The Flintstones: Surprise at Dinosaur Peak (NES Review)

May 26, 2024 by 1 Comment

The Flintstones: Surprise at Dinosaur Peak
aka The Flintstones II
Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System
Released October, 1993
Developed by Taito
NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED

Barney was always the real star, anyway.

Flintstones: Surprise at Dinosaur Peak is one of the three games in a trilogy of Taito NES games, along with Little Samson and Power Blade 2, that are worth a buttload of money. All recent copies listed on eBay sold for around $1,300. It’s one of the reasons why I can’t help but wonder if Taito is leaving a lot of money on the table by not putting out a collection of their Flintstones games. At first, I thought maybe they would be too generic, but then I played Surprise at Dinosaur Peak. It retains the engine from the previous game, Rescue of Dino & Hoppy. Fred’s sprite and various poses are virtually identical, as is his club attack. So, you can imagine my surprise that everything wrong with the first game has been cleaned-up here. Collision detection is improved enough that your club doesn’t clip through enemies, and it now feels like it has real world weight behind it. And, they even added a reason to charge up your club, as a fully-powered strike now creates a rumble that shakes the entire screen. As a result, the combat is very satisfying in Dinosaur Peak. It’s one of many elements that makes this not only the superior NES Flintstones game, but one of the most underrated titles on the entire platform.

Sports are back, only this time there’s no superpowers to be won. You really are just getting 1ups this time, I think. There’s only two events, with hockey going first and basketball returning for the second. I literally couldn’t believe they brought back basketball, almost identically as it was before. Except, this time you can do a running jump shot. If you time it right, it almost looks like a dunk. Oh, and this time around, each game is divided into two 30 second halves with Fred going first and Barney second. These are terrible, and since there’s a pause every time a score happens, they take a LOT longer than 60 seconds. If Dinosaur Peak gets a re-release, I sort of hope they cut these.

The biggest change is the addition of Barney. They couldn’t have implemented this better, as pressing select instantly swaps Fred and Barney. No special effects. No puff of smoke. No delay at all. In fact, there’s a couple moments built around this. Fred’s ability to grab most cliffs and pull himself up returns for the sequel, a maneuver his neighbor can’t perform. Instead, Barney can hang from wires or poles, then pull himself up and stand on them for a brief moment. He can even jump once he pulls himself up. Fred can’t do any of this, and there’s moments in Dinosaur Peak where you have to pull yourself up a wire with Barney, then jump up and swap to Fred mid-air in order to grab a cliff. It’s actually a lot trickier than it sounds to pull-off, which is why I’m thankful that type of design doesn’t show up until the end of the game. I should also note that the final sequence before the last boss requires some of the most precision movement I’ve seen, so you’ll want to practice. Thankfully, this go around the gameplay is smooth and the controls are damn near perfect. If there was a flaw in the last game, chances are it’s corrected for Surprise at Dinosaur Peak.

There’s even a brief shmup sequence that takes you to the final couple levels. A lesser game would have leaned too hard into this, but the Flintstones II’s shmup stage is over really quick, making it an enjoyable distraction.

Most of my complaints are really minor ones. Barney’s slingshot weapon is nowhere near as fun as Fred’s club, nor is there really any point where it feels like it’s necessary to use. Dinosaur Peak does a remarkably good job of mixing the platforming elements equally between Fred moments and Barney moments, but that didn’t carry over to the combat or enemies. Admittedly, I was fine with that since the club is so much more satisfying to use anyway. While the level design in general is consistently good, it never reaches the heights of true greatness. As much as I enjoyed Flintstones II,  it never once managed to produce a single moment that made me sit up and go “wow!” It’s a game stuck in cruise control, and perhaps the best thing I can say about it is that it’s that rare game where the cruise control doesn’t drive it right off a cliff. That’s a minor miracle itself, because the bosses are very generic and the set pieces are unmemorable, except for the aforementioned shmup portion that’s really a glorified mini-game. Really, the most remarkable thing about Flintstones is that it proves the previous Flintstones had potential to be one of the best games on the NES, only the lack of polish wrecked its chances. This Flintstones realizes the potential and becomes one of the best platformers on a console defined by platform games.

This donut is actually a relentless chaser and an instakill nightmare. Dinosaur Peak made being chased by a killer tire a thing before the 2010 horror classic Rubber made people afraid to get their tires changed.

Easily my #1 complaint is the sudden extreme difficulty spike that happens right before the final boss. After nine stages of relatively breezy platforming hijinks, the game introduces a malevolent tire that relentlessly chases you through a series of narrow corridors. There’s spikes everywhere, and while they don’t instakill you, your damage animation will take long enough that the tire, an instakill element, will certainly catch you. It’s not a short segment, either. It goes quite a long time, culminating with an astonishingly brutal final stretch. In it, you have to use Barney to climb up a shaft of tightropes, THEN switch to Fred to smash rocks in your way THEN switch back to Barney to climb the ropes again. The last boss in the next room is a cakewalk compared to this crap. It’s one of the most frustrating and difficult precision movement sections I’ve played recently. Up to this point, I think Flintstones II was right up there with Wacky Races in the “excellent game for children under 10” category, but that final area makes me second guess that, as it doesn’t allow any room for error. I think the average child will probably need a lot of help getting through it. I had built up 16 lives by this point, and hell, I’m pretty okay at this gaming thing. I ended up burning through all 16 lives and ultimately ended up reloading a save state. I literally couldn’t believe how overboard they went with this! You can almost hear the developers say “let’s see the little bastards get through this!”

Actually, the Haunted House before this was a tricky one too. In it, you have to hit switches that briefly open doors, then sprint to them while not stopping for even a moment to do battle with ghosts that can be stunned but not killed. A few sections in this stage took me multiple attempts to finish. BUT, I don’t think a player is likely to die on that level. That wheel gauntlet at the end, on the other hand, is so cruelly brutal. I don’t understand what they were thinking. Perhaps this is one of those cases of “rental proofing” that I’ve heard about, where difficulty is ramped up in order to assure children can’t beat a game in a single weekend rental. Well, except for the fact that they didn’t produce many copies.

Even with that wheel section, I would call Flintstones: Surprise at Dinosaur Peak one of the all-time most underrated NES games. I’m now officially operating under the assumption that the post-Super Nintendo era of the NES was secretly a second golden age for the console. And instead of continuing this Hanna-Barbera marathon, I’m now much more interested in exploring this. What’s most heartbreaking of all is Flintstones II is so rare that it carries that wallet-busting $1,000+ value. That tells me that NES fans in 1993-94 likely never got to play it. Sure, anyone can use an emulator these days, but that doesn’t help an NES owning child in the mid-to-late 90s, does it? Dinosaur Peak deserved to be one of the titles that ushered the NES officially into gaming’s past. A wonderful title to remind everyone why the Nintendo Entertainment System was the savior of console gaming. It’s really good, and as a member of the NES’ most popular genre, it should have been celebrated as one of the final standard bearers of arguably the greatest gaming platform of all-time. That Flintstones: Dinosaur Peak is instead famous only for its holy grail rarity is a bonafide gaming tragedy. Hey Taito, it’s time for a compilation. Here’s your anchor game.
Verdict: YES!

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The Flintstones: The Rescue of Dino & Hoppy (NES Review)

May 24, 2024 by 2 Comments

The Flintstones: The Rescue of Dino & Hoppy
Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System
Released December, 1991
Developed by Taito
NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED

I’ll say this for Taito’s first crack at the Flintstones: there’s some damn gorgeous sprite work. I’m not entirely sure why they drew some of the Asian enemies in the Chinese themed stage to be literally yellow. Surely this was not cool even in 1991. If Rescue of Dino & Hoppy gets a re-release, it’s going to need someone to go in and change the appearance of the enemies.

The first Flintstones game didn’t release on the NES until a couple months after the Super NES launched in North America. In fact, it barely made it out in time for Christmas the year most NES children were probably hoping Santa brought them the upgraded Nintendo console. If not, Rescue of Dino & Hoppy isn’t the worst consolation prize. Actually, it’s not a bad game by any stretch. Over the course of its one hour or so playtime. There’s only one brief section I consider to be genuinely bad. A literal sliver of a single level that takes maybe fifteen, twenty seconds to complete. That’s pretty impressive for a platform game from this era. The problem is none of the rest of the game rises above being just alright. By golly, this really is an authentic Flintstones experience!

Even the name is bad. Given the heavy emphasis on the hanging mechanic, the name could have been “Fred Flintstone Hangs Around.” I haven’t really watched all that much of the show, so I thought Hoppy might be the name of the saber-toothed cat that throws Fred out of the house. No, it’s the family pet of the Rubbles. Why didn’t they make the game “The Rescue of Pebbles & Bamm-Bamm?” Hey, I like animals as much as the next person, but come on!

The big hook to the game is Fred’s ability to hang from and pull himself up most (but not) ledges. With the exception of moving platforms, all of which can be grabbed onto, the general rule is that a ledge that comes to a point is the one that can be held from. However, there are enough exceptions to that rule that it makes judging what can and can’t be hung onto a little frustrating. Also frustrating is pulling yourself up. You just hold the button and press up, but it doesn’t always work as fast as you’d want it to. This goes back to the “only bad section” I talked about, where you have to climb a vertical shaft that’s rapidly filling with instakill lava. For the life of me, I thought I was doing something wrong in this part and that there was some kind of “quick pull” technique I was unaware of. I wish I had looked it up, because I would have discovered there was a lot more to this Flintstones adventure than I realized.

Superpowers are won by playing three identical games of 1 on 1 basketball. I figured I was winning free lives or coins or something. I think I was half paying attention during my first play session. Oh, and I want to note that I was impressed that they actually worked in a jump shot mechanic AND that Fred flicks his wrist on the shot. I’m gushing over Fred Flintstone having good shooting form in a thirty-two year old NES title’s basketball minigame, and people think I’m some kind of ogre?

I didn’t know that there’s three superpowers I actually did unlock, but I didn’t know I had them. Hey, I never paused the game to discover them. Not that I was missing much. All three superpowers cost coins to use once you have them, so only one of the superpowers is generally useful: the high jump, which allows you to spring off a dinosaur high into the sky for five coins. The other two, a pair of wings and scuba diving equipment, are pretty much worthless because each flap of your arm besides the first one when you activate the powers costs you four coins. In the case of the wings, they’re theoretically useful to save you if you mistime a jump and aren’t falling to your doom, but the only time I tried using them, I died anyway because I didn’t have enough coins to get back up to the platform. In the case of the scuba gear, I never found a single situation where it was useful.

Cost to use the wings? Four coins per flap. Cost to Fred’s self esteem for dressing like a choad just to rescue the family pets? Incalculable.

To the Taito’s credit, they were all-in on the hanging from ledges mechanic. Every single level is built around using this for navigation, start to finish. If you’re going to use a movement gimmick to stand out, Flintstones is proof that you really ought to stick with it, through thick and thin. The hanging carries the game over the finish line, because god knows the combat doesn’t. You would think bludgeoning your enemies to death would be satisfying, especially since it has an accompanying POW! impact bubble with each landed strike. But, the combat in the first Flintstones NES game is kind of awful. The collision isn’t sprite-for-sprite accurate, and it’s not rare for your swings to go right through an enemy. Even worse is that they seem to be given a lot more latitude in hitting your collision box than you do with them. It’s never a deal breaker, but the club feels oddly feather-like and lacks the OOMPH that I desire from such a weapon.

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Sticking with the sub-weapons makes more sense. There’s three, and all are useful at various times. The axe is straight out of Castlevania, thrown in a big arc that goes high in the air before coming down. The slingshot is a straight-forward long range weapon, and then there’s the egg. It’s a literal screen-clearing bomb, and yes, it works on bosses, though with them, it takes a few hits. In fact, I used it to beat all three forms of the final boss. The club can be charged up, but I never really found it all that useful. There’s a couple basic enemies that move slowly and are so ridiculously spongy that I genuinely, no joke, think they only exist to finally give the players an excuse to charge-up the club. Oh, and I used it on the ice level’s boss, but only because I ran out of coins. The bosses also suffer the same collision issues the basic enemies have. Usually, games like this need the bosses to be satisfying to fight. Flintstones is weirdly the opposite: the level design, set pieces, and the small handful of one-time special events carry the day, while the bosses nearly burn away all the goodwill. They’re boring at best, and far too spongy. The collision is mediocre and the movement is slightly sluggish, but it’s not bad, either. Flintstones NES is one of those games that is right in the middle, just above the divider line.

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At only eight levels, one of which doesn’t even have a boss, Rescue doesn’t last long enough to wear out its welcome, and there’s a couple unexpected set pieces that put a smile on my face. The fact that they worked in some cartoon gags, like Fred ducking by his head retracting into his shirt? That’s cute. It’s a sweet-hearted game and it’s okay. The best thing I can say about the Flintstones is that kids who didn’t get to upgrade to the NES had one decent, visually spectacular (by NES standards) game for the 1991 holiday season. While playing Rescue of Dino & Hoppy, it was really clear that Taito wanted to do for Hanna-Barbera what Capcom had done for Disney with titles like DuckTales. In a way, they completely succeeded, since Hanna-Barbera has always been a poor man’s Disney. Sorry fans, but it’s true. Not that their product is bad, necessarily, but they’re always in Disney’s shadow. That’s the case with the Flintstones. It’s fine. It’ll do, but it’s not in the same league as the best 8-bit Disney games. Assuming this really were a Disney game, it’d be a B-Tier one, above Adventures in the Magic Kingdom but below Mickey Mousecapade. In a sense, the Flintstones is one of the most accurate licensed games ever. It’s a b-lister game for a b-lister media franchise.
Verdict: YES!

Flintstones, The - The Rescue of Dino & Hoppy (USA)-240522-141432

Barney Rubble is clearly high on peyote here. “I told you not to eat that cactus, dum-dum!” Oh and that’s NOT Pebbles & Bamm-Bamm. That must explain why Wilma is in her mourning dress. The kids were probably eaten by a dinosaur while Fred was having his adventure. That also explains Barney turning to drugs. Thank god the review is over, because this is starting to go to the dark place.

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