I never grew up playing Resident Evil; of the two survival horror games I actually played, one of them was a demo of Silent Hill which took place in the elementary school. My childhood experience with this small slice of gameplay has a tendency to cross my mind – specifically because it didn’t scare me. I suppose my younger self simply couldn’t register fear easily. I thought wandering around the dark shadows of the school was neat, and I liked reading the text despite having no clue what I was doing. All the creepy sounds and dangerous creatures never got to me. I didn’t find the presentation of Silent Hill so much terrifying as impressive at conveying its intended atmosphere. This exact same scenario would later apply to Dino Crisis.
This fascination with art direction overrode any possibility of being cowered by scary moments. I remember being at low health with a limping Regina, staring down a dinosaur that clearly wanted to make her its next meal. I couldn’t see the dinosaur very well, since the fixed camera angle prevented me from getting a good look at my foe. I would occasionally see it attempt to break the barrier, making painful noises each time. As young as I was, I could tell even back then it was a design choice, rather than the pure result of a hardware limit. It was clear that the designer was playing on the fear of the unknown, and I got a kick out of how deliberately this was framed. I just love seeing all the ways that games evoke feelings from players.
This specific moment endured in my brain for years. There was something so simple and masterful about it. Games today have all the horsepower they need to give players a better look at what their character can see in front of them, thanks to what we call an ‘over-the-shoulder’ camera. I don’t think this is better or worse – it’s simply different. However, having never really dug into the other horror games of the past, I never saw such clever use of framing again until I got around to completing the original Resident Evil a few years ago. I even liked it enough to replay it and gain a better understanding of how it ticked. Fast forward to 2023, and I’ve moved onto Resident Evil 3: Nemesis, which has become one of my favourite titles of all time.
Why mention Silent Hill and Resident Evil if the post is about Dino Crisis? Well, my memories and experiences with all these games led me to acquire a certain curiosity. I decided that if I were bothered enough to catch up with Capcom’s survival horror franchise, I might as well check out Capcom’s scary looking dinosaur game again too. What I ended up acquiring was a Big Box Japanese PC version of Dino Crisis, published by MediaKite in 2000 and designed for Windows 98… with a strange USB controller packed inside. You can imagine how excited I was to not only replay this in full but also find out how awkward that controller would feel. Having just come off a surprisingly solid experience with the Xplosiv version of RE3, I wanted to check if this game would work out of the box too – no strings attached.
The controller actually feels pretty good, which was a big surprise to me considering the look of the D-Pad. After getting the game running, I quickly discovered I was able to control Regina with no difficulty whatsoever. It just worked, and nothing about the play experience felt awkward – you would hope the controller worked great with the game it was bundled with! The only oddity was being unable to proceed past the title screen with it, which required keyboard input to bring up the menu selection. So close, yet so far from a keyboard-less experience! I have no idea why it behaves this way, but I must imagine it wasn’t too much of an issue at the time of release. Just play the game with the keyboard or push one of the keys in front of you, right? That said, I did try playing RE3 with it for good measure, which sometimes resulted in awkward diagonal movements. Not unplayable, but not ideal. Better to stick with Dino, I suppose.
The game itself was simple to get running, though it required a tad more effort to boot than RE3 did – I had to set the game’s compatibility to Windows XP Service Pack 2. I also opted to use Lossless Scaling to integer scale the windowed game to a satisfactory fullscreen image. The install process also doesn’t place an executable on your system – the launcher and main file remain on the disc and only work from the disc.
If you have any dreams of playing this version without a disc drive, the best solution would be to acquire the files for ‘Dino Crisis Classic REbirth’. This fan-patch gives the game better compatibility with newer hardware, provides bug fixes, English language support, and adds configuration options not present in the retail game. It also enabled me to get past the title screen without a keyboard. It may be designed for the SourceNext release of the game, but it works perfectly fine with MediaKite. Just grab the official SourceNext Windows XP patch and use that to launch your game. I imagine the widescreen option will be of interest to many, though it’s not to my personal taste. The text and menus still get stretched out, you see, and I can’t deal with that. But perhaps someone else can.
You’re maybe wondering if Dino Crisis properly scared me this time. Well, no. I had just blasted my way through RE3, where I was stubborn about defeating its infamous stalker antagonist, so the self-proclaimed ‘panic horror’ game didn’t put me in a panic at all. That said, the atmosphere had me hooked again. I also began remembering little things, like how my younger self found Regina grappling up into the air vents really cool. And I still find it cool! I spent a lot of time just observing the scenery and getting a feel for how things felt compared to RE3. Did you know that you can buffer the input for opening doors in that game? You can’t do that in Dino Crisis. The latter’s in-game menu was designed for 480i on the PlayStation too, which makes the text more difficult to read when set to 320×240 on PC. I love observing quirks like that.
The way that games interact with people’s emotions will never fail to capture my interest. Even if it doesn’t always hit me, I can always see what the intention was, and there’s a wealth of online videos that let me see how it impacts other people. Games aren’t just amazing now, they were always capable of cool things. Whether it’s to get in touch with older memories or find new experiences, I’m always bound to find something neat by looking back at the past. That’s good enough for me. Maybe I’ll try Silent Hill again. I think that one actually will scare me.
