I wasn't expecting much from the initial pitch of "late-90s Macintosh pack-in game for children", but Nanosaur clears that bar just fine.
My family was poor when I was growing up, so our household usually lagged at least five years behind wherever the newest technology was at the time. Even then, the first waves of iMacs were still far too pricey for us to justify picking up half a decade after their release. $999.99 for the cheapest model? Not likely. If I'd have been both old enough and tapped into the PC market enough to beg my parents to buy one, there wasn't a chance that they would have listened. We wound up getting one of those bottom-of-the-barrel eMachines desktops that you could technically get for free if you mailed in the dozen or so rebates you were instructed to send off. My dad was terrified that whatever disk games I wanted to run on the thing would have given it a virus, of course, so I never really had the chance to get into PC games until I was a teenager. What I wasn't forbidden from getting into, however, were web games.
Nanosaur reminds me a lot of the stuff I'd used to dig up on sites like Miniclip, or OneMoreLevel. Remember On the Run? You ever played that? Also goes by the name FFX Runner? That game was in 3D! And it was entirely in your browser! That's a sentence that's a lot less impressive today, given the breadth of itch.io games that can be played via the web version of Unity, but unearthing the Macromedia Shockwave titles that ran in full 3D was like breaching the first hole into Tutankhamen's tomb. I didn't even know it was possible to do something like that with Internet Explorer. I developed a taste for those 3D web games, however hacked out or janky they were (and they very much were both, constantly). I have to imagine that something similar happened to the kids who supped their first taste of the PC gaming market from Pangaea Software. For better and for worse, I feel like I would have been enamored with this had I found it on AddictingGames fifteen years ago.
It's...surprisingly fine? It's definitely quaint. I'd take a dozen of these "press spacebar on the Nanosaur to start, press spacebar on the glowing emergency exit sign to quit the game" menus over any of the modern, minimal, live-service offspring that tries to obfuscate the exit button to force you to waste more time in the game. There's something about the UI here that's really setting off a lot of weird nostalgia. I know I never played this, but it feels as though I've played a lot like it. I think Cruelty Squad did a great job in capturing a lot of the weirder design idiosyncrasies present in smaller-scale games from the turn of the millennium, and this is that but without the veil of irony draped over it. It's cute.
The actual gameplay itself is mostly unimpressive. There's an irony here that we're at the end of the Cretaceous period and yet the Nanosaur controls as if we're in the Late Cenozoic ice age; it feels like you've got skates strapped to the bottoms of your little digitigrade feet. Considering how most of your enemies are content to just walk at you and deal contact damage, these controls can make it especially annoying to try to pivot around and shoot them. You're much better off just bolting in a straight line and hoping they lose you, rather than trying to take them in a proper fight. There are a decent breadth of weapons here that are certainly fun to have a collection of, but they're not especially varied. The heat-seeking missile is the default laser by any other name. The rest of your playthrough is going to be running around in search of eggs to plop into randomly-available time portals, with some light platforming connecting everything together. It's competent. This is especially impressive for something designed in a three-week window, as detailed in this wonderful write-up, here. Given these circumstances, perhaps it's a testament to the skill of the people at Pangaea that it reached the heights of "competent" at all.
You've only got twenty real-world minutes to win or lose, so it's borderline impossible for the game to overstay its welcome. It's short, it's breezy, and it's really nowhere near as bad as I was expecting it to be. Nanosaur certainly isn't going to set the world on fire today, but it's a wonderful little look back into a bygone age of computing and the free-form design philosophies that came with it.
My family was poor when I was growing up, so our household usually lagged at least five years behind wherever the newest technology was at the time. Even then, the first waves of iMacs were still far too pricey for us to justify picking up half a decade after their release. $999.99 for the cheapest model? Not likely. If I'd have been both old enough and tapped into the PC market enough to beg my parents to buy one, there wasn't a chance that they would have listened. We wound up getting one of those bottom-of-the-barrel eMachines desktops that you could technically get for free if you mailed in the dozen or so rebates you were instructed to send off. My dad was terrified that whatever disk games I wanted to run on the thing would have given it a virus, of course, so I never really had the chance to get into PC games until I was a teenager. What I wasn't forbidden from getting into, however, were web games.
Nanosaur reminds me a lot of the stuff I'd used to dig up on sites like Miniclip, or OneMoreLevel. Remember On the Run? You ever played that? Also goes by the name FFX Runner? That game was in 3D! And it was entirely in your browser! That's a sentence that's a lot less impressive today, given the breadth of itch.io games that can be played via the web version of Unity, but unearthing the Macromedia Shockwave titles that ran in full 3D was like breaching the first hole into Tutankhamen's tomb. I didn't even know it was possible to do something like that with Internet Explorer. I developed a taste for those 3D web games, however hacked out or janky they were (and they very much were both, constantly). I have to imagine that something similar happened to the kids who supped their first taste of the PC gaming market from Pangaea Software. For better and for worse, I feel like I would have been enamored with this had I found it on AddictingGames fifteen years ago.
It's...surprisingly fine? It's definitely quaint. I'd take a dozen of these "press spacebar on the Nanosaur to start, press spacebar on the glowing emergency exit sign to quit the game" menus over any of the modern, minimal, live-service offspring that tries to obfuscate the exit button to force you to waste more time in the game. There's something about the UI here that's really setting off a lot of weird nostalgia. I know I never played this, but it feels as though I've played a lot like it. I think Cruelty Squad did a great job in capturing a lot of the weirder design idiosyncrasies present in smaller-scale games from the turn of the millennium, and this is that but without the veil of irony draped over it. It's cute.
The actual gameplay itself is mostly unimpressive. There's an irony here that we're at the end of the Cretaceous period and yet the Nanosaur controls as if we're in the Late Cenozoic ice age; it feels like you've got skates strapped to the bottoms of your little digitigrade feet. Considering how most of your enemies are content to just walk at you and deal contact damage, these controls can make it especially annoying to try to pivot around and shoot them. You're much better off just bolting in a straight line and hoping they lose you, rather than trying to take them in a proper fight. There are a decent breadth of weapons here that are certainly fun to have a collection of, but they're not especially varied. The heat-seeking missile is the default laser by any other name. The rest of your playthrough is going to be running around in search of eggs to plop into randomly-available time portals, with some light platforming connecting everything together. It's competent. This is especially impressive for something designed in a three-week window, as detailed in this wonderful write-up, here. Given these circumstances, perhaps it's a testament to the skill of the people at Pangaea that it reached the heights of "competent" at all.
You've only got twenty real-world minutes to win or lose, so it's borderline impossible for the game to overstay its welcome. It's short, it's breezy, and it's really nowhere near as bad as I was expecting it to be. Nanosaur certainly isn't going to set the world on fire today, but it's a wonderful little look back into a bygone age of computing and the free-form design philosophies that came with it.