Hi Kei-Nova, is amazing you found something that I actually seen played before. Yeah this mecha dinosaur was on Bootleg console two decades ago on my cousin NES, I actually played this and thought it was the coolest thing ever, never beat it though as my kid brain isn't wired properly to beat games just play them. MECHA Dinosaurs firing bullets instantly reminded me of Power Rangers at its Peak, with Red Rangers T-Rex 🦖 Let DYNOWRTZ War begin!!!
Thank you so much for the Super! That means a lot to me :) I'm glad I could remind you of this one! I plan on digging up a lot more older titles I can play in a smaller amount of time. While I didn't think this was the best, I hope you might be able to relive it and enjoy it again!
I do not think people really expected to finish games back then. You used to be able to count the games you could finish on one hand in the 80s and 90s.
I either had this or rented it... I was real big into dinosaurs when I was a kid, so of course I grabbed it... it must not have been very memorable because I don't remember most of this, but I do remember some. Not gonna defend it, it clearly wasn't one of my favorites as I'd mostly forgotten it until now.
That's great to hear. Since your opinion is so different then my own, and everyone else's at the time of release - what exactly did you like about it? You should pop it in, give it a go - let me know what you think.
I vaguely remember playing this game as a kid... and vaguely remember putting it down after like 5 minutes. Though, to be fair, I could see a modern indie remake working while being funny as shit if they lean into the camp just right.
If you'd played it for 5 minutes, I'd say that's probably the whole actual gameplay experience. Not that there is anything wrong with it, but just by looking at that screen space above the player - you can tell there just wasn't anything going on at all. They could totally spin it in a fun way, but I doubt they would. Hell might even be fun to spin it in an overly serious way and that itself if the joke!
@@Adonis.D.Prince I'm clearly not talking about a faithful remake here. I'm talking about running with the ridiculous concept but building an actually good game around it. If done right I think there's a pretty big audience for this kinda game.
@@Mike14264 I think at that point they might as well just make a whole different game with a similar concept. There just isn't any fan base or following for this game and it genuinely was received horribly at time of release.
I bought this brand-new, back in the day, based solely on what was on the box. I never fully understood it or made it very far in it. Actually - more accurately, I have no idea if I was making any progress in it or not!
I have to say, I felt the exact same way - right up until the credits rolled. I didn't know if I was moving forward or making a dent in anything because I kept repeating the exact same things over and over.
I rented this game a lot when I was a kid. Not because I thought it was fun, I actually don't remember much about the game itself from back then. No, I rented it multiple times based solely on the box art, which I thought was the coolest thing ever! (*≧∀≦*)
Huh, I owned this as a kid, but my Mom got the copy from Funcoland so it was used. No box art, and a sticker covered the.... cover art on the actual cartridge, so I never saw that art. I just always knew it as a mech game. I guess I understand your missing it as a mech game now that you showed it off. Y'know, I sort of enjoyed it; it was a very late NES get for me, so even as a kid I knew it was simplistic..... but I liked punching things as a robot dinosaur, what can I say? Kung-Fu was successful and that is literally just punching and kicking, so... this simplistic formula could entertain kids back in the day, somehow. If just for a very short window of a year or two before games got much more advanced, interesting, ambitious and/or polished. Still, it has a character named Dr. Brainius. Don't care what you say, it's 10/10 😄
Well, TMNT, Star Tropics, Twin Cobra, Dr. Mario, Super Mario 3, etc were released in the same year. So, I'd say Dynowarz was probably not the greatest game of that year, and that many better and more ambitious games were already out (like Leynos/Target Earth a year earlier). But, you know, if you enjoyed it - that is all that really matters, right?
I never had a NES, but honestly this game looks terrible. Like a proof of concept for a game, or an early alpha build. Certainly not something I would consider in a releasable state. And 1hr playtime is frankly shocking. I expect at least 8hrs of gameplay from a game to consider it worth it.
I completely agree. Yet, you'd be surprised at those people who ruthlessly defend it, even though it was widely known as bad at even the time it was released.
I mean, you'd be surprised with how short many games are. One of my last Super Mario Bros playthroughs (and trust me, I was not that used to the whole game) lasted me about 40-50 minutes I think, going through all the levels. There's quite a few classic NES titles, and even some that are considered hidden gems, that aren't all that long. Megaman 1 and 2 can be beaten in less than an hour. Megaman 3 is just slightly longer than that. So is Castlevania, and Batman, and quite a few of Capcom's games now that I think about it. I remember it took me about an hour or so to beat Godzilla: Monster of Monsters, and I honestly enjoyed that game quite a bit, despite its flaws and, admittedly, its repetitiveness, which kinda overstays its welcome by the time you reach some of the later planets, tho the simple kaiju fights with new monsters does keep things interesting. But yeah, not every game managed to be that long back then - about an hour or so was the standard, especially with platformers or side scrollers. Won't even mention shmups, if you want to ignore the time spent on using up limited lives and continues, and having to start from the beginning. That was a common way developers of the time had to make a game feel longer, to make the purchase feel more worthwhile - making it harder, sometimes unfairly so, to make it last longer for the average kid. Sometimes it made a game into a fun challenge, sometimes it made it infamous, and sometimes it was just shit. One thing is clear tho: an 8 hour game? Good luck finding enough games with that amount of content from back then to fill a shelf. Kirby's Adventure playthroughs are still under 2 hours. The original Legend of Zelda would take longer for a completely new player, as they'd have to figure things out, but for a somewhat knowledgeable person, I don't think it would reach 3 hours. Not even the earlier SNES or Mega Drive games had reached that point, not for quite a while. And honestly, longer games aren't a synonym of better or "more worthwhile" games. That's a relatively toxic mindset, that we have to "get our money/effort's worth" or whatever. When a game is really long, it can also happen that we just get tired and exhausted from it, and want to unchain ourselves from it to go do something else. Quite a few of the indie titles that I've played haven't taken me that long to beat them, but they've been such enjoyable experiences, I was really satisfied for them. And shorter games also mean that they can be replayable, or at least easily revisitable. Look, I'm not even defending this here game, it looks pretty bland and static to me. But its low runtime? A standard of the time. Is it that fair to judge a 30+ year old game or so by _all_ of our current standards?
@Mike14264 Fair enough. I never had a NES back in the day so I am not sure what games were like. I played PC games mostly. A much less limited platform than the NES I guess. Yes, some of the earlier PC games I played could be completed in under and hour. Prince of Persia 1 for instance HAD to be finished in under and hour. But it actually took a lot of retries to learn the levels and what to do and not do to be able to finish it that fast. So overall was many hours of gameplay (and yes, sometimes fruatration). Early PC games tended to have high difficulty to increase play time. That's rather frustrating now because modern games aren't like that. But back then that's what people were used to and enjoyed it. I played many games on the BBC Micro in the late 80s and early 90s. Those games were often very hard, despite their apparent simplicity. I personally think if a game can be completed in under an hour on the first try then there is not enough content or the difficulty is balanced wrong. Otherwise it just isn't good value for money.
@@RetroPcCupboard heh, funnily enough, most of the PC games I played as a kid were even shorter: online Flash games 😅 But yeah, jokes aside, I did play my fair share of PC games and ports. Jazz Jackrabbit 2, Ice Age 2, Sonic 3 & Knuckles, that sorta stuff. My dad had these installed on his PC. However, the bigger ones were definitely not the ports of arcade and home consoles games, but rather the ones already made for DOS and stuff. Probably not enough to reach 8 hours. The difficulty was what made them longer tho, a remnant of the arcadian design from back then, when limited lives were still important due to the fact they came from your quarters. Now, they just consumed time, in an age where kids had more free time to spare and not a lotta munty to buy or even rent that many games at once. It was a lot of factors that combined and just worked. But things ain't like that anymore. Heck, even when the NES released - people were starting to own them games. Wasting time with difficulty just to repeat what you had already done is never a good thing, even if the kids of the day are now nostalgic for that kinda challenge. And as time progressed, rentals became outdated, and things became digital... game design was also evolving. Games with lives started to have checkpoints in the middle of them, should you lose all your lives but unlimited continues. Then there came the games with passwords to return to your progress. Then they became even more useless when console games started coming with batteries to save the games (a relatively funny term, the more you think about the actual word "save"), to the point you could bypass losing lives entirely by "save scumming". It's funny, already the Legend of Zelda had foregone the idea of limited lives. Yeah, the game was difficult, but it was a different kind of difficulty. The main thing that made the game difficult was the initial lack of knowledge. The more tools you gained, and the more knowledge you gained about these tools and the world, the easier the game would become, even if you started from scratch. And of course, these are just console games. On PC, action games and platformers followed a similar course, but not so much puzzle games. Saving on these LucasArts games was encouraged in case you die due to a puzzle or encounter, permanently locked yourself into a bad outcome due to either accidental or intentional bad game design, like missing an important item you can't grab again later on. Then there came games like Myst, where you realized you could have games where you didn't die at all, and just got immersed by the world itself.
@@RetroPcCupboard I like to think that it depends on how much fun I have with a game. The time I can spend with a game is not the biggest, and even when it is, if a game is particularly long, I honestly prefer to take a break from it to go do something else. That Spiderman game for the PS4 is huge, probably well into those 8 hours you said. It's a really fun game... But I haven't finished it yet. Meanwhile, games like A Short Hike, Hylics, even some FNaF fangames... they're all really short, but they're the short and sweet variety. Of course, I'd say that the price is also a huge factor. The way you talk, it feels like every game is the same price to you, of about 40 bucks. Of course a 60 buck game that lasts about an hour can be a huge turn off for people, depending on its replayability, but you almost seem to forget that indie games that can last either an hour or eight, are either pretty cheap or even free. And old games? Well, emulation exists, hehe. They're all free to me, these 30 year old games. When price stops being a problem, to me, I'd rather play a fun 1-hour game and have a grand ol' time, than work myself through whatever 10 hour slog there is out there, where a third is cinematics, and the rest is of a genre and a visual style I feel is both pretty tired, and of not much interest to me anyways.
Have you played this? Are you okay? Do you need help? Blink twice. Let me know!
Yeah I played both games and there actually 👍 so suggested you play the first and the second
@@GundamB I'll have to keep note of them.
I own it but I don't think I've actually played it for more than 10 seconds lol
@@uncletony55 Hey, well that art is nice to look at at least!
@@KeiNova that's most likely the reason I bought it!
I loved this game back in the day, the mortars was my favorite weapon, the laser was cool too
Glad you enjoyed it on a personal level!
Hi Kei-Nova, is amazing you found something that I actually seen played before. Yeah this mecha dinosaur was on Bootleg console two decades ago on my cousin NES, I actually played this and thought it was the coolest thing ever, never beat it though as my kid brain isn't wired properly to beat games just play them. MECHA Dinosaurs firing bullets instantly reminded me of Power Rangers at its Peak, with Red Rangers T-Rex 🦖
Let DYNOWRTZ War begin!!!
Thank you so much for the Super! That means a lot to me :) I'm glad I could remind you of this one! I plan on digging up a lot more older titles I can play in a smaller amount of time. While I didn't think this was the best, I hope you might be able to relive it and enjoy it again!
I do not think people really expected to finish games back then. You used to be able to count the games you could finish on one hand in the 80s and 90s.
@@Furluge I'm playing Section Z right now and I totally agree with that statement.
Hey dude! Glad your back in the swing of things. Love the content
Thanks! I'm certainly trying to get things moving again.
@@KeiNova worth the wait bud.
I either had this or rented it... I was real big into dinosaurs when I was a kid, so of course I grabbed it... it must not have been very memorable because I don't remember most of this, but I do remember some.
Not gonna defend it, it clearly wasn't one of my favorites as I'd mostly forgotten it until now.
I think that sums it up well 'not very memorable'. It just goes and ends, nothing really to see or care about.
6:57 you barely contain your laughter at the insane plot
I couldn't, I'm too old for the grade-school names and it got me lol
I got Dynowarz for Christmas one year, I absolutely loved it. great game.
That's great to hear. Since your opinion is so different then my own, and everyone else's at the time of release - what exactly did you like about it? You should pop it in, give it a go - let me know what you think.
I vaguely remember playing this game as a kid... and vaguely remember putting it down after like 5 minutes. Though, to be fair, I could see a modern indie remake working while being funny as shit if they lean into the camp just right.
If you'd played it for 5 minutes, I'd say that's probably the whole actual gameplay experience. Not that there is anything wrong with it, but just by looking at that screen space above the player - you can tell there just wasn't anything going on at all. They could totally spin it in a fun way, but I doubt they would. Hell might even be fun to spin it in an overly serious way and that itself if the joke!
@@TheRyujinLP Who would be the target audience for that? The 8 people who've played this?
@@Adonis.D.Prince I'm clearly not talking about a faithful remake here. I'm talking about running with the ridiculous concept but building an actually good game around it. If done right I think there's a pretty big audience for this kinda game.
An indie remaster of this sorta thing has potential... they'd have to make things a lot more dynamic, but it could be a pretty fun idea!
@@Mike14264 I think at that point they might as well just make a whole different game with a similar concept. There just isn't any fan base or following for this game and it genuinely was received horribly at time of release.
I bought this brand-new, back in the day, based solely on what was on the box. I never fully understood it or made it very far in it. Actually - more accurately, I have no idea if I was making any progress in it or not!
I have to say, I felt the exact same way - right up until the credits rolled. I didn't know if I was moving forward or making a dent in anything because I kept repeating the exact same things over and over.
I recognized this one right away from the thumbnail!
Awesome! I really need to play more games like this.
I rented this game a lot when I was a kid. Not because I thought it was fun, I actually don't remember much about the game itself from back then. No, I rented it multiple times based solely on the box art, which I thought was the coolest thing ever! (*≧∀≦*)
I used to do the exact same thing with Dinosaurs for Hire, even though that was a meh game. Good times!
walker on the amiga....... Amazing
Funny thing is, I'm trying to find a way to capture Amiga right now 😆
So will you make a video about Vindictive drive 1 & 2?
You wouldn't happen to be the dev, would you?
No but getting in contact with the developer isn’t hard
@@GundamB yeah I'd like to support them, I just need to get the $$$.
Played it, liked it. It is rediculously easy and repetitive but for one playthrough, not bad.
Guess it depends on what you feel your time is worth.
@@KeiNova Sounds like their time was well spent if they enjoyed it.
@@Scorpiove Thats completely subjective, certainly.
I used to pretend this was power rangers when I was little
That was probably the game's best purpose, though it came out before Power Rangers came here.
To be fair, it looks interesting enough for a few minutes or maybe actually good with some rebalancing stuff around... maybe
Huh, I owned this as a kid, but my Mom got the copy from Funcoland so it was used. No box art, and a sticker covered the.... cover art on the actual cartridge, so I never saw that art. I just always knew it as a mech game. I guess I understand your missing it as a mech game now that you showed it off.
Y'know, I sort of enjoyed it; it was a very late NES get for me, so even as a kid I knew it was simplistic..... but I liked punching things as a robot dinosaur, what can I say? Kung-Fu was successful and that is literally just punching and kicking, so... this simplistic formula could entertain kids back in the day, somehow. If just for a very short window of a year or two before games got much more advanced, interesting, ambitious and/or polished.
Still, it has a character named Dr. Brainius. Don't care what you say, it's 10/10 😄
Well, TMNT, Star Tropics, Twin Cobra, Dr. Mario, Super Mario 3, etc were released in the same year. So, I'd say Dynowarz was probably not the greatest game of that year, and that many better and more ambitious games were already out (like Leynos/Target Earth a year earlier).
But, you know, if you enjoyed it - that is all that really matters, right?
A giant robot dinosaur fighting game sounds awesome. But dynowarz somehow managed to make it boring AF back in the day.
Yeah, I think that was the game's biggest crime - boredom for an entire hour.
I never had a NES, but honestly this game looks terrible. Like a proof of concept for a game, or an early alpha build. Certainly not something I would consider in a releasable state. And 1hr playtime is frankly shocking. I expect at least 8hrs of gameplay from a game to consider it worth it.
I completely agree. Yet, you'd be surprised at those people who ruthlessly defend it, even though it was widely known as bad at even the time it was released.
I mean, you'd be surprised with how short many games are. One of my last Super Mario Bros playthroughs (and trust me, I was not that used to the whole game) lasted me about 40-50 minutes I think, going through all the levels.
There's quite a few classic NES titles, and even some that are considered hidden gems, that aren't all that long. Megaman 1 and 2 can be beaten in less than an hour. Megaman 3 is just slightly longer than that. So is Castlevania, and Batman, and quite a few of Capcom's games now that I think about it.
I remember it took me about an hour or so to beat Godzilla: Monster of Monsters, and I honestly enjoyed that game quite a bit, despite its flaws and, admittedly, its repetitiveness, which kinda overstays its welcome by the time you reach some of the later planets, tho the simple kaiju fights with new monsters does keep things interesting.
But yeah, not every game managed to be that long back then - about an hour or so was the standard, especially with platformers or side scrollers. Won't even mention shmups, if you want to ignore the time spent on using up limited lives and continues, and having to start from the beginning. That was a common way developers of the time had to make a game feel longer, to make the purchase feel more worthwhile - making it harder, sometimes unfairly so, to make it last longer for the average kid. Sometimes it made a game into a fun challenge, sometimes it made it infamous, and sometimes it was just shit.
One thing is clear tho: an 8 hour game? Good luck finding enough games with that amount of content from back then to fill a shelf. Kirby's Adventure playthroughs are still under 2 hours. The original Legend of Zelda would take longer for a completely new player, as they'd have to figure things out, but for a somewhat knowledgeable person, I don't think it would reach 3 hours. Not even the earlier SNES or Mega Drive games had reached that point, not for quite a while.
And honestly, longer games aren't a synonym of better or "more worthwhile" games. That's a relatively toxic mindset, that we have to "get our money/effort's worth" or whatever. When a game is really long, it can also happen that we just get tired and exhausted from it, and want to unchain ourselves from it to go do something else. Quite a few of the indie titles that I've played haven't taken me that long to beat them, but they've been such enjoyable experiences, I was really satisfied for them. And shorter games also mean that they can be replayable, or at least easily revisitable.
Look, I'm not even defending this here game, it looks pretty bland and static to me. But its low runtime? A standard of the time. Is it that fair to judge a 30+ year old game or so by _all_ of our current standards?
@Mike14264 Fair enough. I never had a NES back in the day so I am not sure what games were like. I played PC games mostly. A much less limited platform than the NES I guess. Yes, some of the earlier PC games I played could be completed in under and hour. Prince of Persia 1 for instance HAD to be finished in under and hour. But it actually took a lot of retries to learn the levels and what to do and not do to be able to finish it that fast. So overall was many hours of gameplay (and yes, sometimes fruatration). Early PC games tended to have high difficulty to increase play time. That's rather frustrating now because modern games aren't like that. But back then that's what people were used to and enjoyed it. I played many games on the BBC Micro in the late 80s and early 90s. Those games were often very hard, despite their apparent simplicity. I personally think if a game can be completed in under an hour on the first try then there is not enough content or the difficulty is balanced wrong. Otherwise it just isn't good value for money.
@@RetroPcCupboard heh, funnily enough, most of the PC games I played as a kid were even shorter: online Flash games 😅
But yeah, jokes aside, I did play my fair share of PC games and ports. Jazz Jackrabbit 2, Ice Age 2, Sonic 3 & Knuckles, that sorta stuff. My dad had these installed on his PC.
However, the bigger ones were definitely not the ports of arcade and home consoles games, but rather the ones already made for DOS and stuff. Probably not enough to reach 8 hours. The difficulty was what made them longer tho, a remnant of the arcadian design from back then, when limited lives were still important due to the fact they came from your quarters. Now, they just consumed time, in an age where kids had more free time to spare and not a lotta munty to buy or even rent that many games at once. It was a lot of factors that combined and just worked.
But things ain't like that anymore. Heck, even when the NES released - people were starting to own them games. Wasting time with difficulty just to repeat what you had already done is never a good thing, even if the kids of the day are now nostalgic for that kinda challenge. And as time progressed, rentals became outdated, and things became digital... game design was also evolving. Games with lives started to have checkpoints in the middle of them, should you lose all your lives but unlimited continues. Then there came the games with passwords to return to your progress. Then they became even more useless when console games started coming with batteries to save the games (a relatively funny term, the more you think about the actual word "save"), to the point you could bypass losing lives entirely by "save scumming".
It's funny, already the Legend of Zelda had foregone the idea of limited lives. Yeah, the game was difficult, but it was a different kind of difficulty. The main thing that made the game difficult was the initial lack of knowledge. The more tools you gained, and the more knowledge you gained about these tools and the world, the easier the game would become, even if you started from scratch.
And of course, these are just console games. On PC, action games and platformers followed a similar course, but not so much puzzle games. Saving on these LucasArts games was encouraged in case you die due to a puzzle or encounter, permanently locked yourself into a bad outcome due to either accidental or intentional bad game design, like missing an important item you can't grab again later on. Then there came games like Myst, where you realized you could have games where you didn't die at all, and just got immersed by the world itself.
@@RetroPcCupboard I like to think that it depends on how much fun I have with a game. The time I can spend with a game is not the biggest, and even when it is, if a game is particularly long, I honestly prefer to take a break from it to go do something else. That Spiderman game for the PS4 is huge, probably well into those 8 hours you said. It's a really fun game... But I haven't finished it yet. Meanwhile, games like A Short Hike, Hylics, even some FNaF fangames... they're all really short, but they're the short and sweet variety.
Of course, I'd say that the price is also a huge factor. The way you talk, it feels like every game is the same price to you, of about 40 bucks. Of course a 60 buck game that lasts about an hour can be a huge turn off for people, depending on its replayability, but you almost seem to forget that indie games that can last either an hour or eight, are either pretty cheap or even free. And old games? Well, emulation exists, hehe. They're all free to me, these 30 year old games.
When price stops being a problem, to me, I'd rather play a fun 1-hour game and have a grand ol' time, than work myself through whatever 10 hour slog there is out there, where a third is cinematics, and the rest is of a genre and a visual style I feel is both pretty tired, and of not much interest to me anyways.