Street Fighter X Tekken

Good news dinosaurs and fighting games fans. Looks like Street Fighter X Tekken has a stage set in what superficially resembles Jurassic Park.


Alex has been spotted hopping around in the background with his bigger cousins and has been announced as a returning character.


I haven't been this excited about dinosaurs in fighting games since DoA 4 although we suspect this level was only included to get some free publicity from this blog WHICH IS FINE. Looks like A Brachiosaurus in the background there and probably a Tyrannosaurus rex (again!).

Jurassic Park: Naked Dinosaurs Edition

Watch people talk about the new Jurassic Park: The Game.

Hmm it looks like the graphics aren't up to much. For a start all the people look like Timesplitters 2 characters and a bug they need to fix is that the engine is accidentally showing all the dinosaurs without the feathers. Woops! Naked dinosaur action. Come on guys sort it out.

Legendary Wars: T-rex rumble

Some lovely dinosaur flavoured DSiWare from Interplay. I'm sure you've all wanted to "build villages inhabited by up to 20 men" right? WELL NOW YOU CAN!

Errors aplenty here but I'll forgive them just this once. In an alternative universe somewhere, mankind is on the brink of extinction. Fortunately, there's melons to collect, magic to use and Tyrannosaurus various theropods dinosaurs to fight whilst building sausage-fest villages.

Expect a full review......pah sure, right. Look at that massive list on the left.

Primal Carnage

I sink maybe there is a renaissance in ze dinosaur vs man FPS non? Ave a look 'ere at ze primal carnage.


Whatever mystical forces are at play which conspire to bring us more of this dinosaurs versus gunny men appear to be in full swing. Although they all seem to have similar source material.

1) Character wearing Robert Muldoon hats despite the limited defensive capacities? CHECK.
2) Big Fences? CHECK.
3) STOMP STOMP REVEAL? CHECK.
4) A character says "Shoot her! Shoooooot her!"? Well not in this trailer but here's hoping.
5) Yeah but Spinosaurus is bigger innit? CHECK.

Also, some feathers would be nice guys. It's a definite fact that most dinosaurs had feathers let's keep up now shall we? Primal Carnage ladies and gentle spoons. Indie developers too which is always nice to see.

Pokemon Black and White

Pokemon Black and White is the next Pokemon game to introduce even more critters to the mix. We've previously blogged the mon inspired by dinosaurs and other prehistoric creatures that are normally revived from fossils and B&W introduces two new 'uns.


Archaeos which, we hope you'll agree is an homage to fossil extroardinaire Archaeopteryx.

And here is Abagoura who, we hope you will agree again is an homage to super fossil turtle Archelon. Two of my favourite palaeontological classics pokemonised. Good work Game Freak.

HEART Spiral Game Studios

HOW QUICK WAS THAT? Following yesterday's ORION prelude post, the guys at Spiral Game Studios have already changed the details of the dinosaurs (and pterosaurs) in their game.

That's what we like to see. A commitment to excellence in dinosaurs and other prehistoric reptiles in games.

More of this please.

ORION Prelude

Check out Spiral Game Studios page for their new game, or a prelude to another game: ORION Prelude? There's even a trailer!!



It isn't a great trailer there are only a maximum of two dinosaurs on screen at any time. I'd be interested to see how they've contrived their dinosaurs into the game because there are jet pack people which could mean time traveling people but then there's also a lot of grass which suggests time traveling dinosaurs? Maybe clones? It could be any of these. Or all of them. Time traveling people travel a little bit back in time and meet time traveling dinosaur clones who have also time traveled. I'd buy that for a dollar.

The website confirms three genera of dinosaurs, Pteranodon, Tyrannosaurus and Velociraptor. Can't say I'm surprised by any of those except Pteranodon but only because they aren't dinosaurs. Also, it should be Tyrannosaurus rex, not Tyrannosaurus Rex. WHEN WILL THESE DEVELOPERS OPEN A BOOK ABOUT DINOSAURS? We've emailed them about it.

1993

Was when Jurassic Park was released. We all pretend that the second and god forbid the third one don't exist but that doesn't stop the IP from getting flogged like a dead horse. RPS have the low down about a new game inspired by Jason-'em-up Heavy Rain.

In other news have some lovely palaeo-themed concept art from Donkey Kong Country Returns. Isn't it wonderful?
In other less interesting news both Fossil Fighters and Combat of Giants: Dinosaurs have sequels coming out in the future. CoD (see what I did there) is even on the 3DS. I was pleasantly surprised by CoD afore however, we know it is going to be middling isn't it? Isn't it hey Ubisoft? Middling to average to par. For shame.

Carnivores: Dinosaur Hunter

One day, descendants of the dinosaurs that invented space travel and set off to explore the universe in the late Cretaceous will come back to survey the planet they evolved on and to check to see how the hairies have done since they left the primitive beasts 65 million years ago.
"Avert your eyes crewmates! They've ruined the birth planet. Look at it! It is sick and dying yet still they rape and pillage it." "We should destroy them with our space dino lasers and wipe their fragile little existence off of the face of the birth world. Give me that order sir and it will be done without a moments hesitation" "Belay that order! Let them revel in their own filth, dirt and dust until they suffocate themselves. Let the last remaining hairy ones look each other in the eye under a scorched sky and realise that they have doomed themselves into extinction. They won't last another century I'd wager.""Sir! Our scans have shown that they... I can't believe it sir! Our scans of their limited technology shows that have desecrated the remains of our ancestors and recreated them in virtual play pens where the hairy ones hunt down our naked ancestors. They depict our glorious lineage as nothing but featherless savages who exist only to endlessly fight each other in desert and jungle type localities.""Why would they simulate the hunting of our poor defenceless brethren? What perverted race creates such sycophantic fantasies? Imagine if they ever created technology that allowed them to escape this hell they have created for themselves? This seals their fate. Ready the space dino laser!"

"One last question sir! Why do we call ourselves dinosaurs? That would make no sense?"

"FIRE!"

Attack of the Verbose Dinosaur

Who says games are all evil? Who says games can't educate? Who says that the shocking pulsating bag of creations that game designers call 'dinosaurs' seem to be accurate according to fifty year old scientific consensus? ME. ME ON THAT LAST ONE. For example, let's take a look at the Xbox Live marketplace title, Attack of the Verbose Dinosaur.
Mother of the mechanisms that lead to the improbable evolution of life as we know it! What is that? Look at that posture? Why is it in a city? Why does it want to affront the street creole that now passes as the language known as English? According to the official trailer this is the last of the dinosaurs and he lived at the bottom of the sea and learned to read from the books that would fall from shipwrecks. He was happy until he got the internet whereupon he decides to seek vengeance on those who abused the beautiful language. Sounds reasonable I suppose. Makes more sense than the plot of Jurassic Park.
Here's the scoop:

Dinosauriness: One incredibly arthritic, overweight internet surfing, book reading, angry marine 'dinosaur' that is some kind of carnosaurian-godzilla love child.

Scientific Accuracy: Unfortunately, the teeth seem to be built into a continuous bar, one on the upper jaw and one on the mandible. Apart from this single slip up this is a pretty accurate recreation 9/10.

Buzz Bonus: I cannot spell dissappear, tommorrow or suprise. I used to be able to but my brain cells are starting to die from playing all those awful Land Before Time GBA games.

Sonic and the Secret Rings

If I was a lazy games hack I'd start this post going on about how Sonic used to be so great and how recently the games haven't been a patch on the older games and how Sega's flogging of a dead hedgehog is retrospectively ruining my childhood memories. I won't though because Sonic Rush was actually alright and OMG SONIC AND THE SECRET RINGS HAS Triceratops in it. Egg on my face, only earlier today I was bemoaning the lack of dinosaur love on the Wii.



My exclusive hands-off review: A return to form for Sonic the hedgehog! Sonic, Sega and Dinosaur fans belatedly rejoice this three year old game! Huzzah! Hurrah! Sonic is back. Sure Triceratops can run that fast. And sure carnosaurs were bright pink. That's reasonable. 10/10

Dinosaurs Strike

Does Pokemon play a little too well for you? Want the chance to fight against anachronistic objects that normally don't have agency on the big screen?

Then today is your lucky day reader because Combat of Giants Dinosaur Strike for the Wii was just announced. A November launch date has been slated.

I was mildly surprised by the DS game Combat of Giants: Dinosaurs. Its dinosaur customisation, arena based combat, unique evolution mechanism as well as combat against tractors stood it apart from the usual run-of-the-mill-shoddy-boring-miss-the-point-dinosaur-pokemon-clones and we haven't had a decent Wii based dinosaur or other prehistoric animal related game since Sea Monsters. Scratch that. We haven't had any decent Wii dinosaur based games in the UK. Oh, Jurassic: The hunted, WHEN WILL THEY PORT YOU?

More Jurassic Park Games?

Read all abaat it here.

This could be the dawn of a new era in dinosaur related games. For so long I've been saying that Jurassic Park should be turned into a series of games.

OH HANG ON....

Dinosaurs vs. Sharks

The official Nintendo magazine is running this brilliant non-competition forum members have been asked to create a Dinosaurs vs Shark microgame on Warioware DIY. Why a 'non' competition you ask? Well that's because dinosaurs would so obviously win. On land. Maybe not so much in the sea.

Either way if you fancy your chances you should enter!

Combat of Giants: Dinosaurs

I'll be honest, when Combat of Giants: Dinosaurs first came onto the radar there was more than a little bit of eye rolling. Like a crufts judge getting a handful of the testes to check pedigree lets quickly metaphorically check the nads of CoG:D. This is a quietly released, Ubisoft DS game. Chances are it isn't going to be picking up GOTY awards. Even the front cover doesn't really give anything away. I was expecting something between the awful awful 101 Dino Pets and the pokemon-alike-games like Dinosaur King. Unfortunately, critical damage to the touch screen of my original DS meant that even though I had CoG:D I couldn't play it. The lovely DSiXL changed all that....

Well reader, much like the newly diagnosed hermaphrodite teen I was pleasantly surprised by this game! You get to choose a dinosaur (you have to start with the sauropod and unlock others later) to take through various arenas with the objective of collecting 100 gold eggs and completing a five part fossil skeleton. Some of the eggs are rewarded for unsurprisingly, beating other dinosaurs in combat and the fossil bits are hidden in uninspiring looking domes of mud that you have to visit on your way around the arena. The arenas are also filled with non egg-rewarding dinosaurs which you may wish to avoid or combat. The combat itself requires choosing and attack and then having to accurately draw a line shape. The stronger the attack the more complicated the line in the shape of a dinosaur head, arms, leg or whole body. The better and quicker you fill in the line, the better your attack. So far, so what right? But the brilliant bit comes later. When you earn enough eggs you can buy various upgrades for your dinosaur allowing a surprising amount of customisation. After the first couple of arenas you unlock the ability to change the colour of your dinosaur but also you can buy 'evolutions' for a number of slots on the body. These take three types. You can either boost attack by buying bony spikes, boost the amount of health you regain using defensive moves by buying what appears to be metal plate armour or boost the number of attacks you can make by decorating your dinosaur with feathers. The best bit is that you actually see the upgrades on your dino. If you get a bit battered in combat then you can replenish health by drinking water or eating bananas? You can also attempt to dissuade the NPDs from battle with a vocal warning meaning you don't have to fight every single dinosaur per arena to proceed. In yet another bizarre twist, occasionally when looking for the fossil pieces you stumble across a mystery combatant which takes the form of commonplace static objects.

I never really realised how much I wanted to play as a pitch black with green tiger stripes, armour plated Brachiosaur with bony spikes coming out of it's face and fancy feathers on the tail attacking a particularly vicious phone box until it happened. I won't regale the epic clashes with a house or a tractor either. Let's do this.

Dinosauriness: I'm yet to play through all the arenas and unlock em all but there are a healthy number of dinosaurs as well as a bunch of inert objects. I'll update the list here when I'm done.

Scientific Accuracy: Well, armour plating, phone boxes, automobiles and nose bone weapons aside I hate to bring down the mood by calling foul on this one. Bananas are suspect too and when the combat starts to get heavy, dare I say it, the sauropods start to do 'combos'. The feather problem normally par for the course in dinosaur games is cleverly dealt with with the crazy customisation tool. Physiologically shall we say, challenging, combos.

Buzz Bonus:On the upside though, this is by far the most comprehensive dinosaur customisation in video games (Spore doesn't count because everything looks like a muppet any approximation to a dinosaur you make is but a muppet dinosaur rather than a dinosaur muppet).

Dotting t's and crossing i's

Reader Grady [quite rightly] has emailed in to point out that Mamoswine was not included in this post all those months ago. Mamoswine is a mammoth-in-disguise which can be found in Pokemon Diamond, Pearl, Heart Gold, Soul Silver, many of the Mystery Dungeons, Pokemon Battle Revolution and perhaps some of those WiiWare games.
The writers of Cunzy1 1's Dinosaurs in Games Blog do not hesitate to point out that the exclusion was no reflection on Mamoswine and was a mere oversight. Consider this post a formal apology!

Jurassic: The Hunted

We got pretty excited when we heard about Jurassic: The Hunted last year so it is without a hint of sadness to discover that it came out with AN ALMIGHTY WHIMPER!
Only two reviews on Metacritic and not so much as a sniffter of an EU release. We're used to hunting down obscure and unsuccessful dinosaur related games on auction websites but not when they were published by Activision! What is the world coming to when a dinosaur game with this kind of pedigree fizzles to release? More on this when we get it.

UPDATE: My co-author, Richie! over at That Guy's A Maniac took justice into his VERY OWN HANDS and contacted Activision about the EU release, they had this to say:

"Unfortunately, we cannot answer questions about a game until it has been released. All new game information is available on the website or in our press releases."

Having just spent the last twenty minutes waiting for all those ridiculous flash videos to load up (why do publishers insist on website design circa 1990? Hello! User friendly!) we cannot find any news related to Jurassic: The Hunted. SO WE@RE TAKING THIS AS CONFIRMATION THAT IT WILL BE COMING OUT SOON! You heard this juicy morsel of dinosaur game related news here first people!

Dino D-Day

Many think Half Life 2 to be a great game. Maybe the best game. But it was missing two vital things.

List of things Half Life 2 was missing
1) Nazis
2) Dinosaurs

Heroes, nay Legends! correct these errors people:



Fingers crossed everyone that Dinosaurs become the new zombies in games.

Spare a thought for B.C.

2010 is the year for dinosaur games readers. I can feel it in my waters but before we get all worked up for behemoths like the awesome Dinosaur D-Day let us spare a thought for a little gem that never made it to market. Today readers we stare at our shoes for two minutes for Lionhead's aborted B.C.
172 Million years ago it was the Jurassic period. 71 999 994 years later, Lie Head Peter Molyneux broke the news that a little game that Lionhead had been working on for the Xbox had been canceled. That game was B.C. or BC or B.C? . It is perhaps one of the most annoying games to look for on an internet search engine is what it is which is some kind of accolade. Anyway, BC would have been a game that celebrated the apocryphal co-existence of dinosaur and caveman as illustrated by many early silver screen dinosaur forays. Even to this day the artwork looks very nice and the game would have set the player in the shoes of (well third person so 10m behind the shoes of) a caveman chieftan who had to lead his tribe off of the menu and well details get sketchy. As you can see from the above and below screens though it had dinosaurs in it which makes us sad to think this is one prehistoric world we won't get to be a part of :(

So far so good and so old but there is a petition to get it going again if you think the world needs a bit more dinosaurs in games. Which it MOST DEFINITELY DOES. So go sign it you loons.

Escape the Museum and Jurassic: The Hunted.

Ever since gaming got mainstream, the hardcore have complained that games have been ruined. More people now play hidden object games or social games through facebook than those really good games about big marines shooting aliens. Gaming proper is officially dead. Long live gaming.

Except when your hidden object game has dinosaurs in it! In which case, screw hardcore gaming we didn't like it anyway and step up Escape the Museum for the PC and now for the Wii!

We haven't played it yet because it is still £14.99 and we'll wait until it drops to around £5. We have to be careful though because once games go to £5 they next just dissappear from the internet and you have to go looking in dirty pawn shops and antique shows in order to find them again.

SURPISE DINOSAUR GAME! Also expect to see Jurassic: The Hunted in stores soon for the Xbox 360, Playstation 3 and Wii. It looks like next gen finally got on the dinosaur train. And we haven't been this happy for SEGA. It is a shame that Activision didn't get Flash Bang's memo about feathers though :( A possible step backwards for dinosaurs and other prehistoric creatures in games.

Viva Pinata: Trouble in Paradise- Xbox 360

I am painfully aware that there should be an accent somewhere over one of those letters up there in the post title. I apologise but it doesn't matter anyway because SHOCK HORROR do we have a drop in standards by covering this game?

Very early on, I made it clear what exactly constituted a dinosaur and/or prehistoric creature and hence what kinds of things I would and wouldn't be covering. So for example, Yoshi would not count as a dinosaur but Rampardos would. Where is the rationale you might ask? Well it's my blog and I'll do what I want. Plus those Pinatas are so adorable I just had to include Choclodocus even though I imagine it won't exactly flourish in the following analysis:

Dinosauriness: Well a Choclodocus (should I italicize it? yes, yes I should) can take many forms, shall we say 'taking inspiration' from such dinosaurs as Ankylosaurus, Stegosaurus, Triceratops and some kind of Sauropod.

Scientific Accuracy: Well it does look very cute. Look at his liddle face. I don't think we need to ruin the atmosphere by going on and on about scientific accuracy. Do you?

Buzz Bonus: I was rooting around the internet and came across the following coded message "Place the skull, ribs, spine, and amber gem into a store house. Eventually they will fuse into a Choclodocus egg. This egg can be hatched by a Cluckles wearing a Jurassic Hair accessory". Presumably that means something to somebody but alas that person isn't me.

How to get dinosaurs into your game

Boy! Playing all these dinosaur games for this site is tricky. Especially when your dinosaurs and other prehistoric creatures don't appear until right at the end! Syberia I'm talking about you. So today I'm gonna be taking a different tactic so that this site isn't months and months between updates.

The inaugural post in this series is how to gets them Dinosaurs and prehistoric creatures into your games. Are you making a game right now? Trying to find an angle to get some of them extinct beauts in? Then you've come to the right place.

Clone 'em in! Largely inspired by Jurassic Park many games including the JP games use artistic licence with current scientific cloning knowledge to justify them dinos. Just dig up some fossils, umm clone them, voila. Ici est un dino!
Scientific Accuracy: Way off. Way way off. Like, seriously. Way. Off. Cloning technology for animals that still exist struggles to get it right. Cloning animals when we have some of their DNA is still completely unsuccessful e.g Thylacine, Mammoths. Cloning animals when their DNA has never been found is, as I type, pure science fiction.
As seen in: All the Jurassic Park games and Killer Instinct.

Reconstruct them in! Only slightly different from the above method in that cloning isn't explicitly mentioned. It normally involves some mysterious process off screen. Excavate a fossil pop it into a machine at a lab and hey presto! You've got your dinosaurs and other prehistoric creatures. Just don't ask us how we did it. Its science and stuff.
Scientific Accuracy: Since the process is not available for us to assess it is impossible to comment other than to say hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm really?
As seen in: Tekken, Small Arms, Pokemon, Dino Master.

They were hiding all the time! You just weren't looking properly. Lost Valleys, remote islands and inhabitable climates are the staple hiding place for most dinosaurs and other extinct species. But be warned! It makes a little bit more sense if your dinosaurs are in an ecosystem that could actually support them. The dinosaurs in Tomb Raider are all obligate carnivores and in Tomb Raider 2 generations of Tyrannosaurus rex seem to have survived and propagated for millions of years in a giant, featureless pit. It a make a no sense!
Scientific accuracy: This method of getting dinosaurs into your game is probably the least offensive to scientific reason and many modern day 'sightings' of dinosaurs and dinosaur myths seem to centre around remote unexplored regions.
As seen in: Peter Jackson's King Kong the Official Game of the Movie, Syberia, Tomb Raider.


Have a Museum!This is where most people see dinosaur and other prehistoric creature remains and many games have museums packed with skeletons of prehistoric creatures. More often than not though the beautiful skeletons are destructible playgrounds :( Also, this means that your dinosaurs have to be pretty static unless you go for a Night at the Museum thang.
Scientific Accuracy: As long as your fossils aren't coming alive at night due to an ancient Egyptian artifact or zombie curse and all the bones are in the right places you're alright by me.
As seen in: Animal Crossing, GTA IV, Stranglehold, Evil Dead Fistful of Boomstick, Siphon Filter.

Time travel/Bending! Can't find a way to bring the dinosaurs to your characters? Then bring the characters to the dinosaurs. Crazy scientists can be working on a time travel device when it goes wrong, time travel technology just inexplicably exists or you can always invoke an anomaly. Choose your method just don't expect a physicist to endorse your product.
Scientific Accuracy: See cloning.
As seen in: Dino Crises, Fossil League, Turok: Dinosaur Hunter, Paraworld.

Just don't explain at all why they are there Hey! It's your game. Do what you want. Most games would be very boring indeed if we stayed within the realms of what is possible in real life. Alternatively, you can go for a mixed message like Dino King which just seems to be very confused as to how the dinosaurs get there. Something about some stones and a meteorite? It doesn't matter.
Scientific accuracy: Nothing is impossible! It's just that most things are improbable.
As seen in: Dino King, DoA 4.

They're just there okay! It's not important how they got there but they are here! That's all that counts. So have fun.
Scientific Accuracy: In a time before Wikipedia things could just be the way they are without an army of people constructing possible causation theories. It's fiction for god's sake!
As seen in: Off Road Velociraptor Safari, Doritos Dash of Destruction, 101 Dino Pets, Deathtrap Dungeon, Timesplitters.

Its all about the timing. Conscious about offending your palaeontologist friends? Unwilling to contravene science with time travel or over ambitious cloning projects? Then simple. Just set your whole game in the world of the dinosaurs and/or prehistoric creatures. That's allowed. But it does mean that you can't have any human protagonists but often I find them overrated anywho.
Scientific Accuracy: As long as your environments are good palaeo environments and there are no anachronistic blunders your game will be good until a new scientific discovery goes and ruins it all.
As seen in: Sea Monsters: A prehistoric adventure, Jurassic Realm, Ice Age, Dinosaur!

In the wind.. Fossil Fighters, Ice Age 3 and Go Diego Go! Great Dinosaur Rescue

Oh what a surprise! A DS based Pokemon rip-off where collecting fossils, cleaning them, reviving them and then battling with them is the order of the day.

This does make a refreshing change (See also Dino Master and Fossil League: Dino Tournament Championship).

I'm going to resist the temptation to review it from prerelease videos and screenshots although we all know it's going to be so-so. And the dinosaurs are all made up :(

Ice Age 3 plods onto every console going as did the first two games of the films. Expect generic platforming. It's hard to get excited about these when the previous ones were playable but mediocre. It's even harder just contemplating the wedging the dinosaurs into the Ice Age format. Still final judgement to be reserved after I play through all fourteen versions.

Go Diego Go! Great Dinosaur Rescue. Firstly why are the not so great dinosaurs not worth rescuing? And also...just no. Just no. I'll be honest, the to do list just got a new last place with this game.

Tot ziens!

Peter Jackson's King Kong: The Official Game of the Movie-Almost every platform

Widely (and rightly) ridiculed for it's ridiculous name, this game was released on a shed load of platforms. Some of them were surprisingly good considering the film tie in (PS2) and some were pretty bad (GBAand the DS version ). Either way dinosaurs were a feature of the films and games and they are a delight in this title. Fans of dinosaurs in games should endeavour to pick this title up (on the consoles) as rarely have nicer dinosaurs been seen on the little screen.

Dinosauriness: A number of dinosaurs with very silly names. Quite why the silly names I'm not too sure. Perhaps it is so that know-it-all palaeontologists can't later poo poo some of the made up dinosaurs and other prehistoric creatures as they are want to do. Perhaps there has been some crazy isolated insular evolution going on on Skull Island which led to the total loss of feathers. And silly names. Anyway there's some sauropod ones, theropod ones, some hadrosaurs, some permian mammal-alikes, ancient giant crocodiles, some pterosaurs and the very silly named Vastatosaurus rex.

Scientific Accuracy: I quite like the idea of making up some dinosaurs rather than lazily skimming described species. This gives you a lot of artistic freedom and a way to ignore the palaeontologists who go to cinemas and concentrate on biodynamics and scale rather than the action/drama etc. I'm giving it a 5/10 but only because it could be a 0/10 (they are all made up) or a 10/10 (they made them up so how can it be inaccurate?).

Buzz Bonus: All dinosaur fans should play this game. It has some nice settings some cool set pieces and spear throwing. Who doesn't love themselves some spear throwing?

Tekken 2, Tekken Tag Tournament-Arcade/PlayStation, PlayStation 2

Like or hate Tekken, Alex is in Tekken 2 and Tekken Tag Tournament. Alex is a dinosaur (albeit a dinosaur cloney job [as they so often are]). Alex is a weird name for a dinosaur fighter guy. Apparently he was created by Doctor Boskonovitch and learned how to wrestle from Armo(u)r King. He currently resides in Australia.

Dinosauriness: Hard to judge really. Alex was created by extracting 'something' from a fossil tentatively from the dromaeosauridae family. Judging from the state of him this is probably correct.

Scientific Accuracy: Well. The usual extraction from fossils, no feathers etc. etc. caveats. All in all 4, no 3 out of 10 for accuracy. Maybe that's too generous. 2? 1? It's hard to say. Make your own mind up.

Buzz Bonus: Alex was in the Tekken animated film. Although it wasn't Alex. They were called Rex. Under no circumstances watch the animated film. It is bad. No. Awful. Word.

The to do list

So little time. So much to do! Here is the to do list in case you were wondering WHY THE HELL I HADN'T GOT ROUND TO LOOKING AT Land Before Time: Into the Mysterious Beyond Yet.

Playing all these through takes time peeps! And some of them are shovelware to the max.

Batman Lego, BUZZ! JUNIOR DINO DEN, Carnivores, Carnivores 2, Carnivore Ice Age, Carnivores Cityscape, Combat of giants: Dinosaurs, Dino Hunter, Dino Land, Dinotopia: The Sunstone Odyssey, Dino Stalker, Dinosaur park, Disney's Dinosaur x 3, DoA 4, Dinosaur World, Evil Dead Fistful of Boomstick, Fossil Fighters, Fossil League Dino Tournament Championship, Go Diego Go Great Dinosaur Rescue, Ice Age, Ice Age 2, Ice Age 3, Jurassic Park, Jurassic Park Trespasser, Jurassic Park Dino Defender, The Land Before Time: Into The Mysterious Beyond, Lost World: Jurassic Park, Siphon Filter, Splashdown 2, Syberia, Syberia II, Tomb Raider 3, Tomb Raider 10th Anniversary Edition, Turok: Dinosaur Hunter, Turok Evolution, Turok (Xbox 360), Turok Rage Wars, Turok 2 Seeds of Evil, Warcraft III, War of the monsters and Zoo Tycoon: Dinosaur digs.

There's more out there, I know it. Apologies peeps.

Small Arms- Xbox 360

Small arms is a poor man's (and suitably cheaper) Super Smash Brothers. The idea is to jump around and beat the other guys but without all the tech. The characters are cutesy and a little more-than-a-little-bit Fur fighters. It's available on Xbox Live Arcade which means that a gazillion people played it for two days before going onto the next PlayStation-era-esque throw away.

Regardless of the merits of Xbox Live arcade, Tyrone, one of the characters in small arms is a dinosaur!



Dinosauriness: Some kind of genericy raptor jobby.

Scientific Accuracy: He was created in a science research facility, a la Riptor from Killer Instinct so it may be possible that he doesn't have feathers, is ludicrously coloured and carries and ice ray thing to fight a mouse, a chicken and a small ninja woman. Overall 7/10.

Buzz bonus: Tyrone falls very close to the line of being a not real dinosaur (like Yoshi or godzilla and therefore not eligible to be covered here) but he has such a nice little face. Look at his face. Lovely.