the plot is going from the minute the mystery is presented to us it's so clear that the space dinosaurs are mother's failed attempts at creating human life and for the game's entire plot to revolve around our main character stumbling around this obvious conclusion is really pretty annoying bafflingly this actually happens a second time with a different mystery after heading off to investigate the mysterious life sign patrick discovers a terrified young girl karen who chases through the ship and eventually corners in her quarters she's obviously terrified and has no idea what's going on so patrick speculates that she must have been in cryogenic sleep waking up once they boarded the ship she claims that mother had told her to stay away from any other humans as they were dangerous and patrick being the gentle soul that he is wins her trust by opening up about his dead sister that apparently looked exactly like her i think the mystery about karen's role in the plot is supposed to be a big motivating driver for the player but it's just painfully obvious that she's mother's successful human experiment as if her conversations with mother despite supposedly being in cryogenic sleep weren't enough of a clue moments before we enter her quarters we find a crew log that talks about how one of the colonists was a famous scientist that had been working on synthetic human prototypes it's just absurd how clear the direction of the plot is and when karen dies and then later mysteriously reappears clueless about her death well it makes sonya and patrick's confusion just seem ridiculous i'll give it to the critics there this element of the story absolutely is very silly so another mechanic that we're required to deal with is that mother will constantly trap patrick in situations that require us to take control of sonja and come to his rescue sonia plays exactly the same as patrick with a jetpack to dodge and jump and equally as much difficulty actually seeing where you're supposed to be going what makes these sections far worse is that despite only controlling her for about 45 minutes across the entire game she has her own set of upgrades meaning she's always weaker than patrick this means you're thrown into these annoying parts where you either need to grind enough to buy a health upgrade which you won't then use for the rest of the game aura forced to try and run past every enemy with her sections becoming progressively harder as the game goes on the only fresh element they do introduce is the game's alternative movement mode which comes up whenever a character enters a zero g environment as sonya you'll often need to travel around the outside of the ship in order to save patrick and then later on when mother is trying to recapture our heroes she'll turn off the gravity in various sections of the ship meaning patrick gets to float around as well now the sonia sections are pretty terrible for some reason the environment's been designed so you're essentially traveling along corridors with open space on the bottom of the room i think they were supposed to function as a little assault course but you can easily fly over every obstacle which just means they're over in the blink of an eye the patrick zero g sections however they are much better the middle of the game involves traveling around the central section of the ship which is called the shaft section and it's pretty notorious for being difficult as balls thanks to all the platforming you need to do in order to progress upwards well once you're at the top you can transform the ship and the whole shaft section is flipped onto his side which you now traverse in zero g it's actually odd how well this works it almost reminds me of the inverted castle in symphony of the night and just like in that game it's not so much that the levels are beautifully designed to work from different directions but more that it's a really novel experience to play through those same areas again from a completely different perspective now honestly by this point after i'd gained a few upgrades and gotten used to the first person mode to assess my surroundings i'd say that i was almost despite the game's best efforts having a good time and for a brief moment that vision of being able to tell you that this is actually an enjoyable game felt within reach unfortunately as is the case for almost every game in the dyno crisis series the back end is extremely unpleasant and really what little positivity i had quickly drained away during a boss fight captain jacobs is sadly killed while trying to buy time for our gang to get away and this prompts patrick to finally decide he's had enough of all this nonsense and head off to deactivate mother it all feels like it's building to a conclusion until you actually get to the mother control room and have your progress stopped by a completely arbitrary force field that requires you to backtrack to the first zone of the game it is just the worst instance of backtracking i've ever seen a completely unnecessary objective that only exists to extend the run time and cuts off any momentum that the plot had been building this section was also where most of my patients ran out for the small little annoyances that the game is full of as we've got to traverse across the entire game it's almost impossible to do it based solely on your memory of the game's locations so you need to reference the in-game map in order to work out where to go and it is utterly torturous to use because of the game's verticality it's extremely hard to understand how rooms actually link together and in certain parts of the ship it's not even clear where some rooms end and others begin as if that wasn't hard enough for some god forsaken reason the map's controls are inverted which makes absolutely no sense as none of the rest of the game is in the early sections of the game where objectives don't take too long to resolve you simply don't need to use it but in these huge late-game areas once you're lost or don't know where to go oh you're just screwed another element that i became so tired of is the enforced combat encounters thanks to mother trying to kill us she'll randomly lock down rooms of the ship and send in hordes of dinosaurs with you only able to progress if you kill them all from a narrative perspective this doesn't make a lick of sense as i have no idea why mother would arbitrarily stop sending in dinosaurs and from a gameplay perspective it just destroys the pacing asking you to kill upwards of 20 enemies before you can move on when you're desperate to just find the items you need so you can finally make some progress running into one of these rooms where you just spam your jet pack and fire aimlessly off screen hoping not to die it's just the worst feeling in the world so if you have the patience to sit through the enormous game wide back track you'll be able to deactivate the force field and progress into the game's final moments which really function more like a glorified boss rush up until this point i'd have probably said that the boss fights are the only moments where the combat feels remotely functional as fighting a single enemy means you can roughly guess where it is even if you can't see it although the camera angles you have to deal with are still pretty awful unfortunately this all comes crashing down near the end of the game and the last bosses are some of the worst i've ever seen in a third person action title after turning off the force field we're thrust into a fight against the mia placidus which is an aquatic beast that conveniently appears after the rumor in randomly fills with water i think the idea is that it swims around beneath you you have to jump around on platforms making sure you're not knocked into the water i say i think this is the idea because what i did was simply jump over to the exit and leave i have no idea if this is intentional and given the boss has a health bar i'm gonna say that it isn't but it makes this the most hilariously short fight in the entire game pretty soon we're in the mother control room fighting the aquatic monster again although this time the mechanics are even weirder it races around the room leaping out of the water to do this jet attack other than that as long as you stay well away from it it can't do any damage to you the whole fight is just an exercise in staying away from the boss and slowly chipping away at its massive health ball immediately after this we're thrown into a fight against mother itself and all this consists of is destroying these flying tablets for some reason this boss doesn't have a health bar and as the tablets respawn it's not exactly clear what you're supposed to be doing or if destroying these flying bricks even does anything while all this has been playing out mother reveals her grand plan to us which surprise surprise is that the karen units were the product of her experiments with human and dinosaur dna and that all the monsters on the ship are failed experiments required to get there now i am not a scientist and anything but a super intelligent space computer but i really don't understand why making a giant aquatic water monster or a two-headed electricity beast would be steps on the way towards making little robot girls much less why she needs to make the thousands of hammerhead raptors that we fought across the ship patrick's reaction to this whole situation is also equally perplexing if you remember he swore to protect karen because she looks like his sister and spends the whole game including her in their escape efforts well when mother reveals that the karen units actually include dinosaur dna patrick suddenly does a 180 and starts calling them monsters who will never be human it's like the plot can't decide if it wants to be a philosophical exploration of who or what is human or a schlocky monster flick set in space and it means we get a half-baked mixture of both with patrick flip-flopping from sappy savior to vengeful human supremacist without any warning so with mother destroyed the ship goes into meltdown activating the self-destruct sequence and forcing our heroes to race over to the only escape pod on the ship this is pretty typical for survival horror games and usually means you're right at the end of your journey instead of following this tried-and-true formula dino crysis 3 instead takes its own route and asks you to beat three more boss fights before we can see patrick and sonia to safety the first is the cerberei which is a two-headed electrically charged gigantosaurus that somehow snuck up behind our heroes just like with the mia placidus you don't actually have to do any fighting here despite the boss having a health bar and taking damage from your weapons all you need to do is run away but you'd be forgiven for not knowing that given the game presents it like it's a stray fight either kill the beast or make it to the bottom of this room and we get a heart-wrenching scene where karen sacrifices herself to save patrick and sonya patrick who seems to have cooled off on her quite a bit now just sort of wistfully looks down after and then they head off and never mention her again we then have to activate a final transformation which will allow patrick and sonia to get to the shuttle bay and for some reason we have to fight another boss before we can start this process given this is potentially your fourth fight in a row and you're likely low on health packs and wasps it makes this whole section a huge slog of trying to keep distance and chipping away with your bass gun which does almost negligible damage the fact that it's not even a new design and it's just another fight against another australis makes this all the worse i have no idea what school or design made them think this was what the game needed at this point once the time is actually on screen we need to take control of sonya and go and activate the other half of the transformation sequence and this final room might be the most [ __ ] thing i've seen in any game all of the platforming that we've previously done has worked around that process of first person scanning the room and then carefully and slowly jumping to the platforms well in this room that entirely breaks down as we have to move like lightning because of the timer and there is infinitely respawning enemies that can hit you off of any of the platforms it is utterly torturous to play through and were it not for the emulator i was using having saved states i seriously don't think i would have ever been able to make it through this point once patrick and sonja get on the escape shuttle things finally lurch to a conclusion as the osmandius blows up and they jet back to earth having made their escape except what's this it's the cerbury from earlier which has somehow made it out of the depths of the ship made it to the shuttle before patrick and sonja and then clung on while it traveled through space away from a huge explosion sonia claiming that they'll never make it with that thing on top despite having just made it sends patrick up to do away with the final final boss annoyingly this all takes place in zero g so you have to hover up and down to avoid attacks and generally it just feels like a pretty awful way to end the game once the monster's on about a quarter health sonja sends up the final wasp and patrick gets inside of it and blows the monster away once and for all much like almost everything else in the game it's just strange it doesn't really make any sense why is this wasp a weird spaceship when all the others are little drones where does sonya get it from and why couldn't it have been used earlier and how the [ __ ] does a monster with no arms hold on to a ship that's traveling at a thousand miles an hour anyway with this cerb ride dead the two head back to earth and the credits roll placing me in an elite group of people who have actually finished this monstrosity so yeah dino crisis is a pretty terrible game although like i said at the top of this section of the video i think it's important to understand why exactly it's so bad instead of just repeating the same old criticisms anyone can see that the camera and the movement system absolutely don't work together in the slightest but really that's down to a matter of direction rather than these two elements naturally not working if the camera was pulled right back to give us a wide view of the areas we fight in i could see dynacrisis 3 actually being pretty fun the auto aim would give it an almost twin stick shooter feel and as the dodge and wasps both feel great to use i think this tiny change would really improve a huge portion of the game as for the platforming and exploration well this is where i get to be a contrarian because i really don't think it's all that bad and if you can get your head around carefully scanning rooms in first person before you set out it's sort of playable in that old school ps1 third person adventure game way given its reputation and its awful critical reception i went in anticipating something unplayable something truly awful but instead what i found was a game that i think has a lot of potential that's just been undone by some really stupid design decisions as dead space would show five years later this combination of high intensity action and sci-fi horror could work really well and it's a real shame that daniel crysis 3 wasn't able to pull together the pieces and bring us that combination much sooner now obviously the awful critical reception massively impacted dino crisis 3 sales numbers an initial report whether it grossly underperformed against capcom's expectations this was helped in no small part by the xbox's huge failure to make an impact in japan which was the territory that dino crisis had historically done the best in what made this situation even worse was that due to how games were developed for the xbox it was almost impossible for capcom to port the game over to the playstation 2 where they might have recouped some of the investment and been able to iron out the game's flaws unlike capcom's failed gamecube exclusives which could easily be shifted over to sony's platform dyno crysis 3 was sealed away trapped on a system that his fans didn't own and unable to be fixed with a much needed re-release it means that dyno crisis 3 holds the unfortunate title of the last dyno crisis game ever made and it's also the most maligned title as most fans aren't even aware of dinostalker's existence dynacrisis 3 has become the focus of all of that frustration and it sadly lives on in the form of youtube videos discussing how bad it is a symbol of the death of a once highly successful franchise and so that takes us to the end of our story with dyna crisis transforming from our once best-selling series into one of the most renowned unfinished franchises in video game history it's hard to believe that as a series it existed for less than five years but it made such a huge impact on the video game landscape that calls for its return have always been loud and persistent so before we look at if it could ever return let's try and work out why it's laying dormant for so long it would be so easy to just look at dynacrisis 3 with its awful reception and terrible sales and put it down to capcom not believing the series was viable any longer but that doesn't really tell the whole story a huge part of what drives franchises forward is the passionate creators behind them and the mid-2000s marks the point in capcom's history where a huge amount of the talent from that golden era moved on we've already spoken about how shinji makami hated the playstation 2 and was personally involved in capcom backing both the gamecube and xbox with its releases which led to resident evil 4 releasing in 2005 as a gamecube exclusive the game was an immediate hit with critics widely being praised as one of the finest games ever made but thanks to the gamecube's tiny install base the game sold terribly and capcom's board just couldn't take it anymore without mikami's approval they greenlit a port to the playstation 2 breaking that exclusivity agreement with nintendo despite the ps2 port of resident evil 4 being a huge success selling 2 million copies in its first 6 months mikami was utterly incensed he quit capcom with immediate effect and took a huge amount of their talent with him forming clover studios and going on to release masterpiece games like beautiful joe godhand and akami it meant that the creator of dyno crisis and his biggest advocate was no longer at the studio that held the ip and with shun takumi completely absorbed with the ace attorney series mikami's departure left only kobayashi and tsujimura as executives that might be interested in making another sadly in 2005 tragedy struck and aged only 56 noburu tsujimura suddenly passed away he left an incredible legacy of tv and video game screen writing but with his death dino crisis lost its main storyteller the only person who held the keys to that cliffhanger that everyone was so desperate to see resolved just a few years after dino crisis 3's release there was nobody left at capcom who actually wanted to work on the series and as the company shifted away from survival horror and towards a more western influenced action style that slower paced dino focus series just didn't fit this modern version of capcom if anything i think the fate of the series was really sealed back in the late 90s it always sold well enough to have its own unique fan base but not so massively that capcom would keep it going if developers lost interest without mikami resident evil continued on and without kamiya devil may cry continued on but dino crisis never commanded those huge numbers that made the next installment inevitable it was exactly why it was offered up as an experiment to test the japanese xbox market and as mikami has had ample opportunity to create other dinosaur horror experiences at other companies and hasn't i think the argument that dino crisis might never have seen another game beyond three regardless of how it performed is really quite convincing but even with all that fans are desperate to see another installment in the series and i include myself in that group well on the 9th of march 2022 we all thought that moment had finally come during sony's state of play stream the presentation cut over to a ruined futuristic city where dinosaurs poured out a strange vortex suddenly text appeared capcom presents and then we saw a ragtag group of soldiers and a short-haired red-headed woman working out it couldn't possibly be could it turns out it wasn't this was exo primal an online-only multiplayer horde mode style game that featured overwatch style classes and a mixture of pvp and pve combat the fan response was negative to say the least and capcom even had to put out a statement telling people this game is nothing to do with dino crisis which went down like a lead balloon it was the closest that fans had come to that mythical true sequel and it felt like the rug had been pulled out from under us exo primal may well turn out to be a fantastic game but that mystique of the incomplete we spoke about at the top of the video well it means that nothing but dino crisis will suffice now i don't want to end on a negative note and the developers at capcom have repeatedly said they aren't opposed to working on another dino crisis game so with irrational hope in our hearts let's think about what a potential dino crisis remake or sequel could look like firstly as much as fans are desperate to see regina finally return to the future and save dylan without tsujimura writing the plot i think a direct sequel is pretty unlikely the crazy sci-fi time travel shenanigans were really his baby and i imagine anyone taking over the franchise so long after dino crisis 2 would want to carve out their own take on the series similarly as much as dynacrisis 3 is full of potential that could have been realized with another release or a proper sequel its reputation is such that i'm sure any future dynacrisis games would go straight back to the more grounded survival horror of the first two installments now given the current state of aaa game development and capcom's own history i think that a remake is far more likely than a sequel we've seen resident evil churn out all kinds of remakes over the years and generally speaking they're a fairly high quality despite often not being made by any of the original team so the question really is should they remake dynacrisis 1 or dyno crisis 2. personally i'm inclined to think the first game would be better mainly because i think diana crisis 2 would have to be changed pretty massively in order to modernize its arcade combat systems most of the good ideas have already been iterated on games like devil may cry and bayonetta so i think a remake would have to be quite different and that would sort of miss the point dino crisis won however well that could slip perfectly into that slower paced modern survival horror formula that capcom put together in resident evil 2 remake i think that the system of weighing up combat versus using tranquilizers and being chased through multiple rooms by raptors would work pretty damn well with a remake the back half of the game could be remixed or expanded and they could even turn the choice system into something more like the modern branching paths that we've come to expect from aaa games it's of course all wishful thinking but it shows there is creative space left for the series to move into and given that response to exo primal and just how hyped people get for remakes of any kind i think capcom would be crazy to not capitalize on it it's the sheer power of incompletion mystique in the 19 years since the last dino crisis game the reputation of the series and interest in it has only grown despite the series ending on an incredibly sour note half the games have some of the lowest review scores on their respective platforms but it's not stopped the staying power of the franchise bring up dino crisis and people will know what you're talking about and we can't come to announce that remake well i'm sure that mystique would explode into full-blown hype we can only hope that like other incredible series that eventually re-emerged from the wilderness psychonauts pikmin kid icarus or even capcom's own dragon's dogma the dyno crisis eventually loses that mystique that's made it so interesting and instead of talking about how great it was we can talk about how great it is thanks for watching as always a huge special thanks to my patrons i know in this crazy time we're living through money is more precious than ever so it's a real honor to know you're choosing to use it to support the channel we're fast approaching the point where i might be able to think about doing this full time which would of course mean more videos more often so if you'd like to contribute the link is in the description below but of course if you can't please don't worry about it thanks a lot i'll see you for the next one

Channel: I Finished A Video Game

Views: 1,645,384

Keywords: dino crisis, capcom, resident evil, shinji mikami, silent hill, retrospective gaming, video game review, playstation, sony, long from review, video essay, survival horror, dinosaurs, video game essay, retrospective, video game critique, devil may cry, ace attorney, sweet home, resident evil dead aim, resident evil 2, dino crisis 2, dino crisis 3 gameplay, dino crisis 3 cutscenes, dino crisis remake, resident evil 4, capcom retrospective, video game retrospective

Id: W98ZEZfBtXQ

Length: 178min 32sec (10712 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 16 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/Xusder]

For anyone who wants to play the PC version at it's best, try out the Dino Crisis Classic REbirth patches, which essentially fixes up the original Japanese SourceNext PC version.

It's not that hard to find a copy of the Dino Crisis SourceNext version on the internet that you can find on archive if you search Google. Installation is a little more involved, since you need to mount the ISO to a virtual drive then open and copy the files straight from the disc instead of actually installing it (something that most people don't really know how to do) but since Windows 10 can finally mount ISO files natively it should be a little easier now.

Also, these are the guys that also did the Resident Evil 1/2/3 Classic REbirth patches as well, making those games better to play on the PC as well.

[u/Ok-Influence6062]

I've been on a PS1 kick lately, used to watch my dad play this when I was like 7~8 until I was good enough to finally beat it (still waiting for Regina to come back for those two!) and Duckstation is freaking magic in getting these games to look clean nowadays! Check this out:

https://youtu.be/_Ww9zMFOaeU

[u/[deleted]]

I genuinely wish we would get more Dinosaur shooter type games with horror themes especially. I miss that about my child hood

[u/WilsonX100]

God i played dino crisis 2 so much as a kid but never beat it. Idk how many times i watched that opening cutscene

[u/iliveinablackhole_]

I never played too much of these games when I was younger, I was more into silent hill and resident evil, but I've been saying for a long time there's a serious lack of dinosaur games. It's really bizzare how we had dino crisis and turok in this era but once graphics increased to the point where they could actually make some really cool looking dinosaurs in games, they just stopped making dinosaur games.

Dinosaur survival horror sounds like the coolest shit ever with modern graphics and sound.