DINOSAUR PLANET!

[A Black Falcon]

In some of the most exciting game industry news in... I have no idea, a decade or more probably, somebody... leaked out a late, probably as much as 90% complete beta version of the N64 version of Rare's lost classic Dinosaur Planet!  This nearly feature-complete but extremely broken build is from December 2000, close to the point where Rare moved development over to the Gamecube after Nintendo decided that finishing and polishing the N64 game would have pushed it out of the first few months of 2001, and they wanted the N64 dead well before its time so it was moved over to Gamecube instead of releasing as one last N64 hit in, I would guess, summer '01 or such.  As the N64 fan that I am I have always found Nintendo's quick abandonment of the N64 in early 2001 extremely disappointing; we could have had a bunch of amazing things on the system had they just released them!  Dinosaur Planet's the big one, but a US release of Sin & Punishment is another huge one, and we could have had Animal Forest too if they had localized it quickly.  (And why didn't we get one of the Custom Robo games at some point, here in the US?  But anyway.)  There were other N64 games that were cancelled and moved to the next generation too, such as Resident Evil Zero and Eternal Darkness, but Dinosaur Planet was the farthest along of all of them.

And making it worse, the choice to move the game to Gamecube caused a full two year long delay, followed by a game, Star Fox Adventures, that was deeply disappointing.  Star Fox Adventures is an action-adventure game with strong Zelda influences, but without Zelda's freedom or gameplay quality.  Instead, the game is totally linear and gameplay is boring and flawed.  The conversion to a Star Fox game never did entirely make sense, it clearly isn't something originally Star Fox-themed.  Worst of all, one of the two protagonists, Krystal, was dropped and turned into a girl you (as Fox) have to rescue.  That was just an awful, AWFUL decision!  Just leaving Krystal in fully playable would have made SF Adventures better, though it wouldn't have saved it.  The game released right as Nintendo made probably its biggest mistake ever, allowing Rare to be sold to Microsoft, and the game was clearly pushed out the door before the deal closed.  The game had been in development for a long time, since probably like 1998, but it felt felt rushed and unfinished. 

So, similar to many others I have always considered Start Fox Adventures to be a boring, average game with poor combat and story and only okay gameplay.  However, at the same time,  I have also always thought that the original N64 version would have been great, it's always been one of the very top titles on my "lost games I very badly wish had been released" list.  It's in my top otwo on that list for sure, along with Zero Racers on Virtual Boy.  I don't know, I know that the final game (SF Adventures) is nowhere near Zelda quality and most of the desgin is based on Dinosaur Planet -- this game is also mostly linear and has similar combat and such to Star Fox Adventures -- but... I don't know, for some reason I've always had this feeling that Dinosaur Planet wuold have been awesome.  Ocarina of Time awesome no, but awesome.


And now... now we can actually play it.  Well, kind of.  Because here's the thing -- again, this build is NOT finished, and it is very broken.  The first hour of the game is fully playable, as it was made that way for press previews and such, but everything after that is a mess.  It seems that at this point in development everything was coming together in terms of building all of the parts of the game, but nobody was actually piecing everything together into a coherent whole yet and making things connect in-game.  Additionally, everything that is there is super buggy and crashes constantly.  The game still needed everything to be put together and connected so you could play more than the first hour, and it needed polishing and bug-fixing work, but it was nearing content-complete status at this point in December '00... just before Nintendo decided to ditch the N64 and move this mostly-finished game to GC, even though it'd surely have been finished and released before the Gamecube's launch date that November, instead of having to suffer through two years of delays due to Rare struggling with the generation transition followed by that deeply disappointing final version.

Oh, this build of the game actually has Fox in it as the main male player character.  Sabre, the original male lead, exists and you can switch to that model, and they often call Fox "Sabre",  but Fox is in the game.  Nintendo of Japan had apparently made the 'let's make this Star Fox" decision clear to Rare back at E3 2000.  It's kind of amazing just how much stuff is in this build of the game though!  There are lots of cutscenes, all fully voice acted of course... probably all of the areas... etc, etc.  It just needs to be made to function correctly and, in some areas, finished.

The soundtrack is incredible as well!  It's exceptional work from Rare's all-time-great music team.

So what can I say of what is there in the game?  Well, it is a lot like Star Fox Adventures, but yes I like this more.  Part of that probably is that it's on the N64, my favorite console.  Part is that Krystal is playable and you'll spend at least half of the game as her.  Part is that the story seems to make sense here, since there's a lot less Star Fox shoehorned in, Fox himself aside.  The gameplay is a classic N64 action-adventure game from Rare, during their shortlived period as one of the best developers in the world (I would say this period lasted from 1994 to 2001), and is fun.  I can't say anything conclusive until the community manages to actually finish the game, but yes, this game is good. That's not something I'd say about Star Fox Adventures.

For anyone who is wondering, there is a Discord for people working on trying out the game, finding bugs, and trying to patch stuff and such.  It's open so anyone can join if you're interested.  (I mean, I'm no programmer or rom hacker, I just want to play this game, but I'm in there...)

But yeah, this is just incredible stuff!  Of all of the game prototypes that were out there but not released, this is probably the most exciting one out there to see.  I mean, that is unless there's some actual mostly finished Super Mario 64 2 rom out there, but I'm sure that game didn't get anywhere near that far.  It's just awesome stuff!

[Sacred Jellybean]

Neato! Here's a video.

[A Black Falcon]

Yeah, that's most of the part of the game that fully functions.  After that you can get farther with hacks, but the game is currently not completable, stuff totally breaks later on.  It's not clear if the last parts of the game were finished at all yet or not (they probably weren't, Star Fox Adventures adapted most of what was actually finished in Dinosaur Planet, there's probably a reason several of the later areas were cut from that game and it's probably that they weren't made yet.), if there's an ending at the end (there may not be), etc.

So what's the plan, from what I've seen on that Discord?

1) Continue playing the game and trying to hack fixes into it via rom patches, Gameshark codes (ie direct code manipulation), etc.
2) Meanwhile, have some people work on decompiling the rom into readable source code.  This will likely take several years, sadly, it's quite hard to do.
3) Once the decompilation is finally finished, get programmers to finish everything for real, without the hacks that'll be needed until then.  Also other people (art, etc.) may be needed depending on how finished the later parts are and how much new content the people working on the game want to add.

So yeah, sadly it'll be a long process, but that we can play it at all is amazing!  Rare's great lost N64 game has finally been found.

[Sacred Jellybean]

I mean... yeah, it could be good. But to be honest, I'm getting such strong Star Fox Adventures vibes from it that it's hard to get enthusiastic about. I feel like I've already played it, and it's mediocre.

I'm not even sure why SFA was so underwhelming. It seems to have all the ingredients of a good game. I've heard the arguments - well, it was written as one game, then ported onto another system, probably rushed, and was the last big game just before Rare got sold to Microsoft, setting expectations high...

Okay, but... more specifically, what makes it a bad game? I honestly can't remember, just that it got boring after a while. I think I eventually lost steam when the game put me on some tedious mini-quest that I needed to complete before proceeding to the main story. I feel like the combat system was underwhelming and monotonous, but I can't put my finger on why. There's something vague about why the game sucks that I can't quite divine, which feels frustrating.

[A Black Falcon]

I felt very similarly to that about Star Fox Adventures.  That game has a lot of problems and, overall, is a disappointing game a bit below average.  For some reason I've always had this idea that the original N64 version would have been a lot better...

As for how complete this build is, some of the things that seem to be the most incomplete, most notably the later parts of Krystal's half of the game, are things that they would end up cutting from SFA, so it's not clear if even a later build would help there.  This is a late build of the game, but Rare did continue with the N64 version a little bit into 2001, past this build from December '00, before moving over exclusively to the Gamecube.  DP was going to have eight Krazoa and six spellstones, while SFA has five Krazoa (kind of six) and four Spellstones.  It's highly likely that those later ones from DP and the areas and dungeons that contained them were never finished, so the homebrew devs will need to decide about what to do with that part of the game.

So how complete is this build?  It's maybe about a third complete when it comes to "how far can you get right now before it totally breaks and progression becomes impossible".  It's maybe 70% overall, perhaps.  Bug fixes, once done, will increase that percentage, but it's looking more likely that this isn't the legendary 90% build that supposedly is out there, it's a bit short of that... maybe?  But it's close enough that a complete game can be made of it so that's more than good enough.


Oh, my main criticism right now is that a lot of areas feel empty.  Rare built the spaces, but haven't put much stuff IN a lot of those spaces yet!  Enemies right now mostly die in one hit and lots of areas don't have any at all.  I don't know how much more stuff can be fit into the game -- despite the very empty areas it's already a 64MB game which requires the expansion pak so it uses all 8MB of RAM -- but hopefully at some point something can be done about that

[Dark Jaguar]

It's definitely an intersting historical footnote, but it's an inferior version of an underwhelming game.  Is Star Fox Adventures terrible?  No, but SJ I think I can answer your question about why it didn't all pull together.

One, the puzzles solved themselves.  You walked up to an interaction point and the game just autoselected the thing you needed.  Aside from a couple hidden switches, there really weren't many puzzles at all.

Two, the gameplay was all over the place.  I'm not even talking about the arwing missions.  I'm talking about large sections being dedicated to odd mechanics that felt like other genres of games.

Three, it was STILL unfinished, or at least the design felt like it was incomplete which would be even worse.  This is the biggest one.  Large chunks of the games show off locations or bosses or elements that never actually showed up in the game at all.  Krystal, for example, was nothing more than a maiden in distress that was barely even mentioned much less played as once the game got underway.  Whole dungeons were excised, and that last chance at a boss fight against the big bad you've been working to reach throughout the entire game just... got interrupted by sudden Andross.  No final boss fight, here have a retread of a familiar battle from previous Star Fox games.

Four, the story made no sense.  The whole world has an ancient religion worshipping ancient spirits only for you to find out that those spirits are Andross, who is decidedly NOT ancient.  What, am I to believe that he somehow influenced the development of this planet's culture to the point massive temples were built, worshipped at, and then abandoned to decay, in the space of 2 years since Fox defeated him?  It feels like the story is in conflict with itself.  This element above all others can be blamed on the shift to being a Star Fox game.  They'd have been better off not involving Andross at all of course, and I don't even mind that Fox McCloud is in it.

I feel like this is the sort of game that could stand for a full on remake from the ground up.  I know that numerous interviews have had Rare employees state they didn't rush the game out the door and that it really was complete and that the acquisition by Microsoft didn't rush anything.  I don't believe it.  The results speak far louder than their denial, and what are they supposed to say?  "Oh yes our bosses screwed you over, please hate us and our bosses."  I wouldn't even expect them to be honest in those old interviews.  It'd be like believing the employees of Silicon Knights BEFORE the collapse of the company.  (ABF I still believe every word of the countless employees reporting how horribly mismanaged that company was.)

[A Black Falcon]

[Dark Jaguar]

Yes I saw what's in the early prototype, and while some things are better story-wise, all in all it's still got a lot of elements missing.

Here's why the final boss fakeout failed so badly.  You've been working on one combat system, the staff, for the entire game and that final battle against Scales was the culmination of all your practice.  Then he just dies and it's an Arwing fight.  Would the final fight against an evil dragon have used your staff, or would you have been on teradactyl back?  If the former, well that could redeem itself, if it's the latter, it's really no different from what we got.

Thing is, Fox being in the game isn't much of a stretch at all, but Andross most certainly is.  Fox was responding to a distress call and he ended up caught up in a long adventure to save the world.  That worked perfectly fine for me as far as a setup goes.  It even goes a long way towards differentiating Krystal from Fox.  They're from very different cultures and it shows.  Too bad they didn't actually get to capitalize on it by working in that character switching component.  Still, even if they had worked it in, from what I can tell it would have basically just split up what we did get across two characters rather than actually add more content.

A complete reimagining of the game for me would take the arwing and make it a method of fully controllable travel in an open world environment, Jak and Daxter mixed with Fury 3.  No need to be ready to warp when you can fly in real time to the various locales in the game.  It could have been "all range mode" all the time.  The arwing is a single seater, but there's room to work another seat in there for the purposes of using that as the relay point to switch characters.  Prince Tricky?  Gone!  Just... get rid of him.

[A Black Falcon]

For anyone interested in reading more about this build and such, the group working on fixing it have set up a wiki now at http://www.dinosaurpla.net .  Check it out.

Storyline-wise, it is becoming clear that the biggest difference between DP and SFA is that DP is a much more serious story.  In SFA they dumbed everything down, making the game more of a fun adventure through the planet of dinosaurs before you beat Andross again at the end.  But in Dinosaur Planet there is more story, a more complex story, and a more serious story.   This tone is set right at the start, as after the intro teradactyl-back battle you land in the central palace and Krystal finds a dying dinosaur, killed by Scales' troops.  The early cutscenes are more verbose too; DP has a somewhat 'en medias res' feel, as you join Krystal (and then Fox/Sabre)'s quests after they have already gotten underway.  She's talking to Scales about 'the wizard' and such, and you need to figure out the context later.  DP has an hour and a half of voiced story cutscenes that have been found so far.  The DP story is both more coherent and more interesting.  The big thing that's missing is an ending of course, as far as anyone has found there isn't one.  The cutscene from before the final boss raises a lot of questions, but there's no answers to any of them, only a credits sequence.  I wonder if they hadn't made an ending yet, or if it was removed from this build for some reason...

Oh, and Krystal's partner character, Princess Kyte the pteranodon, is way less annoying than Fox/Sabre's, Prince Tricky the triceratops, I think.  Both have pathing issues and such though, the partner AI is definitely still flawed in this build.  But as far as the characters go Kyte's probably better.

As for that final boss, I think the battle is on foot?  The whole fight hasn't been found though, if it was indeed finished.  The cutscene that plays before the bossfight is viewable online but the actual battle mostly doesn't work yet I believe.

Thing is, Fox being in the game isn't much of a stretch at all, but Andross most certainly is.  Fox was responding to a distress call and he ended up caught up in a long adventure to save the world.  That worked perfectly fine for me as far as a setup goes.  It even goes a long way towards differentiating Krystal from Fox.  They're from very different cultures and it shows.  Too bad they didn't actually get to capitalize on it by working in that character switching component.  Still, even if they had worked it in, from what I can tell it would have basically just split up what we did get across two characters rather than actually add more content.

That's a good point, Fox himself does fit better than Andross.  You can explain Fox's presence much more reasonably than Andross's, it's too bad that they eventually decided to shoehorn Andross into the ending of the game as they reworked it for the GC...

Here's why the final boss fakeout failed so badly.  You've been working on one combat system, the staff, for the entire game and that final battle against Scales was the culmination of all your practice.  Then he just dies and it's an Arwing fight.  Would the final fight against an evil dragon have used your staff, or would you have been on teradactyl back?  If the former, well that could redeem itself, if it's the latter, it's really no different from what we got.

To be fair SFA does have those Arwing sections here and there, it's not like Andross is the first time you fly in an Arwing in the game... but yeah, that battle definitely doesn't fit well with the gameplay of the vast majority of the game.

A complete reimagining of the game for me would take the arwing and make it a method of fully controllable travel in an open world environment, Jak and Daxter mixed with Fury 3.  No need to be ready to warp when you can fly in real time to the various locales in the game.  It could have been "all range mode" all the time.  The arwing is a single seater, but there's room to work another seat in there for the purposes of using that as the relay point to switch characters.  Prince Tricky?  Gone!  Just... get rid of him

Yeah, if they remade it it probably would be much more open world, I'd expect.  But on a related note, much like SFA, one thing is missing from DP, and that's any sign of side content.  Neither SFA or DP seems to have much of any side content around the main quest, which means both games are missing a pretty big part of the Zelda formula there...

[Dark Jaguar]

Agreed.  In fact in that way it reminds of of Conker's Bad Fur Day and how it went from the massive exploration with lots of side content found in Banjo Kazooie to a much more "on rails" series of set pieces.

[etoven]

Wow,. seconds in the game already looks insane for the time. They lead with there best right off the bat.

Neato! Here's a video.

[A Black Falcon]

So progress has been very slow, but over the past year the fans working to try to make this game as complete as it can be given the unfinished nature of the game have slowly made progress, hacking in fixes for various things.  It's clear that the game was not finished and the later parts of the game are incomplete, but more things work than did a year ago and that will slowly continue.  Of course once the decompilation is complete things will really be blown open, but that will likely take a long time.  That people are hacking in fixes for the many broken things in the meantime is fantastic.

[Dark Jaguar]

I'm impressed!  I may go ahead and get a N64 Everdrive so I can play stuff like this.  Good news by the way, Krikzz is safe and able to manufacture again, but progress is slow at the moment.  Inventory comes and goes so pick it up when you can while Krikzz regains some footing.

[A Black Falcon]

I mentioned it again because after some time with not much happening, in the last month or two things have really picked up, a few people hacking fixes into the code in the two Dinosaur Planet Discords (yes, there are still two) have made some significant progress.  There's quite a ways to go but some stuff is fixed.  They also are working on fully re-implementing Sabre instead of Fox and are pretty far along on that.