Rihards Online

For my first guest blogging on Rihards Unplugged, I’ll be covering DINOSAURS! Ok not dinosaurs in general, but more specifically in ParaWorld. The game is a fairly standard RTS, for which it’s received quite a thrashing on various gaming sites but when you actually dive in I found it quite captivating. Admittedly I probably AM the target audience, my obsession with dinosaurs rears its many toothed head occasionally, but still the game is quite captivating.

The premise is quite simple, there is an alternate world adjacent to ours (parallel if you will), in which dinosaurs still exist and cohabit along side humans and electricity simply doesn’t exist. You play three modern day scientists, chucked into this world by an evil immortal genius (the very finest kind of evil genius no doubt) for discovering the evidence of this world existing. He of course has a nefarious plan and you will be inconveniently in the way of said plan. But that’s the single player story and its fairly standard fare admittedly, but the game’s experience itself is quite magical.

The landscapes you cross are majestic and detailed down to the fish you harvest for food being coelacanth-like fish. The light twists and lengthens as days pass in the game itself and you find yourself somewhere between Settlers and Starcraft. With dinosaurs. Of course. That’s not technically true as one faction sticks to mammals, woolly mammoths huge boars sabre toothed kittens and the like.

The world is full of life, from the different types of units which utilise or control dinosaurs, or those which simply inhabit the landscape some being peaceful happily wandering around your camps and lands, others happy to attack you on sight, some capable of wandering competently between land and sea. You deforest as you go, so it’s not entirely nature friendly, plus as one tribe you can eat the dinosaurs as easily as help them. But the experience of living alongside all these huge creatures is a very pleasant one and whilst not the most original or ground breaking game, its been made well and competently.

We’ve been well overdue a game involving dinosaurs and this is something between a Sir Arthur Conan Doyle classic and Jurassic Park. The music reminds me heavily of a mix of things, Jurassic Park being one of them and actually The Mummy being another, a heavy melodic but relaxed affair, it doesn’t jar and sets the feel of a period piece.

As a designer and a gamer, I appreciate the lush landscape, the forests, trees savannahs and waters. And the quirk that the traditional fog of war, really is a fog. All in all, I was expecting to be disappointed because well it’s a game about dinosaurs, and how often does that really work, but it’s very good, it won’t blow your mind, but you’ll enjoy being there, and smacking the crap out of a pirate with a Stegosaurus’ tail has to count for something.

The opening sequence has been the subject of CGSociety scrutiny too, the full thing is downloadable from Pendulum‘s own site.

And all the pictures shown here (taken ingame by myself) and more can be found full size here on Rihards gallery.

Mark
Find me usually rambling and scribbling at scrapbook.sreski