is it weird to review what is basically an incomplete alpha of a game that never came out, and also unfair to rate it higher than the final-yet-very-different product it got released as?

yes and i don't care. researching this game made up a good chunk of my childhood and i enjoyed it, leave me alone.

there's a good lot of Dinosaur Planet that was left unchanged in the retail Star Fox Adventures (specifically the galleon intro and most of darkice mines for example), but it's still a vastly different beast altogether. unlike SFA, DP's pacing is a lot slower and seems to be mostly focused on environmental puzzles and exploration rather than the more fast-paced action and challenges than SFA brought. not a bad thing (especially when the environments are pretty gorgeous even for the N64), but definitely an acquired taste when you're more used to how things were in SFA.

isn't to say Dinosaur Planet is better (or worse) than the game it ended up becoming tho; there's definitely more to DP than SFA in a lot of areas, but alpha-state-bugginess and unfinished-ness aside, there's quite a few quality-of-life things that SFA had that i really wish were in the build we got. two that i can name off the top of my head: bomb spores IMMEDIATELY vanish upon touching the ground, and some items like mushrooms you have to manually pick up rather than automatically picking up when you walk onto them. plus some challenges that got reworked in SFA are substantially more difficult in DP coughcloudrunnerjetbikeracecough.

but yeah that's. kind of the reason why i can't really rate this the full five stars. SFA's got its issues, and DP isn't exempt from it's own flaws.

due to the state it's in, Dinosaur Planet is essentially impossible to truly complete, and with some areas and tasks being empty or unfinished, you can't really go through the story "as intended". still, DP's a trip to explore what could've been, as well as compare it to it's finished Starfox-ified verison. there's a sense of mystery and atmosphere to DP's original N64 incarnation, and i'm so glad i can finally experience it after 15+ years of researching the game.

will this game ever be truly "finished", be it in Rare's hands or by the dedicated fans decompiling it? hard to say, but with this and the tsukihime remake coming out in the same year, weirder things have happened.

and even then, i'm fine with what we got. it's some sense of closure to a mystery over two decades old now, and it's been a real treat to explore.

listen. i grew up with banjo. even during my mid-teens, first time seeing the reveal trailer my reaction was pretty much "oh this is different than what i grew up with but it looks fun".

i still stand by N&B being actually pretty decent if you go in not expecting this to be a platformer, and also if you enjoy building stuff and doofing around in physics sandboxes. that being said, i'm not a fan of the more self-deprecating writing in N&B. yes, i know (shockingly) this was actually a game the banjo team wanted to do, but the writing does make the game feel at odds with itself.

jonathan tronathan eat my shorts

i love rare as much as the next 90s kid but man this game has not aged gracefully at all

conker's bad fur day is the drakengard of n64 platformers, but replace everything that made drakengard so intriguing with dated film parodies and humor on par with south park and newgrounds. also the literal shit monster that sings that's the only reason people ever remember this game.

multiplayer kicks ass though!