Dino Riki – NESventures in Prehistory

One thing you’ll notice as you pour over games libraries is that sometimes there’s this great premise or boxart or fascinating descriptions. The NES had its fair share of these, and I’m sure the prospect of dinosaurs caused plenty of us to rent Adventures of Dino Riki. It’s one of many games I would have rented for this reason, and it’s well over 25 years now. This is a game with a dubious reputation, and my memories weren’t exactly glowing. But I was curious if my thoughts about the game were from this disconnect of concept and execution, or if it was simply because it was bad.

Honestly the boxart is definitely promising. It’s cartoony, but clean and has a lot of character. It also features one of the only dinosaurs in the game (the Tyrannosaurus) and a pterosaur. It’s there to sell the game as being this prehistoric romp.

 
Riki is a caveman which fights his way through of hordes and waves of various animals and obstacles, dinosaurs in the vast minority but all of them having a decent degree of character nonetheless. Adventures of Dino Riki is a vertical scrolling on-foot shoot-em-up. Your bullets are stones – slow and weak, but upgradeable to tomahawks, boomerangs, and torches that increase drastically in power and rate of fire. You can clear any segment of the game starting from your stones (from what I experienced) and while enemy numbers and formations can be pretty harsh this is a game of memorization – once you know what’s coming the levels go much more quickly.

The biggest issue Dino Riki has as a platformer is the platforming. You will die if you come into contact with a cavernous pit or a pool of water, so the obvious solution for poor, landlocked Riki is to jump. This is extremely touchy as the game is an autoscroller and you will constantly adjust your position as you line up a jump. And with the collision detection as poor as it is, you will want to take the time to line up these leaps. When platforms become narrow or there are enemies flooding onscreen while you are trying to do this, it becomes an issue.

The problem that arises when enemies are present is that Riki cannot jump over enemy shots (and most enemies shoot) or enemy bodies. That would have made an interesting, but risky, evasive technique. One solution is to find a wing power-up for Riki, which lets him fly as long as you hold down the jump button. And while this has some limitations, it makes platforming sections trivial. It’s one of a number of hidden power-ups, however, and can only be uncovered by shooting an invisible tile somewhere in the maps.

There are a few power-ups like this. One is a Macho Riki item that changes you into a super buff caveman that can throw images of himself as an attack. These are very hard to find though, so I’d focus on maintaining your torch attack instead. Your weapon degrades as you take hits, but the game does let you take multiple hits and even expand your life bar so it’s fairly forgiving in that regard.

Especially since sometimes it’s difficult to avoid damage in this game. For instance I had to continue in 3-4 and there are these black sphere enemies near the start of the segment. They spin around Riki, about 6 of them, and rapidly close in on him. You can get the tomahawk before they appear but I was not able to kill all of them before they reached him – the weapon was not strong or fast enough. So one or two would get through, I’d take a heart of damage and be kneecapped for the rest of the segment. Most of the game seemed relatively fair after death except for a few instances like this.

It’s sort of like Gradius in that regard, there’s a bit of culture shock when you’ve been crushing the game with a fully upgraded character and then all of a sudden you die late in the game and have to cope with your scrubby starting gear. But similar to Gradius you can persevere with the bare essentials so if you’re patient you can overcome. That said this game is not newbie friendly, and one of the general comments you’ll see about Dino Riki is that it is difficult.

And yeah, it’s tough. You’re a fairly decent sized target and a lot of crap gets thrown at you especially near the end. And the jumping is unabashedly bad. When I started this game I immediately hit a wall before I started recognizing patterns and how to play, it’s particular style of shmup just needs a bit of time spent with it.

Strangely though the bosses are dead easy, perhaps to compensate for the stages being nails ha ha.

However, if you’re playing Dino Riki you’re probably no stranger to difficult games, or top down shmups on the console. We are driven by these games because they awaken something deep within us, that push to beat the game because it’s hard but also because it’s a lot of fun and every new sector you reach feels like an accomplishment. Dino Riki’s lack of enemy and level variety and sketchy gameplay sort of scuttle this. It’s not really Dino Riki’s difficulty that sinks it, honestly it’s that it could have been so good if it was much tighter. Shmups are not an uncommon sight on the NES and Famicom but when you have a masterpiece like Recca or Crisis Force or Life Force and so on, there’s a certain level of polish and quality you come to expect.

Adventures of Dino Riki did stir these feelings in me, I was incensed to beat it and in spite of its flaws I had a lot of fun with it. I haven’t squeezed the ol’ NES controller so tightly in so long, I have a sore thumb to show for it. Honestly, I love playing games which run with a loose theme and just present you with elements that the designers probably thought would be cool. It doesn’t so much matter to me that it’s on the crap side of things, I can still see the fun in it. I think Dino Riki falls into this category for me.

That said, I don’t think I can recommend this to anyone, unless you’re curious and an NES enthusiast. It’s a very charming game that stands to frustrate a lot of potential players. Approach with caution.