Dino Dicember #30: Jurassic Predator (2018)

Yes, “Predator”, singular, this has nothing to do with Extinction: Jurassic Predators (plural), which was done because The Dinosaur Project/The Lost Dinosaurs did ok in review and made some money, so we’re gonna make another found footage dinosaur movie, with good practical effects and worse in every other aspect.

But i already reviewed that. Just yesterday.

I have to preface i was gonna review Jurassic Thunder (the one head mounted machine guns on a T-Rex) for this Dino Dicember slot, but i relented, because i felt nothing i could say will matter to a movie built on the foundation of the Dr. Evil meme, and doubles downs on its putrid shit factor, amplified and self-excusing itself due to the narrative frame of 80’s comic book and action flicks.

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[EXPRESSO] Sly Spy/Secret Agent NSWDDL | Rolling Thunderball

Another Switch eShop sale on old arcade games from Data East (as part of the Johnny Turbo’s Arcade releases), another EXPRESSO review.

This time i picked up Sly Spy… never even heard of it before, but it look like it’s gonna be heavy on spy movie cliches and Bond references…for 2 bucks, sure,

And my intuition was spot on, alongside plenty of posters in the background, bearing titles or characters from other Data East games, like Karnov or Bad Dudes, there are plenty of Bond references in it. I was also right in guessing it being a fairly transparent Rolling Thunder rip-off, from the screenshots and description.

While it’s totally that, the game tries to disguise it a bit byt adding some variety, since it opens on a sky.-diving level, has a driving section on a bike with built-in machinegun and a couple of underwater levels where you harpoon sharks avoiding scuba enemies and mines.

The variety isn’t bad at all, but the main bulk is still on-foot levels and it’s basically Rolling Thunder, with a limited amount of ammo for the gun and the deliberate inability to just shoot upwards. Same sidescroller formula, plus the ability to shoot while jumping, use fists and kicks when you’re out of bullets, minus the ability to enter doors to replenish ammo. You can also fire a powerful golden gun-rifle when you get all pieces from fallen enemies.

And like Rolling Thunder, while there is some challenge involved, it’s way more about memorization of the often unfair level design through multiple quarters inserted into the machine and out of your pockets.

It’s alright, all things considered, but i don’t recommend spending more than 2 bucks on it, since it’s a very short experience from an era of design best left in the past.

Dino Dicember #27: Jurassic City (2015)

From the director of Silent Night, Zombie Night, and Terror Birds (also editor for many films, including Sand Sharks, obviously), we have yet another dino flick where Los Angeles is attacked by dinosaurs… not a single giant dinosaur, because people that write the synopses for these movie (on Wikipedia and/or IMDB, depends) don’t actually watch them most of the time, or they do watch them drunk and try to piece together the plot later, because there isn’t a T-rex (or equivalent) rampaging alone through LA. Yes, the DVD cover has it, but that’s false advertising.

In this occasion the dinos didn’t arrive via a Stargate-style time portal, but were created in a lab and escaped a secret facility manned by a shadowy government squad, and due to an incident they bring an armored van (containing 3 Monolophosauruses, in the same genus as the T-Rex but acting as this movie’s raptors equivalent) inside a nearby prison, where they just brought a serial killer… and a trio of college girls temporarly detained (having been busted the night before at an obnoxious party). As the dinosaurs break free and kill most guards and soldiers, the girls and the serial killer and are now forced to escape deeper into the prison, bedgrudgingly having to cooperate.

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[EXPRESSO] Bleed 2 PSN | They Watch The World Burn

After becoming “the world only and truest hero” in the first game (as in her fantasy videogame world), Wryn sat around playing videogames and all was well with the world. Until the usual gaggle of old rivals, new villains and alien invaders (some of them robotic) attack The City, for the usual reasons that this is a videogame and we need to shoot a lot of baddies. Not that it matters in any way, it is a videogame.

What has improved is the gameplay (graphics not so much), which was already good but has been refined, with better controls and a better control over the jump and dash manouver, and a new found emphasis on deflecting back projectiles and countering boss attack thank to the katana, already available in the fist BLEED, but now given as the standard melee weapon to compliment the usual twin pistols, making for faster, tougher and more satisfying encounters and ways to control the flow of battle.

Even the campaign levels are paced and flow better into each other, while also providing more variety, ticking all the classic arcade clichès, like riding and moving around rockets shot by the enemy airship, standing on moving cars while fighting in the highway, levating into the alien mothership, etc.

It’s still a short experience, but this one improves on replayability thank to the better gameplay, as it lends more to speed-runs or the Arcade “1 life only” run, but it also has more varied and interesting characters to unlock (including the Clawgirl from They Bleed Pixels), mutators and a mode that offers a set of 5 randomized levels. The Challenge mode is back unchanged, but at least they just outright say “it’s totally unbalanced”.

Short but quite sweet, i’d recommended getting the series bundle when it’s on sale.

[EXPRESSO] Bleed PSN | All The Shakespearoes

You’re not a hero. You’re a girl with magenta hair, Wryn, and you do have pen and paper, so it’s time to write and draw yourself into a story where heroes aren’t relevant anymore, and you twin-stick shoot your way through the random cabal of ex-heroes, from the alien defender, the “Astrogirlie” robot, the dragon, etc. so you can indict yourself to the Hall Of Heroes in the story you insert youself in. And maybe think what would Travis Touchdown would do.

The story is non-sensical meta-narration there just to “excuse” the kitchen sink approach to enemies and bosses, complete with passable 2D retro style graphics and characters that remind one of early 2000’s webcomics. Here it’s cute because it doesn’t hide itself under some “high pretense”, and because it focuses on what it wants, gameplay, and to be honest it delivers, combining side scrolling action in a twin stick shooter style,with emphasis on style, since you’ll have to master the triple jump dash and a bullet time bar to avoid the fairly challenging patterns of enemies and bosses.

Controls fairly well, shooting is satisfying, it’s quite challenging even on the standard setting without feeling impossible and so becoming just pure frustration. It’s good fun, but it’s fairly short lived fun, by design drawing in from the arcade era with just 6 stages. This isn’t necessary an issue, since it is a small indie title sold for relatively cheap, but i can’t say it has as much replayability as it parades, as aside from harder difficulties and trophies/achievements, the extra modes are kinda lousy, and there isn’t much that much to unlock or upgrade.

I’d still recommend pickin it up for fans of the twin stick shooters and sidescrollers, especially when it’s bundled on sale with the sequel, Bleed 2.

Dino Dicember #13: Jurassic Attack / Rise Of The Dinosaurs (2013)

Quite the functional, generic-ass title, i must say.

This one has TV movie and genre actor Corin Nemec of Stargate SG-1 and Beverly Hills 90210‘s fame, whom also was in Dragonwasps, Sand Sharks, Dracano/Dragon Apocalypse, and many more, including… Robocroc, which it’s exactly what it sounds. And will be quite likely reviewed here in a double feature with Roboshark. Eventually.

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Dino Dicember #11: The Eden Formula (2006)

Wait, this movie isn’t produced by Roger Corman, how it could it count as the second unofficial sequel/spin-off of the Carnosaur series?

Well, this time the connection is both direct and oblique, as it’s directed (and written) by John Carl Buechler, who worked on the special effects for the 3 Carnosaur movie, and – for whatever reason – he decided to crib stock footage from the first Carnosaur flick. Times.. never change.

Sorry for the screenshots’ abysmal resolutions and quality.

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Dino Dicember #9: Carnosaur 3: Primal Species (1996)

Remember when Carnousaur 2 script couldn’t definitely decide if to consider the first movie or not, so it just gave an explanation for the dinosaurs that could kinda link the two movies together?

Well, the third one doesn’t even try to follow one of the movies or both, so it’s no wonder it was released in the UK simply as “Primal Species”, might as well use the subtitle as the alternate title, since this one wasn’t even conceived as part of the Carnosaur series, originally.

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Dino Dicember #8: Carnosaur 2 (1995)

2 years later, following the rise of a new dino-human hybrid race… Wait, this is that type of sequel, just slap another number on the name of the previous movie, and do whatever the fuck you want with it, as long its about the same general theme and/or subject. Continuity, thy name is Corman.

This time we have a group of scientist that go a nuclear mining facility in Yucca Mountains (just missing an atomic Tor Johnson followed by gray, dull narration) to investigate a potential meltdown, but instead find dino eggs in one of the caves. Not, not radioactive dinosaurs, that would have been kinda fun, just the boring old cloned type of mutant dinosaurs. You can guess the rest.

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[EXPRESSO] Super Star Path NSWDDL | Match-3 Shooter Mess

After quite enjoying Bot Vice, i decided to check out the others games the spanish DYA Games had on the Switch eShop, and this one got my attention, especially because of the concept, a mixture of puzzle game and 2D spaceship shooter.

And it was on sale for 1 buck.

Basically, it plays like a standard 2D spaceship shooter (down to the vertical scrolling), but the aliens and obstacles are placed in a still grid like they’re puzzle pieces, so shooting a row of aliens of the same color triggers a chain reaction, making nearby aliens of different colors crystalize into unbreakable blocks. Defeated aliens also leave behind gems, emeralds (3 for stage to collect) and upgrades, which can be used to buy more spaceships and upgrade their stats.

This… until you reach the level’s boss, then the pace speeds up considerably, the puzzle elements are thrown away all together, and you can use autofire. You’ll need it, since the bosses are fast and hit hard even at the beginning, throwing bullet hell style projectile patterns, quite jarring, even when you know it’s coming and you bought/upgraded better ships…it just feels like a different game, and i feel it’s done to just pad the longevity out a bit, as you have only 6 levels, each longer and featuring some specific obstacle/damage.

Problem is arriving to the bosses themselves it’s more a matter of luck than anything else, due to badly randomized level layouts, which result in many runs where you simply can’t do anything to avoid dying, trapped by the enemies patterns to be crushed by the scrolling in a way or another.

Shame, because the idea is nice, but for how short lived this game is, it’s mostly a frustrating, unbalanced pile of aggravation more than anything else. Disappointing.

P.S.: Also, don’t bother tackling the final mission unless you have ALL the emeralds, because even if you manage to kill the boss… you will die anyway if you don’t already have all the emeralds. No, the game doesn’t make it clear you NEED to get them all to even finish the game, it just says that you need to get them all, implying they’re important to the story and in general to the game, in the How To Play section.

Fuck you too, Super Star Path.

Please never pull shit like this again. Just don’t.