Nanosaur – Pangea Software - 1998 - First time playing?: No, played as a kid.

Nanosaur rules so hard. No, I'm not saying that for the game itself, it's seven minutes long if you know what you're doing which is kinda underwhelming even if the game itself is pretty fun. No, Nanosaur is awesome because it has the audacity to exist at all. Because someone was willing to make a game about a time travelling cyber dino from the future with a gun for a hand flying around with a jetpack while nuking T-Rexes that explode into polygons when they die.

Ok, so it's a couple of thousand years into the future and humanity has successfully cloned and resurrected the dinosaurs. That's not all though, the dinosaurs they resurrected in question are super intelligent cybernetic dinosaurs called Nanosaurs that are cooler than dinosaurs because they have guns and jetpacks. Then a plague hit and humanity immediately all died after cloning like five nanosaurs. But the nanosaurs are smart so they built their own futuristic dino society and inherited the earth. But since there are only a small handful of nanosaurs all made from the same few dinosaur fossils, the only way they can breed and continue their cyber dinosaur legacy is by screwing their cousins repeatedly. This is a problem because the repeated inbreeding is causing the nanosaurs to get stupider with every generation. So of course, the obvious solution is that you send a velociraptor back in time 20 minutes before the asteroid hits that wiped out the dinosaurs in 65 million BC so that she can steal dinosaur eggs and bring them back to the nanosaur future so that they can be nanosaur breeding stock. Why go back literally 20 minutes before doomsday? See, this is important primarily from an ethical standpoint. 65 million BC Dinosaurs are stupid and don't talk and as such diplomacy between the nanosaur and the dinosaurs is impossible, so she can't exactly explain "actually I am saving your child and your entire species". Now, if you time travel right before the apocalypse then it doesn't matter because anyone you don't kill is going to die anyway so you can just murder every dinosaur you come across and take their eggs guilt free. It's for their own good, really.

"MSX there's no way you're not exaggerating here-'' no, this is literally the actual canon plot of Nanosaur, it's actually this completely insane and I love it. Some of the details, such as the reason the nanosaurs are stealing eggs being so they don't have to keep inbreeding, aren't detailed until the sequel, but you can find everything that I just explained to you in the read me files included with these games. What I love most about this is that these games came preinstalled on Mac computers around the time of their release, and I absolutely love the fact that something this utterly weird was chosen as a first impression to leave on many newbie Mac gamers. Then again, at one point Apple also bundled MDK with Mac OS 8 computers, MDK being a game where you play as a man with a sniper rifle for a head accompanied by a six-limbed dog, so clearly Apple in the 90s had no concerns about being perceived as weird.

The story is kind of the best part of the game and it's not even in the game itself, you only get this rad cyber dinosaur lore from a couple of PDFs, one of which isn't even for this game, but the context it gives to the utterly bizarre action during gameplay makes the already offbeat vibe the whole game has going on all the more of a spectacle. It's not Pangea's weirdest game by any means, that honour goes of course to Weekend Warrior, but it's a hell of a lot more charming in my opinion, but there might be some nostalgic bias there. Regardless, I feel like I admire Nanosaur and Pangea's later release, Otto Matic, for actually having a cohesive theme that the game sticks to while still feeling extremely surreal. More effort went into making a weird and fun premise as opposed to Weekend Warrior having a loose connecting thread tying together otherwise completely unrelated assets where every single character looks like it comes from a different game. Weekend Warrior's story is just nowhere near as entertaining to explain as Nanosaur's, in spite of both of them being excuse plots.

So how about that gameplay? Um, yeah, it's not great. I wouldn't call it bad, but there's also a chance I'm a bit numb to its quirks, having played this game since I was six years old. Once again Pangea Software falls back on tank controls for another 3D game, but it is significantly better to control than Weekend Warrior. Movement in general isn't nearly as sluggish, you have a double jump for further manoeuvrability and your guns are much more suitable weapons for these controls than awkward floppy melee combat. You have a nice selection of weapons too, most of which are useful, just ignore that useless ripple gun. Your standard red lasers are reliable and give you a lot of ammo, your orange lasers are rarer but home in on enemies, your purple spread shot is excellent for close range or crowd control, and then there is the nuke. The Nanosaur can shoot a bloody nuke out of her laser gun hand. It's near impossible to use without blowing yourself up and it's beautiful, absolutely the button you press when absolutely everything within 50 feet of you has to die,consequences be damned. There's only a few different types of enemies for you to fight, but it's a good enough variety for a game of this length and gives you a lot of versatile uses out of your arsenal. I hate the pterodactyls though, good luck hitting flying targets in a game where you can't aim above you, they're tricky to hit even with the homing shots.

Throughout the game world you need to find dinosaur eggs, pick them up in your mouth and then carry them to the nearest temporal portal in order to send them back to the future. You need five in total, one of each of the five colours the eggs come in. You can get more eggs of a colour you've already got if you want to, but all you'll get for it is extra points. There's some annoyances here, like the finicky hitbox for picking up an egg and the fact that the eggs are tiny and the only colour difference between all five egg types are small microscopic spots on their shells, making it hard to judge what egg is what since from a distance and with the right lighting the red egg will look like the purple egg and the green egg will look like the yellow egg. Overall though, it's not too bad since the fact that there's multiple of each egg type and you only need one of each, thus eliminating any kind of 'needle in a haystack' type scenario, go in any direction and you'll eventually find one. The game map is divided up into three areas, the starting jungle, the volcanos and then the canyons for the finale. You can find the red eggs in the jungle, blue eggs in the volcanos, and then the remaining three are all found in the canyon. Thanks to the last three eggs being so close to one another, even that intimidating 20 minute time limit isn't too much of a hassle. I'm no speedrunner but I can still comfortably beat the game under seven minutes, so you have plenty of time, although it may take a couple of tries to learn the level layout.

The main reason I feel the gameplay is underwhelming is something I'm torn on, but it's just too short. This isn't like Prince of Persia where although that game has a time limit it's extended by the high difficulty, puzzle solving, exploring and routing with each attempt. Being initially overwhelmed by the time limit and the cheap rockfalls in the canyon aside, the game is actually pretty easy once you know what you're doing, and with such a simple objective it's over before you know it. The reason I'm giving Nanosaur some slack here however is that first off there's definitely some score attack potential here, aiming to figure out how to get as many eggs as possible and as many kills as possible in a short amount of time, almost feels akin to a caravan mode in a shoot-em-up. Secondly, Nanosaur was never aiming to be a big release or anything. It was designed to be a free download and was released as such, only going commercial after the sheer amount of downloads the game got made it unfeasible for Pangea to keep up web hosting costs like this without paying out of their own pockets. Bandwidth for webmasters was also an issue back then after all, before free file hosting sites got widespread. Nanosaur's primary design purpose was that of a tech demo, and in that regard it absolutely shines. It's easy to take it for granted now but for the time these models were pretty detailed and smoothly animated, plus the game itself ran incredibly well on the hardware too. Something I noticed when watching the animation of the T-Rex on the title screen is that there isn't that PS1-style polygon clipping, the textures smoothly wrapping around the whole model without obvious seams. The draw distance is, well, clearly bad, but that's fairly standard of the era, reminds me of Turok on N64. They could have just made a visual demo, but Pangea went the extra mile by attaching a game to it at all, no matter how simple it was, and that game was enjoyable enough for enough people for Nanosaur to be a wild success.

Still, I really do feel like the game could have been something more. The jetpack for instance, it's so ridiculously underutilised to the point that it might as well not even be there. Fuel for it is rare and even when you max out its fuel tank it still burns through all of that fuel in seconds. There's a single small platforming sequence you can skip by using it and it can help you in getting the last egg, but that's about all you've got for the utility of the jetpack. A sequel could expand upon the proof of concept on display here, and I would have loved to see Nanosaur get a full 10 level long game like Pangea's other 3D action games, but Nanosaur 2 completely shifts genres and doesn't play anything like Nanosaur 1. The closest we got to Nanosaur 1 as a full game is probably Otto Matic, which is probably my favourite Pangea game. Completely different setting and characters, but it's just as off-beat as Nanosaur and features similar run & gun gameplay. Expect a review of that in the future.

Nonetheless, Nanosaur may only be one short level, but it's at least a fun short level, even in spite of the control jank and initially intimidating timer. The story and setting meanwhile elevate it to something far more memorable to me, something that has lived rent free in my brain for the last 20 years and still makes me smirk every time I remember this absurd game exists. Thank you for your service Nanosaur, I wouldn't want to live in a world where you don't exist. Once again Jorio has made an excellent port for modern operating systems, which you can download by clicking here.

Oh right, there's also Nanosaur EXTREME.

Nanosaur Extreme – Pangea Software - 2000 - First time playing?: No, played as a kid.

It's exactly the same as Nanosaur but it has five times as many enemies and surrounds you with T-Rex mosh pits.

Look at this and tell me this is not the very definition of 'epic'.

- Page written by MSX_POCKY, 29th April 2023