by In 1991, Taito, who created hits such as Space Invaders, Bubble Bobble, and Raiden, made The Flintstones: The Rescue of Dino and Hoppy. Since that’s a mouthful of a title, I’ll just be referring to it as The Flintstones from now on. The resulting game has elements of disparate games such as Castlevania and Double Dribble.
So, is this mashup of genres worth your time, or are you better off banging rocks together? Let’s find out.
Gameplay
As mentioned previously, the gameplay is a rather unusual mix of other genres. Most levels follow a typical platformer with some elements of Castlevania. The remaining levels are basketball matches against an increasingly tough opponent. Win those matches, and you win a new ability.
The controls for the platformer sections are pretty standard. The D-pad moves your character, the A button jumps, and the B button attacks. Hold B to charge your attack and hold up on the D-pad while hitting B to use a special weapon. Start pauses and Select cycles through the special weapons you have collected.
In basketball, it is mostly the same controls. However, if you don’t have the ball, you attack with B, while if you do, you throw the ball. Jumping with A allows you to block when you don’t have the ball or jump to get a better shot if you don’t.
The special weapons all cost some of the points you get from stone tokens. These tokens are obtained from killing enemies. You want as many of these as you can have. The weapons you get are the stone tomahawk, a slingshot, and a dinosaur egg. The tomahawk arcs through the air with medium attack power. The slingshot is a weak but straight shot across the screen. And last but not least, the dinosaur egg costs a whopping 10 points but kills all normal enemies on the screen.
The special abilities you get from the basketball games are as follows, and they also cost tokens to use. The first is a Dino-like dinosaur that allows you to jump high, a pair of Icarus-style wings that allow you to fly, and a scuba suit to swim underwater. This last one isn’t particularly useful since it only works on one level.
The platforming is solid. It has a few quirks, like needing to hold A and up to pull yourself up ledges, but it works for the level design.
The combat is pretty good, although the hitbox on your basic attack seems shorter than it should be. When you charge your attack, you do pretty heavy damage, so if you know your range and timing, it is worth the risk.
I give the gameplay an 8/10.
Graphics
The graphics in The Flintstones are actually pretty good. Especially the larger sprites of the villain and his time machine in the opening scenes. All the characters are recognizable and look like they came straight from the show. This was not always the case with licensed games from the era, so it is very nice to see.
While there aren’t a lot of levels, the enemy variety is actually pretty good, and all of them look good. The bosses are done especially well.
There are several different cutscenes and even a few special effects, such as the distortion when you activate the time machine to chase after the villain, Dr. Butler.
I give the graphics an 8/10.
Music
The music is slightly above average. It’s not bad to listen to, but it repeats very quickly, and 2 of the 5 levels, the jungle and ice levels, share the same music. For me, this made the music a bit grating at times.
They do have a pretty good 8-bit rendition of the show’s theme song, as well as The Jetsons’ theme song. Not on the level of Capcom’s DuckTales theme, but very few games reach that level.
Overall, I give the music a 6/10.
Story
This game actually has an interesting story that ties into The Jetsons Meet the Flintstones. It’s not going to win any awards, but I personally like it when games add more story than they need to, so long as it doesn’t detract from gameplay.
This won’t get a rating because it’s not important for a game like this. It’s just nice to see, and I thought it was worth mentioning.
Difficulty
The game goes from easy to frustratingly difficult and back again. The only part of the game that feels like it has a normal difficulty curve is the basketball segments.
You have 3 hits before you lose a life, you can die 3 times before needing to continue, and you have unlimited continues. There is no password system, so if you restart the system, all of your progress is lost. Fortunately, once you know the game, it’s not long.
One mechanic that causes a lot of problems is when you get hit, you are knocked back and pretty far at that. It also takes a while to recover from the animation. The hit boxes for your attacks and the enemies are a bit off at times, which compounds the problem.
Final Score
Overall, I give The Flintstones: The Rescue of Dino and Hoppy a 7.5/10. I quite enjoyed going back to this game, even if it was a bit tough at times. It’s currently about $30 loose, which isn’t bad considering the price of many retro games. If you have a chance to try it, I recommend giving it a shot.
