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 (Sega Master System Review)

May 24, 2024 by Leave a comment

The Flintstones
Platform: Sega Master System
Released November 1991 (1988 on Home Computers)
Adapted by Paul Marshall
Published by Grandslam Entertainments
Released Only in Europe
NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED

That green thing above Fred’s head is the paintbrush. I never understood half the jokes in the Flintstones. Logically, the joke that they use living animals to replace electronic appliances makes sense, right? The humor is supposed to be they’re the MODERN stone age family, with all the conveniences a typical nuclear family of the 1960s has even though they don’t have electricity. Instead, animals are their electric can openers, garbage disposals, or laundry machines. In fact, that’s the Flintstones punchline in its entirety. Why a living paint brush though? Why is using an animal more convenient than a stick with hair? Do the Flintstones need the satisfaction of knowing, when they stare at their living room wall, that an animal suffered SO MUCH to make it that color? It’s funny they use an animal that lives under their sink as a garbage disposal, in part because we really used to stick pigs in our outhouses and rain shit down on them. They loved it! They never ate better! But Michelangelo didn’t take one of the piglets and use it to paint the Sistine Chapel! At least when it was still alive. I can’t say with certainty The Last Judgment wasn’t painted with the snout of a dead piglet, but he was definitely not using a living one. It’d squirm too much!

It’s rare that I play a game so bad that I think the developers should be ashamed of themselves, but that’s the Flintstones for the Sega Master System, and presumably the earlier 1988 home computer games that this version copied. An absolutely atrocious, lazy licensed game that has no soul at all. It’s divided into four segments. First, you paint a wall. Do I even need to go on? It’s not even a fun video game type of paint the wall, either. You have to catch the paintbrush, because, well, Flintstones. Then, you have to dip the paintbrush in the paint bucket, which you cannot move. Then, you put some paint on the walls. Then you repeat this step until the wall is done. The challenge is a strict time limit, moving a ladder into the right place, and the fact that Pebbles escapes the crib and draws on the bottom part of the wall, ruining your work. The collision detection makes no sense for where your paint will be, and this is made worse by the fact that your brush runs out of paint really fast. Also, it still consumes paint to do a portion of the wall you’ve already done. It’s awful, but once I figured out that Pebbles being out of the crib too long doesn’t lead to a fail condition, I won pretty quickly. I just painted the top part of the wall and most of the bottom while she sat there doodling. Then I dropped her in the crib, caught the paint brush, and finished the bottom. This was so boring that I’m half surprised level two wasn’t “now watch it dry!”

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The second level is a very quick drive to the bowling alley that lasts under a minute. Over the course of a few screens, you have to hop over rocks. The collision is god awful and the timing is weird, but it’s over with fast. Then, an actual full-sized game of bowling is the third level. It’s one of the worst bowling engines I’ve ever experienced. At the point of impact, the balls and pins are replaced with a BAM graphic. Even when the ball is being delivered right into the pocket, the head pin and other pins COULD be left over. Even with this problem, once you find the sweet spot and the right amount of left hook and power, getting a strike is easy. In my first full game, I had a 230. It should have been a 220, but whoever made this doesn’t understand how bowling works. The 10th frame has a max of three balls. Not complicated, right? Except when I played the tenth frame, I got a strike, a 9, and then got the spare.. and it gave me another ball. Are you kidding me? By the way, the object is to beat Barney’s score, and he’s a terrible bowler. I won 90 to 230. It wasn’t even close, but it might actually be entirely random. While I was learning the mechanics, at one point Barney had a double strike and was neck-and-neck with me. Once I understood what I was doing, I couldn’t miss and Barney couldn’t hit. What a bizarre game.

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After all this, the game suddenly becomes a terrible platformer. Flintstones’ home computer roots show here, as it’s along the same lines of the type of sloppy, unpolished shovelware that my older readers had to slog through to find the rare quality games on their Amigas or Sinclairs. You make your way up a shaft, dodging enemies and compensating for gusts of wind. There’s a helmet that, once you grab it, you don’t even have to bother dodging the nuts and bolts that try to crush you later. Grab Pebbles and bring her back the way you came and.. that’s the whole shameful game. I have played some doozies at Indie Gamer Chick, but Flintstones might be the most cynical. I got the distinct impression this version of the Flintstones was not a game anyone wanted to make. There’s no heart to it. There’s no polish. What little extra effort there is to be like the cartoon is undone by atrocious gameplay. Anything resembling charm is entirely dependent on the connection to the show itself. Like, hey, Fred does his tippy-tingle-toes approach before releasing the ball in bowling. That would be commendable if the game was good, but it ain’t, and so that effort becomes obnoxious instead. The best thing I can say about the Flintstones is it looks the part, but that actually takes on a sinister vibe when the gameplay is as horrendous as it is here. They knew what they needed: the license and the graphics to look enough to get kids to pester their parents to buy it. That’s cruel, isn’t it? The Flintstones is the rare game that’s so bad that it’s borderline evil for it.
Verdict: NO!

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