Dinosaurs

Dinos in Space has little to do with either dinosaurs or space. Rather, it is a well-conceived little puzzle game -- conceptually quite simple, but with the ability to pose puzzles that take real cognition to solve.

One or more dino-emitters are located in a square grid; when you press the space bar, they spit out dinos in a particular direction. Each dinosaur must be guided to a same-colored space station, also located in the grid. Your main tools for doing so are arrows, of which you have a limited selection to place in the grid; grey ones affect the path of all dinos, while colored ones affect only dinos of the same color. In some levels, you also have teleporters, which move dinos from one square to another. The number and mix of tools is strictly limited in each level, so that there is typically only one, or a handful, of solutions.

The original Caveman Craig was released back in 2008, and apparently the Andrews brothers have been extending and refining it since. The basics of the new game are the same as the old. Unlike the RTS norm, you have an avatar, the eponymous Craig, and newly created cavemen must be taught how to perform their tasks -- killing dinosaurs, harvesting berries, returning them to the cave, transforming them into food.

The new game has a larger variety of dinosaurs, as well as accomplishments and system that lets you buy useful things with XP (including the mammoth shown in the screenshot above); it also has an element the previous game lacked -- actual combat. In most levels there are multiple opposing tribes, and when you feel ready, you gather your hunters and fight them, defeating them by destroying their totem.

Time Gentlemen, Please is what they say in English pubs when one of their statutory and inexplicable closing times is approaching, so everyone can buy a last round. It's also the name of a Lucasarts-like adventure game from Dan Marshall and Ben Ward, a sequel to their superb Ben There, Dan That.

"Too bad we haven't evolved into birds yet..."

I hear that.

Human beings generally assume that other brains just aren't ticking the same home-brewed quality of consciousness that we experience individually. This is true of our perception of animals and other human beings. Maybe some species actually possess acute intelligence, but they just don't speak our language. Like velociraptors -- they're hunters you know.

65,000,001 BC is a platform adventure where you play a raptor with certified ninja skills on a quest to save the world from meteoric doom. Unlike Dino Run it takes an exploratory pace with a dose of tongue-in-cheek writing, allowing you to experience raptor-hood not as a primal hunter racing for survival, but as an intelligent problem-solver saving the world with calculated method. The controls give a sense of Metroid: Redesign garnished with a taste of The Lost Vikings, not quite perfect but smooth enough once you sail through the first areas. The flow is supreme, like a slit eye focusing keenly.

As a mile high wall of dust and moldering flame devours mountains behind me, frenzied stamped stumbling at my feet, meteors knocking out a stegosaurus, boulders crushing eggs and trees, I take the instant to thrash the neck of a small lizard, consuming it whole, and gallop toward the distant call of salvation. The meteor has hit. I have a window of seconds, no mistakes. I am a velociraptor, an agile predator. As I attempt to beat Dino Run on Insane difficulty I'm listening to footage from the latest World Economic Forum, discussing the role of private equity and hedge funds. The irony is not lost.

Easter is the celebration of our divine ancestry from the lizard-people, Quetzalcoatl, Tammuz, etc., and their thirst for the blood of bunnies and other reptoids. Science seems to indicate that some dinosaurs, like these feathered raptors, did evolve into birds, but did you know they also evolved into mammalian hybrids, and that these hybrid bloodlines of shapeshifters now rule the world? Ergo, Off Road Velociraptor Safari is probably the best way to celebrate Easter - ever - because it taps into the reptilian consciousness of predation that drives our totem sacrifices, in the form of a jeep, driven by a raptor, mauling other raptors for mad points.