Saturday, February 13, 2010

DynoWarz Will Warp Your World!

Long before its recent merger with Namco, Bandai was a videogame publisher in its own right.  In 1990, it released DYNOWARZ: The Destruction of Spondylus for the 8-bit Nintendo Entertainment System.

There are a few things wrong with the magazine ad, however:



First, the angles are really bizarre.  Assuming that the threatening robot dinosaur is not so far in the foreground so as not to be threatening at all as it strolls casually by, and that the robot figure is of generally human proportions, we are presented with a ballistic conundrum of JFK conspiracy proportions.  How is it that the laser-firing robot manages to fire with his foreground hand into the background side of the dinosaur's neck, at a sufficient angle for the bullet to emerge into the foreground again?

Never mind that the only ad copy present beyond the game title and legal fine print is:

Power the Mighty Robot Dinosaur, Cyborasaurus on a Mission to Save the Spondylus System!

So the game is not meant to be about the Destruction of Spondylus, in the end.  Nor is the player a humanoid robot battling mighty robot dinosaurs.  We're actually meant to identify with the giant cyberdino whose vital neck circuitry has just been disrupted by laser fire.


Glad we got some of that straightened out.

If not the perspective.

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