Adventures of Dino Riki (1987)

Beat in slow motion mode. I was not expecting this to be a shoot em up, as a caveman on foot shooting stones, axes, boomerangs and fire balls. It was pretty simple early on. Diamonds gave score, fist improved the weapon or acted as star when using fire balls, star killed all enemies on screen, heart gave 1 hp, and the bird allowed flying, which I did not realize until checking a walkthrough. Flight was important because the platforming was terrible, but I only flew past 1 stage. The jumps were all instant death and very difficult to pull off from the perspective, nevermind the constant forward movement and inability to get to the top of the screen. The sheer amount of times I died at this platforming make me wonder how the hell anyone could be expected to beat this game without save states. At least the platforming changed from stage to stage, from water with lily pads and moving floating rocks, to quicksand and fire breathing statues, to chasms opening in the ground and indestructible skeletal dinosaurs. The bosses were comically easy with only the final boss offering any kind of slim challenge. Complete opposite of the stages with the insanely difficult platforming and not quite so difficult regular enemies. The 4th stage repeated the 3 previous biomes with the difficulty ramped through to roof. I barely beat it. Then the game started over again at stage 1. No fanfare or text or anything. The enemy patterns were interesting with the unkillable little skeletons standing out as unique. They could be killed with the screen clearing power ups though. I'd rate this higher if there was no platforming or at least tone it down to only take 1hp.

5.0/10