(Ultra 64, 2001)

I've long considered Dinosaur Planet my favorite game of all time, with an asterisk. That asterisk was because unlike my other favorite game of all time, it never got the chance to see the light of day. And in all honesty, knowing what I know now, that was never going to happen. It was a 64 megabyte game in 2001, the year that the Ultra 64 died. It required the Expansion Pak. And frankly, it just wasn't done. But I still loved it all those years, and I love it still. And now it's released! I can finally vindicate my adoration to the point of imitation (in the form of Athena's Arrow) for the last few years.

Here's where I'd say "Regardless, let's talk about the game. Here's the good:", but it's not appropriate here. This won't be formatted like the Quake games, this is more of a thorough exploration of the game. Part of the reason why is that it's a quality assurance demo from December 2000, and not the full game. The full game, as far as I know, never existed. As such, all I'll say is let's finally get into it after all these long years! And do keep in mind that until this notice is deleted, this is just a draft of the article. I'll be sure to inject a little more character and humor into it as I edit it.

The game starts in the clouds, with our player character, Krystal, riding a Cloudrunner. It was at this moment that my heart nearly exploded in amazement that it was real. I was for real playing this game, the idea of which meant so much to me; this was, after all, the perfect sendoff that the Ultra 64 deserved.

I had first seen this game as a video years ago, even before I bought my first Ultra 64, a normal old charcoal black console. Back then, I thought it looked amazing, but I didn't immediately feel the crushing defeat of being there at the time in 1999 being excited for the game to come out, so while I thought it was an amazing looking game with a soundtrack every bit the equal and then some of the games I'd heard up to that point, it never burned at my soul. At first. But as I gained more and more respect and adoration for the console that now takes center stage on every platform I have my TV on, the idea of having a game this technically impressive to cap the system's life off became that much more meaningful. And I wasn't alone, either. I found myself in the company of a whole army of potential superfans of this swan song that was never sung. I found myself coveting even getting a high quality glimpse at those dynamic shadows and pixel-perfect textures and characters who could actually show emotions, whose eyes moved to what they were looking at; a far cry from the days where the most Mario's face changed was swapping one eye texture for another.

So, the Galleon (the skyship of General Scales, who's kind of a big deal) spits rocks at Krystal, trying to shoot her out of the sky. I guess they're also supposed to be cannonballs, but they're totally just rocks. The scene doesn't just give you a reason to be against the Sharpclaw, it demonstrates the game's dynamic colored lighting, the red of the rocks' flames whirring past, shining off Krystal's fur and the Cloudrunner's pycnofiber. Not missing a beat, Krystal positions herself behind the Galleon and shoots out her magic at the cannons and later its propellor, finishing off the head of the warship before it can take another shot at you. At least, it doesn't if you're any good at the game. And honestly, actually playing this section really does have a little bit of a Star Foxian feel to it, if just a little, with the aerial projectile combat.

Krystal boards the Galleon and I just get blown away once again by how beautiful the game is. I had just finished playing Super Mario 64, so the contrast between early Ultra 64 graphics and the absolute pinnacle the console could offer is absolutely stunning. If my review convinces you to pick the game up, make sure to keep a healthy diet of only early Ultra 64 for a day or two prior.

And then my brain noticed something. The captions. Despite being an English company, Rare are completely awful at writing the English language. I guess I'm not one to talk, given that my use of the letter thorn is not limited to zero per year, but so many words are misspelled, punctuation misused, and capitalization abused. It'd be one thing if this was an internal prototype for testing, but this was made to be shown off! But in all fairness, this is minor nitpicking.

So, here gameplay starts, and it's... very Zelda. Later on, it'll show more of its Diddy Kong Racing origins, but for now, it starts off with our yellow-clad lass feeling an awful lot like a certain Hylian hero. Like, ridiculously so; copied bullet point for bullet point from starting you off with three segments of health that each consist of their own smaller subsegments, to your jumping and ledge control being automatic, to Z-targeting and dodging -- about the only thing not copied and pasted is the actual handling itself, which is smoother and more refined, as befitting a game hypothesized to come out three years after it. But unlike the green clad hero's adventure, I'm invested. Something about it is drawing me in far, far more than Ocarina of Time ever could, and if I were to guess, it'd be the story and characters, the two main ones you switch between throughout your adventure.

To sidetrack from the game for a moment, the story is far different from what the casual observer often believed it would be, and even I was a little surprised with some of the new elements, and if you wish to experience it for yourself beforehand, here is your official

The story is split between two perspectives. The first is Krystal, the damsel-in-distress of the GameCube reboot, who is no damsel here by any means, with the staff her adopted pop made for and gave her four years before the events of the game. She's a 16-year-old fox whose entire village was massacred by the same wolf who took her in out of remorse for his own rage-fuelled bloodlust, a wolf who just happens to be the best magician and general of his entire tribe. His youngest son is the other playable character, Sabre -- one of the Royal Knights. Sort of. This is actually not exactly a build of Dinosaur Planet per se, but rather, one of the very earliest builds of Star Fox Adventures: Dinosaur Planet, the aforementioned GameCube remake, still on the Ultra 64. So, Sabre's model and much of his voice acting has been replaced with a very early form of Fox Mcloud, Royal Knight of the Lylat System, with his famed blue jumpsuit, magic sword, and dead, unmoving eyes. Randorn, the wizard that raised both Sabre and Krystal, flew with his father in the famed Star Fox team.

While I'm not intimately familiar with how the story's changed and we'll get to why later on, an earlier draft of the story from only a few months prior has surfaced on the web, and it goes as such, with most of the actual in-game story skipped over to as to make the rest of the review more interesting to read:

Ten years before the start of the game, King Randorn's elder son, one of his Royal Knights, was slain in combat with the Vixon tribes. This ignites a burning, passionate hatred in his heart for the Vixon, and when he encounters a tribe of them, possibly not even the same one that took his son, he takes it out on them, slaughtering the entire village -- only a six year old girl remains of the entire tribe. When he came back to his senses and realized what he did, he buried each victim of his with full Wolven military honors, feeling unfit to go back to rule his tribe. When he's finished with the burials, he finds a scared Krystal, and out of personal obligation for killing her entire family, he takes her in as his own adopted daughter, giving her that name and heading out into the wild unknown, far beyond their slice of the world.

Ten years later, the now elderly Randorn and sixteen-year-old Krystal find an ancient ruin, within which a magic crystal receptacle lay, the crystal itself not far away. So they do the obvious thing and set it into its hole, which opened up a portal through which the King of the Earthwalkers asked for help in saving the planet Sauria. He sent Krystal to find Sabre and catch him up with the last decade of events, before jumping in and going on an adventure.

She finds him, and nearly gets killed by him. It isn't until she proves that she truely does know him, was raised by him, that Sabre sheaths his sword, still wary of the strange girl of the species his is so bitterly against, who claims to be his sister by his father's choice, a father who had already been burned before by the Vixon. He hears her story, however reluctantly, and they go to the portal, following after their dad to the titular planet, Sauria. Randorn hasn't had a good time of it, as it turns out, and General Scales, ruler, tyrant, and dictator of the Sharpclaw tribe has nearly killed him just as soon as he arrived, him taking refuge in Warlock Mountain. The magic there is keeping him alive, but it's up to Krystal and Sabre to put an end to Scales' schemes, rescuing their respective royals along the way, and taking one each as a partner -- Krystal bringing Cloudrunner Princess Kyte and Sabre taking Earthwalker Prince Tricky, a familiar face from the game's predecessor, Diddy Kong Racing. That's the same Tricky you might have raced not four years ago. now an integral character in your quest.

They aren't really Scales' schemes, of course they aren't; an evil general so petty as to be high off his own fumes from just capturing some princess far smaller than he is isn't world destroyer material. He's working for a bigger baddie, the Kamerian Drakor, the final boss of the game. He's bribed General Scales to work for him, and he's behind the planned Hitchhiker's Guideing of Sauria. Drakor puts up a big fight against Sabre... and wins. Sabre (and presumably Prince Tricky, but that never gets addressed) dies in the confrontation, leading to Sauria's destruction. This is not optional, this is how the story progresses.

But this is not how the story ends.

Krystal, more heartbroken about Sabre's death than Sabre would be about hers, travels back in time to save him and the planet, and eventually succeeds. Drakor is killed, and the planet is at peace, Randorn taking the two back to their homeworld (which, by the way, is named Animus), and training them to be his successor, retiring to a quiet life of eating carrots and drinking whiskey.

And you know what? I love this story so much even with the elements that bother me (like the species confusion and Krystal never addressing her adoptive father by anything other than his name or as "the wizard"), and it is such a missed opportunity that it never happened. A less ballsy game might have Sabre trust Krystal implicitly without any reason to, or save the Drakor fight to the very end, never putting its protagonists in danger, but DP doesn't do that. It kills one of its main characters dead, he only comes back because of time travel. That's a risky move, and one that I don't see nearly as much. But at the same time, a lot of my love of this story comes from its potential; due to its nature as a video game, or at least a video game on a console from 1995, it just doesn't have the room to really talk about the themes that it so clearly hints at. While yes, it is a fun dumb video game plot at its surface with a neat gimmick, and compared to the rest of the console's lifespan it has few, if any, equals in terms of both quality and quantity, it also has so much potential for exploration that a more patient fan fiction author than I would most certainly have a field day with it, exploring themes of racism, of the determined human (or in this case, animal) spirit, whether evil is inherent or learned, and of what drives men to commit heinous acts. Even something a little pettier than that could at least explore the effects Randorn abandoning his ten-year-old son would have on the both of them, or the implications of a race of pirates, or at the very least why nobody's heard of a mammal despite an established mammal tribe, the Snowhorn, having been there for long enough to be a fact of life.

I really hope that something this good comes around again. And not as just an interactive movie, but a massive plot that also has a massive, amazing game behind it.

Whoo boy, this is gonna be a long review.

So, let's talk about the controls. Seems like a good place to start; after all, we left off when we were just taking control of Krystal on the deck of the Galleon. The movement in this game is wonderful. Both characters share the same exact controls and physics, so everything I say about Krystal applies to Fox, and with that having been said, Krystal controls every bit as amazingly fluidly as you'd expect her to based on the videos of other builds floating around the web. She's responsive and turns in a graceful angle that's not too tight, but not even close to too wide either, it's exactly right for the game's design and it should be, since by this point Rare had been pumping out games for the Ultra 64, twice or three times a year, for three years (plus Killer Instinct Gold in 1996 and Banjo-Kazooie in 1998). Her speed is essentially perfect (maybe could use, like, a 5% upping to her max speed if that, but that's just my tastes, not something that's objectively the case. Starting from a stand-still feels natural and fluid, and stopping from a run doesn't feel too prolonged, unlike Banjo, who has jerky movement that feels a little too stiff and almost grid-like in how immediately he starts up at nearly full speed, and preserves a little too much momentum when stopping.

The buttons on the other hand... the placement is perfectly fine and you never wonder which button does what, but the game has Ultra 64 Syndrome in that there aren't quite enough buttons for everything, meaning context sensitive inputs, which isn't exactly my favorite thing in the world, especially not when I'm trying to shoot a fireball from the staff (or, more often, just turn the camera to behind Krystal's back) but I end up locking on to whatever I was looking at instead, and needing to manually cancel it and reposition. It's a minor nitpick admittedly, but it does prove to be an occasional annoyance to me personally.

And speaking of occasional annoyances, there's a Sharpclaw grunt right in front of you. Combat is perfectly fine and Zeldaish, though the hitbox on Krystal's staff is further away from her than that of Link's sword to him. The game explains Z-targeting, dodging, and attacking. There's a problem with dodging. not only do you have to hold down the B button to do so rather than just automatically dodging if you tap the control stick in a direction, but it's also just a tiny bit completely pointless. For most enemies in the game, the hitstun from your normal attack is so prolonged that they'll never get a hit on you, or if they do, it'll be so minor and so infrequent that even a gang of them rarely poses a threat at your weakest point.

And really, that's the demo's worst mechanical fault: it's devoid of any actual challenge. The only time you ever face any fear of dying is either from environmental hazards like a freezing cold lake or from intentionally committing suicide; even on my very first playthrough I never died a single time up to the point I got to Swapstone Hollow. However, I'm talking specifically from the perspective of the demo and what it offers, from the fight on the Galleon to the earliest scene of Cape Claw. In the month that the game has been released, programmers have hacked in a level select and are working to decompile it and get a more complete game running, and I'll update this review when I get around to downlading the patch myself and playing it, for now I'm experiencing the demo as Rare intended it to be experienced, mostly just out of laziness. I definitely anticipate a tough fight with the big bad, but what I'm getting right now is as tough as tapioca. And of course it is, it's a demo, the idea is to show off the game (in this case, to management), not necessarily have a particularly thrilling time with it.

That's nothing in comparison to the demo's actual worst problem. It is a MASSIVE ISSUE, and is INCREDIBLY embarrassing.

The game is only about as stable as my parents' marriage, as in, it crashed and burned years ago. Reminder:

It's such an unstable game that it caused a huge problem at E3 2000, and someone had to stand by the console the whole time to reset the game when it crashed. And in my own experience, I haven't even tried breaking the game and it's crashed on me easily twenty times, just doing stuff that I'm supposed to do. There is no possible way this would pass by QC, and yet they submitted it anyway. On top of just crashing, I've had plenty of weird bugs pop up such as the camera locking to directly behind Krystal's back, which is admittedly something I hope does make it to the eventual Windows port that's sure to come as an option, and some less savory things, like entire sections of level geometry failing to load, just showing as magenta nothingesses. There's even an issue in the build itself where some textures fail to properly display, most notably in Swapstone Hollow.

And speaking of level geometry, it's filled with as many holes and gaps as the average Rare employee's grasp on the English language. Not intentional holes to platform across, though there are a few of those, I mean portions of the collision map that, despite corresponding to areas that are walkable, have no collision and so act like a ledge. If you fall through one, the game will crash most of the time and occasionally not crash, but you'll still end up in an endless loop of spawning inside the same hole you fall through. Forever.

To get back on track, the Sharpclaw is a breeze to dispatch, usually not even landing a hit on me. I know what lies just up ahead, I've seen this exact scene dozens of times before, and I put it off for a little bit to just run around the deck of this ship that built so much hype up in my mind due to the sheer atmosphere. So, to fill the time while I get my bearings, my mind wanders to the things that Rare employees have said about the game. Especially about the game's framerate. And if I'm to be totally honest? They were absolutely misremembering. Sure, the framerate isn't nearly as buttery as it might be if Dinosaur Planet were a Windows game, but the assertion that it ran particularly poorly is a flawed one. The peak of Treasure Trove Cove ran at a worse framerate than even the most densely packed scenes of Dinosaur Planet, with the game pulling in a consistent 15 to 20 frames per second, and the less densely packed scenes reaching up to a full 60, with 30s, 40s, and 50s being fairly attainable at non cherrypicked times. Now sure, they were completely correct about the stability issues of the game, but the performance was actually pretty good for Ultra 64 standards, especially when it's pushing the console this much; there's the occasional moment where I have to just stop and take everything in, because the game just looks so next-gen. By 2001, Rare truly were the absolute gods of the Ultra 64.

Well, can't put it off forever. Let's face off against the General.

I love this scene, it's iconic and the music is fantastic. My first time seeing it on console for myself felt surreal, and I had a grin on my face the whole time. But I've seen it dozens of times, I know how it goes. Scales shows up, bitchslaps Krystal, I act surprised while the music flares up, getting me pumped, and then...

Huh?!

Scales didn't fall off the Galleon like he should! He gets zapped, but he just... teleports away! I guess I really underestimated how different the game got in that sub-year span of time between E3 2000 (where he did get shocked and fall off the deck of the Galleon) and December 1. And really, this is a way more reasonable way to set up his return, though it does make it far more obvious that he will. I'm personally split between the two, but I think I prefer the surprise. It's such a powerful moment to think that you're safe, and you've saved the princess, just to learn Scales got away by the breadth of one of the hairs he doesn't have. Especially when a somber, almost mournful version of his leitmotif plays in the background, Krystal's hands over her face to hide her tears.

But that's in the future. For now, the Galleon's stopped at Warlock Mountain, and you're now free to take in the naturalistic scenery. You might even notice the game's day-night cycle, which is cool, but in my opinion it cycles far, far too fast. While I don't think it should be real-time, the timescale on show here is ridiculous, with an entire day going by in the span of three minutes. Either Sauria is spinning so fast that Earth's measly thirty-thousand miles per hour looks stationary by comparison, or someone (probably I) dropped a few squares. Don't worry, this is the nitpickiest I plan on getting in this review.

The place looks a little different from the Press Demo from late 1999. A bit more fleshed out in most areas, but the staircase to the Warpstone receptacle is a solid ramp now. Not a big deal. Still the same layout, and it's polished to a spit shine. The architecture here is interesting, classical and dilapidated but with a unique feel to it. Probably due to the Ultra 64's graphical fidelity. There's a strange floating jellyfish-like creature that will hurt you, but it's easy to avoid, so do so. The area's remained the same since '99 and possibly even earlier -- go right and down the winding cave. A wounded, dying Earthwalker will await you, and you'll get a little snippet of extra story, and a Magic Crystal. The scene was incredibly powerful and moving the first time I saw it, but while I definitely feel sorry for the guy... it doesn't really keep its power for very long. Play through the game another two times and the scene fades into the background. It needed a little more depth, but it's over relatively quickly, and we get to the game's first puzzle room, a mechanic that I have no issues with, I think it's actually implemented pretty well.

The main few ways are demonstrated in this chamber and the next. Timing "puzzles" (really, more just a test of timing), switch puzzles, and button puzzles. Switch puzzles would later go on to be a defining feature in a completely unrelated computer game, and here they're pretty inoffensive. Though I'd imagine so; this is the introduction. Finally, buttons are something we'll need to get back to. We're up to Randorn now, and he explains Sauria's lore. The Krazoa fought each other in a war of mutual annihilation, and from the ashes life resisted its end. They're gone, but from them sprung the dinosaurs. I like this plot, but it drags on a little too long. He also suggests that that's a lie, but, uh... we'll just ignore that for the next half the game, if that's alright with you. He's alright, the magic in the temple is keeping him alive, but he can't leave it. He can keep all the Krazoa spirits safe while you collect them together to fight off Drakor, who you don't know about yet.

This is where buttons come in. Randorn gives you his torn-up spellbook, and with it your first magical ability, shooting a fireball to do essentially everything from stunning enemies to activating buttons to shaking trees to get fruits to getting logs to come crashing down. You use it in this room to get your first Warp Crystal, but now the test of timing from earlier has turned into three buttons. You don't have to do them one at a time, you can do all three at once, which is a godsend for the perpetually lazy like me. You come out of the cave only to get shoved, a little rudely, into a cutscene of General Scales commanding his Sharpclaws on the Galleon, the ship flying away just in time to avoid you boarding it. I still think the scene would be more powerful had Scales looked like he died earlier, but it's still a pretty vivid moment in my mind since I didn't expect it at first, and it wouldn't have been my first guess either. It's a good cutscene, just... make sure not to kill yourself at this point since if you do, the Galleon's hitbox comes back turned 90 degrees, and you softlock yourself. Not good. The Warp Crystal goes in its receptacle, you go step onto the Warp, and you get taken to Swapstone Circle.

Here's the final scene with Krystal for now, and it's really well done. Krystal's line delivery and body language is on point here for the art style and tone of the scene, and Rubble has a fun personality, if a little too much breaking the fourth wall for my personal tastes. She steps on his hand and that's how you swap to Fox and back, though it's kind of... a weird story thing. Canonically all they're doing is sitting in their respective stone's hand until the other brother picks the other up, wasting a lot of time in the process. Swap is a strange thing to conceptualize. I guess maybe they're able to communicate with each other, and something about time relativism, despite being on the same planet and so being subject to roughly the same timescale, with miniscule differences.

Or it's a video game. That could be it. Still, I wish it was addressed. In any case, without further ado, we warp to...

return home / return to the Ultra 64 page / this page written March 22 - April 7th, 2021