Dinotopia is based on the books Dinotopia and The World Beneath, by James Gurney. It's set on an uncharted island, where dinosaurs are intelligent, and live side by side with humans. Typical for an adaptation, you don't need to have read the books to play the game.

Unlike most adventures these days, the story is rather modest. You're not out to retrieve the secret plans, catch a serial killer, or save the universe. As Nathan, survivor of a shipwreck, you just want to be reunited with your sister Constance, who washed up somewhere else on the island. The game thus revolves around Nathan's efforts to find her, with a little help from both humans and dinos.

The interface here can only be described as "minimalist". At the start, there are only two cursor icons: the hand and the dino tracks. The tracks are used to move Nathan around the world; the hand is used to pick things up, manipulate objects, and talk to people. Later in the game, Nathan gains a dino companion, Atrick, and a third icon, an eye, becomes available. When the eye is clicked on an object or person, Atrick might comment on it, providing clues or information.

Items are stored in a scrollable inventory box on the lower left of the screen. On the right are the icons, and a key symbol that opens up the control panel, where you can adjust the sound volume, as well as save, load, or quit the game. In the bottom center is a picture of the island, used when traveling to new locations.

Everything is very simple, which is not surprising, as this is a family-oriented product, aimed primarily at kids, although certainly playable by adults. The atmosphere is non-threatening; the dinosaurs generally have a "cute" look to them; there is no strong language, violence, or sexual matters; and Nathan is never in any really dangerous situations.

In keeping with that, most puzzles in the game are not hard to solve, and there aren't, in fact, many of them. Each location typically has one, or sometimes two, important things to do. For instance, the vital activity at the beginning is learning the language of Dinotopia, after which Nathan is able to travel around part of the island by dino cart.

The game is partly linear, but not strictly so. Nathan can go to any available location at any time, so backtracking to, for example, a previous town to pick up a missed item, is no problem.

Dinotopia ran cleanly on my system; it never crashed, froze, locked up, or exhibited bizarre graphics. There was one place where I ran into something that might be a bug; more on that shortly.

Sound quality, however, was not all that good. The digital voice recordings were done at a very low level. Even with the volume bar at maximum for sound and minimum for music, I still had to turn up the volume on my speakers, the first time this has ever been necessary for a game with internal volume controls.

The speech itself was uneven in playback. Sometimes, it came through clearly; sometimes, there was a lot of stuttering skipping, making it very hard to hear what people or dinos were saying. For instance, the voice of the smith in Pumice Town played smoothly, with no breaks, whereas the speech of the two dinos who pulled the cart was only partly understandable. There was no reason I could discern for these differences, but it was certainly annoying, the more so as there is no option for text.

This, by the way, was with native Gravis support. Unlike too many other products these days, Dinotopia has drivers for a wide range of sound cards, which at least puts the game in reach of a greater number of players. You don't have to worry about "SoundBlaster and 100% compatibles only".

One of the things I found irritating in the game was that there are no conversations, only monologues. Nathan himself, the star character, never speaks. When you click on someone, that person says something, and that's that. I often had the feeling that Nathan was being lectured to instead of talking to people.

The place where there might be a transient bug is at the cliffs. Here Nathan has to jump off at the right moment and land on the back of a flying dino called a Skybax. The first time through the game, everything went fine (not counting the many jumps I made to get the timing right). However, my second pass through the game, the Skybax simply didn't move. Nathan dropped down the cliffside, while the dino remained unmoving at the far right.

This was extremely puzzling, since I had done all the correct actions to bring the creature over, and repeated plays and restores didn't help. However, when I booted up the game fresh the next day, and restored the position, everything worked perfectly the first try. The Skybax flew over, Nathan landed on its back, and that was that. So if you're having similar problems, you may want to try exiting the game, rebooting your system, then running the game again to see if that helps.

There were also parts of Dinotopia that were incredibly tedious. When you reach Alpine, you have to visit a monastery at the top of a mountain. So you go up the mountain. Up the mountain. Up the mountain. Up the...well, you get the idea. It appears to go on forever, with nothing to see except snow and pine trees, no one to talk to, and nothing to do but walk on.

The desert is much the same way. Here you have to lead a blind dino back home. Of course, you don't know where that home is, so you begin trudging across the sands. As with the mountain, there isn't much to see or do, and since this is a large area, walking around takes a long time. And because you don't want to lose the dino by going too quickly, you have to move slowly.

In real life, mountains may be tall and deserts large, but this is a game. Putting in wide expanses of essentially nothing does not add to fun or playability; it simply makes for boredom.

My general impression is that this isn't so much a game but a Dinotopia travelogue. A good deal of the world is mainly backdrop and window dressing. Waterfall City, for instance, has a lot of buildings, but only three that can be entered. The rest exist just to make the city. Only a few of the characters are relevant to the story; the majority either have nothing to say, or make some inconsequential remark that may shed some light on Dinotopia generally but otherwise don't mean a lot.

Overall, Dinotopia, with its emphasis on exploration, easy puzzles, simple interface, and generally laid-back atmosphere, is most suitable for the young novice gamer, who has little or no experience with adventures. Veteran gamers, and kids who have already played the likes of Ripper or Phantasmagoria, may find this one too simple, and a bit dull.

Just Adventure Assigned Grade: C

System Requirements:

486/66
8MB RAM
2xCD-ROM
DOS 5.0
mouse