3-D Dinosaur Adventure

When I saw a dinosaur-emblazoned box on a school computer back in the nineties, I wondered what it would look like in full three-dimensionality. Reality was different. 3-D Dinosaur Adventure from 1993 is a point-and-click adventure that tries to be educational, but the effect is more nostalgic than anything else.

It's a guide to the Jurassic period, where you move around static scenes and a guide explains the world to you with an approach that's sometimes overly childish. The graphics boast three-dimensionality — you'd expect dinosaurs in wireframe models, old-school stuff that slowly rotates to seem imposing. The mechanics are simple: you click on objects and characters, read text, and occasionally listen to voice commentary. That's all there is to it.

The problem is pacing. The game is painfully slow. Every interaction forces you to wait for something to load, something to play, something to render. The graphics aren't bad for the era — they have their charm — but they pretend to be something they're not. It's not a real world, and it's not a game in the conventional sense either. It's more like an electronic school poster masquerading as entertainment.

Education without a fun foundation tries to sustain itself here, leading to boredom. After twenty minutes you've grasped the style, and it gives you no reason to continue. If it were purely a school classroom, that wouldn't be a problem. But the game wants to play like a game, and for that it depends on being fun. That's missing here.

Today you can run it through an emulator or DOSBox just as a curiosity — as an example of what it looked like when computer pioneers grabbed dinosaurs by the neck and tried to turn them into edutainment. It's well-intentioned, it just doesn't quite work. But if you want to remember what educational experiments looked like back when every animation was a miracle, here it is.