#144 – Color a Dinosaur

You will color dinosaurs, and you will enjoy yourself.

PLAYERS: 1

PUBLISHER: Virgin Interactive

DEVELOPER: Farsight Technologies

GENRE: Edutainment

RELEASE DATE: July 1993

Could Color a Dinosaur be the most boring game of all time? Only if Train, 3 Doors Down, and Jason Mraz provided the soundtrack – bazing! Color a Dinosaur will find you doing nothing but coloring many a dinosaur. Essentially, this game is an outdated version of Microsoft Paint, except you can only color in the provided dinosaur templates with horrendous colors (pastels? Light pink?). There is no drawing of any kind – no adding or subtracting from the dinosaur templates, or drawing anything other than dinosaurs. The dinosaurs themselves look basic, traditional, cutesy, boring. Sometimes there’s color lag when you’re trying to fill out larger sections of the dinosaur or background. Tommy Tallarico did the music, so that’s something, I guess. Even his catchy ditties probably couldn’t save this game from the inevitable $2 bin at Babbages and Funco Lands of old.

Color a Dinosaur is – or rather, was – a $50 coloring book for your NES, with less color options than a Crayola 50-Pack. It’s what critics and gamers would refer to today as “shovelware,” games that are made hastily and cheaply for a quick profit, and purchased by parents too uneducated to know what kind of games their child actually desires. The cover reads from ages 3 to 6, but I guarantee no toddler wants to color in a game when they could be sucking up foes a la Kirby, blowing fools away a la Mega Man or Contra, or squashing Goomba’s heads a la “The Sopranos” – er, Mario. It’s worth a download for chuckling purposes only.

F