Friday 28 October 2011

Dyna Brothers (Mega Drive)

So, I've been having one of those dilemmas I sometimes have where I think the games I'm posting about aren't obscure enough. But I think this one is pretty unknown.
It's a strategy game about breeding dinosaurs to kill aliens. You play as some kind of godlike figure, looking on from the sky. At the start of a stage, there's an egg-altar-thing on the field and also a UFO. You can make eggs for various kinds of dinosaur come out of the egg-altar-thing, and the CPU can make eggs for various kinds of alien come out of the UFO. The aim of each stage is to have your dinosaurs eat all the aliens before the aliens eat all the dinosaurs. You also have various other powers at your disposal: you can make it rain around your dinosaurs, and you can create small localised disasters, such as droughts, floods and meteor impacts.
To do all this stuff uses up points. You start each stage with 1000 points, and you get more whenever your dinosaurs eat anything, so the first few minutes of a typical stage will be spent hatching a lot of herbivore eggs and making it rain around said herbivores so they have lots of grass to eat. Eventually, you'll have enough herbivores that they'll start laying eggs automatically and you won't have to worry about them much unless the aliens start killing them off.
To fight against the aliens, you need to hatch carnivores and oviraptors. Obviously, they eat live aliens and eggs, respectively.
There are some other things you need to be aware of, like the fact that all of your dinosaurs need grass to walk on or they'll quickly die, but those are the basics.
As for whether or not the game is any good; it is! I've played a few hours of it, and I like it a lot! I'm just hoping it doesn't do the usual strategy game thing where suddenly there's a stage that's insanely hard and can only be beaten by following a specific strategy to the letter.
The semi-passive style of play is nice, though. The dinosaurs will mostly go about their jobs automatically without you needing to tell them where to go all the time, which leaves you to focus on making more dinosaurs when they're needed and your various other tactical responsibilities.
There's no english version of the game, and there's very little written about it in english on the internet, either, but someone's uploaded a lot of play videos to youtube, and if you watch one or two of those, you'll easily work out how to play (and also win).
This game also has a sequel, which I haven't played yet, but I am looking forward to when I get round to it.
Now my only problem is that I'm starting to worry that I've been posting too many positive reviews! I can't win!

2 comments:

  1. I like this game and have been working on a FAQ for it, as well as releasing a soundtrack of it with the original SC-55 sound. Check out my thread for it here on Sega-16:
    http://www.sega-16.com/forum/showthread.php?31655-Dyna-Brothers-How-to-Play

    ReplyDelete