Disney's Dinosaur

Not so much a Game Boy Color game for dino devotees as it is for lemur lovers.

It's a sheer problem of scale. Dinosaurs are very big. On a two-inch Game Boy Color screen, dinosaurs are now very small. Big creatures are cool because they are very big, and when they are very small, they're just lizards.

Ubi Soft's rendition of Disney's Dinosaur (a breathtaking film that opened this weekend) obviously lacks the scope and grandeur of the film. That's a given. The big pity, though, is that the game design is created mostly with puzzles out of the abilities of the dinosaur heroes of the movie. You end up playing most of the game with a leaping monkey. That may be fun elsewhere, but I want to stomp, to swim, to fight. I want to eat leaves out of the treetops, and then have some other creature try to feed on me. If the game box says "Dinosaur", I want Dinosaurs.


  • Based on the Disney animated film
  • Six playable dinosaur characters from the movie
  • Puzzle and action gaming
  • 27 levels
  • Game Boy Printer support
  • Only for Game Boy Color
Without the sheer beauty and splendor of Disney's Dinosaur (which just hit theaters last weekend), any translation of this story simply falls to a less than gripping game concept (where are the dinos going if the extinction is eminent?) and characters that don't translate well from the film (without the facial expressions and voices, they're just big creatures with no human qualities).

Fortunately, Ubi Soft and developer Digital Eclipse have worked out an innovative style of gameplay that grasps at the film's coattails. The task at hand is to team together six prehistoric creatures in an effort to get out of their ravaged homeland and find some small paradise to spend the rest of their existence in. Each animal will have to use his own special abilities to get past obstacles, and only by switching partners, pooling resources, and dodging enemies will the band make it to the promised land.

The problem with the game is that only three of those six creatures are dinosaurs -- the other three are lemurs. And for the vast majority of the gameplay, you'll have to play as one of the lemur monkeys, as they are the only ones who can jump or climb. Even Aladar, the film's star, sees little screen time in this game. How heartbreaking is that for kids that their Dinosaur game is all about chimps instead of ferocious T-Rexes or mighty Stegos?

There are an unfortunate lack of good puzzles or teamwork skills in this title, and as that's the whole purpose of the game design, play quickly becomes droned and boring. In an attempt to get all of the movie's stars in, the lemur skills are doled out between the three, meaning only one can jump, one can climb, and one can run. Similarly with the dinosaurs, one can ram, one can pick up things with his teeth, and one can swing his tail. Clearly there should have been a more diverse cast, as you switch off between the three in situations that any one of the creatures should have the ability to handle but yet can't just because it wouldn't be a puzzle otherwise. The PlayStation version at least has a flying dino, but in the Game Boy version, these flying creatures are only enemies.

And the teamwork is similarly anemic. If this has been a prehistoric Lost Vikings, the game might have been fun. But dinos don't even stay on the screen when you switch -- at teeter-totter puzzles, you drop off one of the lemurs, then switch to another dino, and trigger the action to swing the teeter-totter. The whole time, only one creature is on screen, so when you're a dino you don't even realize that the monkey is waiting on the other side of the springboard, waiting to be launched. When you trigger the sequence, all you get is a title screen telling you that the lemur has been launched across the chasm -- very uneventful.


The killing stroke is that platform gaming in Dinosaur is just worthless. About halfway in, players will face a string of leaping challenges, and the control all of the sudden goes just south of hell. Up to that point, the game is an amusing but not terribly interesting puzzler. Once you get to the platform action, however, there's no reason to continue. Bad collision detection and control simply becomes a terrible burden, and the rest of the game isn't worth working through the frustration. It's just no fun anymore -- especially since you play these sequences not with a mighty dinosaur, but with a puny baboon. Dinosaurs didn't become extinct; They simply dropped out of the limelight all fed up playing second banana to a bunch of banana eaters.

In This Article

Dinosaur Image


Rated "E"
DeveloperUbisoft Montreal
Release DateFebruary 22, 2001
PlatformsPlayStation 2, Game Boy Color, Dreamcast, PlayStation, PC
Disney's Dinosaur
Disney's Dinosaur