Dyna Brothers

Dyna Brothers is a 1992 strategy game for the Sega Mega Drive that never left Japan. The premise alone shows the authors had no appetite for copying anyone: strange objects start falling out of the sky onto a planet where dinosaurs live quietly among themselves, and the aliens that climb out of them set about the locals.

The model is plainly Populous. You do not command units one by one as in later real-time strategies; you intervene from above and let the dinosaurs get on with being dinosaurs. Everything revolves around the Egg, which is your base, your energy store and your hatchery in one. New saurians come out of it, and if you lose it, you are finished. Several species are available, among them stegosaurus, triceratops, tyrannosaurus, allosaurus and oviraptor, each at a different price and for a different job. Managing energy is therefore the central decision here: hatch three cheap ones now, or save for a single heavy?

In practice the game is chaotic and not very forthcoming. It runs in real time, explains almost nothing and is entirely in Japanese, a practical obstacle worth knowing about before you start it. There is also less content than a modern player would expect, since the first game offers only a single-player scenario campaign; it took the sequel to turn the idea into something fuller.

Recommend it as a curiosity. Console real-time strategy was thin on the ground in those years, and Dyna Brothers is one of the more ambitious examples, if not one of the better explained. Bring patience and a willingness to experiment and there is a surprisingly workable game here; expect clarity and you should stay away.

On oldgame.cz it runs straight in the browser, with nothing to install.