Dinosaur World (video game)

Dinosaur World is a freeware video game developed by Asylum Entertainment and published by the BBC in 2002. It is a spin-off of Episode 2 of Walking with Dinosaurs ("Time of the Titans") and the special The Ballad of Big Al. The main point of the game is to find all the animals and plants, including several location features, that are distributed in five different zones. The game is available on the BBC website as an alpha, as it was never finished.

Gameplay

The player begins the game in the Mossy Plain, the first location in the game. The player then must find everything on the checklist in the Electronic Field Guide (also containing controls, instructions and a world map) in order to unlock a hidden level: the Salt Lake, where the player can create their own dinosaur herds to explore their behavior. The game contains six regions, the Mossy Plain (inhabited by three Diplodocus), the Forest (later inhabited by a female Allosaurus, although the cry of an unseen Ornitholestes can be heard), the Crater (not inhabited by any dinosaurs), the Dry Riverbed (inhabited by one and later two Allosaurus; a Diplodocus carcass can also be found here), the Desert (inhabited by three Diplodocus, one of which is usually killed, two Allosaurus, one trapped in quicksand, and another who is apparently Big Al from 'The Ballad of Big Al', and who dies of his injuries later in the game after tripping over a fallen tree-trunk while trying to hunt down a Dryosaurus in the dry season. Later, you will see two pterosaurs, and two Stegosaurus, one of which is dead and trapped in quicksand) and the Salt Lake (the largest region, where the player can create any number of small/large Diplodocus and Allosaurus at their will). The Salt Lake is accessible in two ways, either once the player has found everything in the game, causing a rockfall to occur in the Desert. The player then must climb up the rocks and onto the cliff, where they must tag onto one of the two pterosaurs inhabiting the Desert, which will fly the player to the Salt Lake, or when of the Diplodocus go to that area and the player tags along with it, than rotates the camera towards a little depression in the hill next to it then drops him/herself and walks over the hill until the salt lake. The second way is probably a glitch or a mistake that the developers never noticed or ignored.

External links

• Official site
• More about Dinosaur World (also downloadable here, archived)