Dinosaur Planet

releases on TBD

Dinosaur Planet was a game originally developed by Rare and set to be published by Nintendo, planned for release on the Nintendo 64, but later intended for the Nintendo GameCube instead. It was cancelled in its original form, rebranded and incorporated Star Fox characters, becoming Star Fox Adventures. A late prototype was found and dumped onto the internet in March, 2021.


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is it weird to review what is basically an incomplete alpha of a game that never came out, and also unfair to rate it higher than the final-yet-very-different product it got released as?

yes and i don't care. researching this game made up a good chunk of my childhood and i enjoyed it, leave me alone.

there's a good lot of Dinosaur Planet that was left unchanged in the retail Star Fox Adventures (specifically the galleon intro and most of darkice mines for example), but it's still a vastly different beast altogether. unlike SFA, DP's pacing is a lot slower and seems to be mostly focused on environmental puzzles and exploration rather than the more fast-paced action and challenges than SFA brought. not a bad thing (especially when the environments are pretty gorgeous even for the N64), but definitely an acquired taste when you're more used to how things were in SFA.

isn't to say Dinosaur Planet is better (or worse) than the game it ended up becoming tho; there's definitely more to DP than SFA in a lot of areas, but alpha-state-bugginess and unfinished-ness aside, there's quite a few quality-of-life things that SFA had that i really wish were in the build we got. two that i can name off the top of my head: bomb spores IMMEDIATELY vanish upon touching the ground, and some items like mushrooms you have to manually pick up rather than automatically picking up when you walk onto them. plus some challenges that got reworked in SFA are substantially more difficult in DP coughcloudrunnerjetbikeracecough.

but yeah that's. kind of the reason why i can't really rate this the full five stars. SFA's got its issues, and DP isn't exempt from it's own flaws.

due to the state it's in, Dinosaur Planet is essentially impossible to truly complete, and with some areas and tasks being empty or unfinished, you can't really go through the story "as intended". still, DP's a trip to explore what could've been, as well as compare it to it's finished Starfox-ified verison. there's a sense of mystery and atmosphere to DP's original N64 incarnation, and i'm so glad i can finally experience it after 15+ years of researching the game.

will this game ever be truly "finished", be it in Rare's hands or by the dedicated fans decompiling it? hard to say, but with this and the tsukihime remake coming out in the same year, weirder things have happened.

and even then, i'm fine with what we got. it's some sense of closure to a mystery over two decades old now, and it's been a real treat to explore.

this isn't super playable in its current state but it being playable in a state at all makes me very happy. Dinosaur Planet was always a really interesting thing, ambitious cancelled games are just inherently compelling but this one was particularly cool. Rareware at their peak doing shit on the N64 that still looks impressive before the scope of their project veered towards a worse direction. it's easy to wonder what could've been, but having all of this confirms it was better off this way, but only in theory. playing through this yourself requires a lot of trial and error, it's definitely not finished. really love this game's Krystal, wish she was more of a character in the final game. also wish they didn't ditch the adorable designs here to try and make her sexy for some reason. Miyamoto will never be forgiven for his crimes.

I'm waiting for it to get in a playable state... but what is here is fantastic. It almost looks like an early Dreamcast game.
Hopefully the community will be able to make it playable till the end.

Infelizmente bugado demais para continuar :(