By Alec Meer on April 2nd, 2008 at 4:09 pm.
Amorphous dream landscapes are sort of like space, right? Good – then this can receive the hallowed ‘space week’ tag.
It’s the first, gorgeous footage of Jetpack Brontosaurus, the next game from Flashbang Studios – who you may remember from such indie physics-delights as The President’s Neck is Missing Offroad Velociraptor Safari. The ethereal soundtrack helps, but even without it I’m pretty convinced this apparent Gravitar/Thrust descendant will muster a joyous PC gamer pile-on in much the same manner as did Raptor Safari and Trials 2 . It makes me want to say daffy things like “mesmeric beauty.” In fact, it’s so elegant that I immediately forgot it was about piloting a 30-ton dinosaur through the skies. It just seems natural, somehow.
That music is amazing. It better be the actual game music and not just fancy trailer stuff.
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That’s some real nice particle effects there. Doesn’t particularly say much about the logistics of the gameplay, though.
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That’s how you make a really, really silly idea look like a really, really good idea: ambient music!
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mmmm, I like the x-ray vision smoke effect thing.
Music seems to be from here. Indie game using (and promoting) indie music? Nice!
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I like the base music, but the clicks and electronic noises just break the flow for me
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Jetpack Apatosaurus, surely?[/sauropod pedant]
Hopefully I’ll actually be able to run this one, as Raptor Safari decided it would only run at 3 frames per second.
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Man Raised By Puffins: I think there was some backstory as to why this guy is a brontosaurus and not an apatosaurus, unless that came from the weird minds of RPS and not from the developers themselves.
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He’s an Apatosaurus named Brontosaurus.
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@ Man Raised By Puffins
I had the same problem with Safari when it came out, but I tried it recently and it appears that they’ve optimized it. It’s pretty fun now that it has a decent FPS.
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From the game’s webpage:”Splendid jetpack dreams of the Apatosaurus named Brontosaurus.”
KG
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Ah, so he is. The tag-line under the image of the majestic jet-packing Apatosaurus on their site reads “Splendid jetpack dreams of the Apatosaurus named Brontosaurus”.
Edit: Yeah, so what Kieron said then. Certainly living up to his species name (deceptive lizard) that fellow. Of course if I wished to continue playing the role of the filthy pedant I could always mention that their jetpacks couldn’t possibly work (no intakes, see) but it feels a trifle silly when said jetpacks are grafted onto a large Dinosaur with a crash helmet.
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There’s something about that music that reminds me of LBA2‘s; of course, it probably helps that the bronosaurus looks a little like Dino-Fly.
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Cool. Is all that X-ray/dimension swapping stuff part of the gameplay? Is there a space-on-top-of-space element I see there?
(I remember being fascinated by that as a concept back in that Duke Nukem 3d secret level which was kinda one level inside another but overlapping. Don’t know if any other games do that sort of thing. The Serious Sam folks seemed like the types who might try it; didn’t appear in Second Encounter, from memory)
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Music is wonderful – more quality abstract electronica in games!
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That reminds me, I would love to see a retrospective on the Little Big Adventure games if there’s ever a chance.
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For a game that clearly relies heavily on realism, the tail of the apatosaurus has far too much vertical flexibility.
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As already pointed out, it’d be nice to see some actual gameplay, i’m curious..
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Man Raised By Puffins: Are you saying you’d rather he be operating his jetpack without a helmet? Because that seems profoundly unsafe.
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If I was a gigantic sauropod I’d be more worried about my neck snapping in two on impact than any grazing on my bonce (which would contain precious little squishy brain matter anyway).
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