Dinosaur World

Dinosaur World is a 3D exploration-based freeware Edutainment Game (and something of an Obvious Beta) from BBC, inspired by their classic TV Documentary, Walking with Dinosaurs.

The objective of the game is to explore various Jurassic environments, find all animals, plants and geographical features described in your inventory, and take note of the events that happen via a limited supply of "TV cameras" you can freely place all around the map, as well as onto the dinosaurs themselves. Once the player has found every item of note, a Bonus Stage opens, where you have the opportunity to create your own dinosaurs and watch them interact.

The game plays like a semi-interactive nature documentary, with a Narrator describing things as you approach them in detail. Many familiar scenes from the original TV show are recreated, but it also offers a number of new events to explore.

Available to download here.

Tropes used in Dinosaur World include:

• One Hundred Percent Completion: To access the bonus area, you have to find every item that's on the inventory screen, but you don't have to keep track of all the event updates in the game.
• Beating a Dead Player: Sort of, but it happens among the dinosaurs due to a glitch. Allosaurus keep attacking even dead Diplodocus, which results in the carnivores jumping up "onto" the air, clawing and biting it.
• Bonus Stage: The salt plain.
• First Person Ghost: The player, for all intents and purposes doesn't actually exist, as nothing reacts to you.
• Game Over: Only when you quit the game manually.
• Insurmountable Waist-Height Fence: You can't walk from the path into the forest, even though there is nothing blocking your way, and there is a solid wall just a few feet into the forest anyway. Why not stop the player there and let you stroll around the trees? Probably to prevent you from walking up the fallen log and have fun.
  • Correction—it's possible to climb that tree, but it involves a little cheating. Wait until the mother Allosaurus appears near her nest, then tag her using 'T'. By shaking your mouse like crazy, you'll clip out of the map, and thus it becomes possible to walk around the map, outside of it. Walk to the outermost edge of the nearby cave-entrance, to the spot where the rock meets the forest shrubbery. You'll be able to walk back into the map again, into the forest and even up the fallen tree. Obviously, the intent was to let you up there in the first place, but they never finished the game completely (evidenced by the fact that you can clip through the other trees freely), and so sealed the whole place off with that invisible wall.
• Mama Bear: Averted with the Allosaurus. When an Ornitholestes robs its nest, it gets real angry, and... continues to stand in a single spot, roaring at nothing in particular.
• Misplaced Wildlife: Rhamphorhynchus in North America, instead of Europe. In the game's defense, it doesn't specify the genus.
• Narrator
• Obvious Beta: Even the BBC site calls it a "prototype game". And it shows: dinosaurs sometimes randomly walk into mountains and disappear, they merge with each other, and even the player can clip through the ground to discover a strange cube sitting at the "bottom" of the game (though it's also visible through the ponds in the Mossy Plain region).
• Offscreen Teleportation: You've explored every region there is, and only found two Allosaurus and a single Stegosaurus in the whole game. What's that? Another Allosaurus just appeared in the forest while you weren't looking? And yet another Allosaurus near the riverbed? And there's suddenly a Stegosaurus stuck in the mud? And also anAllosaurus? Bear in mind, apart from the forest, everything is visibly sealed off by rock walls.
• Prehistoric Monster: Averted. The game tries to showcase a realistic depiction of these animals, at least as far as their behavior goes, of course without taking the numerous glitches into consideration.
• Small Taxonomy Pools: Granted, since it's a small-scaled freeware game based on the second episode of Walking with Dinosaurs (Late Jurassic North America), and only the most noteworthy animals appear.
• Stock Dinosaurs: Allosaurus, Stegosaurus and Diplodocus. And that's all the dinosaurs, folks!
• Stock Sound Effect: The animal sounds have been copied from Walking with Dinosaurs, though unfortunately, Ben Bartlett's music tracks are absent.
• Super-Persistent Predator: Allosaurus will attack Diplodocus until they bring them down or die trying.
• The Voice: Ornitholestes in the game is represented by the sound it makes. The animal itself never appears, no matter how hard you look into the forest. This is purely for convenience's sake, so that the developers didn't have to design and animate it.