Fossil Fighters

Review from Matt - Tuesday, 06 October 2009 @ 3:18am

There's a particular genre in games that's almost entirely owned by the portable market. It's a kind of find-and-fight style of game, and includes such titles as Digimon and now Fossil Fighters. But most obviously it includes the ubiquitous Pokemon.

Fossil Fighters is a first party Nintendo title, so it comes from a solid pedigree in this genre. Pokemon has been a continual hit for the Big N since 1996. It's the second biggest selling game franchise in the world behind only Nintendo's own perennial Mario. It's no surprise, then, that Nintendo want to duplicate that sort of success, and what better way to duplicate the success than duplicate the game?

Ok, so that's a bit harsh.

This thing is a dinosaur. Though it doesn't look like one at the moment.

The problem is that I'm a cynical old man. Pokemon was never my thing at the best of times (10 years ago) and to see something now that seems to be a blatant rip-off of it from the company that made it seems to me like a cash-grab of the worst kind, creating something new by simply re-skinning an old game and re-releasing it.

I used up my hyphen allowance for the week on that sentence.

Right from the beginning it feels like a rehash. Your hero is a plucky young boy who (presumably having either the best or worst parents in the world) leaves home and sets out for adventure, to collect and train some battling minions and become the very best at what essentially amounts to a bloodsport. You are started along your path by a old professor, and must do constant battle against a repeating set of villains.

All sounding a bit familiar.

There are some new things, of course. The cleaning system for the game is pretty cool. It's well implemented, and kind of fun. Not sure why. Basically every “fossil rock” you get contains a potential piece of fossil. You clean the fossil by using a variety of tools to tap and grind on the rock to clear it from the fossils. If you touch the actual fossil too much, though, you can break the bone. Clearing the fossils fills a blue bar in the top, while a lot thumping at the fossil fills up the top red bar. At the end of a set time if the amount of blue goes over the set line then you have a successful fossil extraction. If you go over the line with the red bar... it's all over red rover.

I like the notion that we develop the technology to recover dinosaurs from extinction, and we use it to make things for us to force to fight in an arena for our pleasure.

NOW it looks like a dinosaur! I mean... vivosaur.

Getting a head lets you “revive” the dinosaur, which is why it's called a vivosaur. A revived dinosaur. Brilliant. All you need (for some reason) is the head, and that lets you start with a basic body. You can then pick up better arms, legs and body to upgrade your wee timorous beast and improve your fighting capabilities. Fossil Fighters is more about upgrading an existing creature, rather than Pokemon's “gotta catchem all” mentality.

Not all of the comparisons to Pokemon put it in a better light, either. While I applaud the use of real dinosaurs, such as Velociraptor and Parasaurolophus the fact remains that none of these are as charming or likeable as a squirtle or a pikachu.

I can't see Fossil Fighters having the ability to become anything like what Pokemon has become so in that sense the idea was lost before it even started.

However, it has to be said, here – I'm not the target market for this game. That Pokemon didn't appeal in any way suggests right from the start that I'm the wrong person to be reviewing this title. After all, if the original has no appeal, why would this? I decided to review it, but not for me. No I enlisted the help of my son.

Introducing Kyle

Kyle is 9 years old and is really into videogames. He's a raging Pokemon fan, and can tell you a great deal about battling the various Poketypes, and has a sincere and enthusiastic plan to build a machine when he's grown up, that will allow him to travel to the world Pokemon are in, and capture some.

About the only thing Kyle likes nearly as much as Pokemon is dinosaurs. So I think you can see that this young man is eminently suited to review this Paleo-pugilism. After I finished with Fossil Fighters I gave it to him to play. Then I asked Kyle a bunch of somewhat leading questions about the game, and have formatted those into the form of a review. I didn't change his words or add to them.

Dig here! Thar be fossils!

Kyle gave it 9/10 and didn't much care that we don't give scores.

Pros

Typical Nintendo polish. Fighting mechanism is quite good, more interesting and strategic than Pokemon. Finding and cleaning fossils is quite fun. HAS DINOSAURS!

Cons

Feels like a pokemon ripoff, but somehow justified because it's by Nintendo. Very slow pace, initially. Does not have pokemans in it.