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By sheer luck brilliant forethought, each Endangered SNESpecies theme month game has had a shared element with the next game in line:

And the connecting thread for this week's game? Well, you're going to end up fighting bad cavemen/dinosaurs in your trip to...

As you may or may not recall, Endangered SNESpecies month is about me reviewing games that feature Anthropomorphic Cartoon Animals which were not featured in more than one game, AND who aren't from a TV series or movie.

This week is a little bit of a cheat, because DinoCity is evidently based on a made-for-TV movie. Who would have thought they could turn a buck based on such an obscure property? Why, the good folks at...

Undoubtedly the irem-ers saw the piles of cash that We're Back! A Dinosaur's Story netted for Visual Concepts and Hi-Tech Expressions Inc., and scoured the market for another dino-cartoon to pounce on.

Evidently they were unable to get the license to a dinosaur film that received a theatrical release, or was a sequel to a film that got a theatrical release*

Instead they teamed up with Smart Egg Pictures to realize the story of DinoCity as a video game.

I think I'll just let the story speak for itself*, using the second most speaking-est tools ever invented: THE WRITTEN WORD!

So, for the record, it was not OK to enter the lab: 2 points for Jamie.

When you start the game proper, a duck riding in a hot air balloon basket held aloft by purple bats explains that "Rockys Gang" stole a fuse from the power station, and you must return it to go home:

Hold on to your socks: it's a platformer! But despite the fact that a) Timmy's the only one who gets a "falling into the space/time/TV vortex" animation, and 2) he's a boy, you can still choose if you want to play as Timmy or his sister Jamie (who has much better detecting-if-entering-a-lab-is-OK skills).

And in fact, each of the Somethingwhatever siblings has teamed up with a different dino-pal:

And far be it from me to point out that both Rex and Tops are suffering from "Donald Duck Syndrome" -- they're anthropomorphic animals who wear elaborate shirts but not a stitch of pants or shoes.

Rex the Dinosaur's attack is a very short-range punch:

While Tops gets to fling arrows:

While they can both jump on enemies to hurt them, arrows are much more useful than fists.

The first level may lead you to believe that this is a standard run-and-bop platformer, where your goal is to not fall off cliffs while fighting evil cavemen. If that was all the game had to offer it would make Rex seem like a horrible choice...

But before long, you learn that the pseudo-Yoshi tag-team partnership between you and your dinosaur is more than just a funny sprite, and in fact leads to some interesting "puzzle platformer" gameplay:

In DinoCity, you ride around on your dino-buddy's shoulders, wandering and jumping to your heart's delight:

You and your dinosaur have a more Mickey Mousecapade-type interdependancy. If either of you go off a cliff, you both lose:

But that's not to say that you're linked at the hip (or worse yet, that one of you trails around slightly behind the other): normally you ride piggy-back as one sprite, but if you press the "R" shoulder button, Timmy or Jamie can leap off their dinosaur's back and run around separately.

The ability to separate has a number of uses throughout the game. Most immediately you'll notice it can be used like a "double jump" to collect power-ups (the dino and kid jump, you press "R" at the top of the jump's arc, then quickly press "jump" again to launch the kid even higher). But when you separate your dino immediately goes into "cowering mode" and falls straight down: if that means he or she goes off a cliff, prepare to meet your mickey.

But you'll also combine this splitting-up ability with the fact that the kids can jump just a BIT higher than the dinosaurs to solve "puzzles" where you need to go a jump or two ahead with the kid so they can trigger something (usually lowering a weight-based platform) that'll allowing both of you to proceed:

If you get back on your dinosaur before they thaw, they're easier to kill when frozen, but don't give you any rewards/bonus items. To tell the truth I didn't end up using this much, but I'm sure it becomes important eventually.

That's about right. While many of the cavemen/flying thingies are of the "normal platformer variety" and are defeated if you hit them/jump on them once, there's definitely some tough cookies amongst the enemies --

But there's also a number of unusual obstacles:

This is actually a pretty neat, quirky game; maybe a 60/40 platformer/puzzle-em-up.

As far as additional features, ironically the "2 Player Mode" is NOT simultaneous, you take alternating turns; you don't even have to play as different kids (BOTH of you can play as Team Rex or Team Tops if you want).

The "Sound Mode", (or "Sound Room", as it calls itself when you select it) has the neat feature of making the characters bounce up and down periodically while the tunes play, as if they're dancing:

...and though you have limited continues and lives, you get passwords at the end of each world (which are made up of 3-6 different short-ish levels):

Nevertheless, it's not a terribly easy game; and I believe your passwords keep track of how many lives and continues you had when you beat a world, so if you play badly enough you might end up with useless passwords (as in, "yes, you're on World 4, but you have 1 life and 0 continues left. Better go back to your World 3 password and try again").

Suffice to say, you'll be seeing the "Continue" screen more than a little:

...but if you're in to that kind of thing, it's a step up from most movie-to-game platformer cash-ins. Despite being a platformer game based on a virtually unknown property, irem has created a pretty reasonable game against all odds. And you know what that means?