Dino Run from the always fun kids over at Pixel Jam tics pretty much all the boxes necessary for a Flash game to find a special place in my heart: It’s simple to play, yet difficult to master, contains adorable pixelated creatures that manage to convey deep emotion despite the four colored blocks making up their eyes, and it includes dinosaurs. Happily, Dino Run is also the sort of guest that knows it’s always polite to bring something to the party – in this case, a new check box for any game looking to capture my fickle and whimsical affections in the future: it’s about the end of the world.

Well, the end of *a* world, at least. At the start of Dino Run, your character’s plans for an idle day lounging around the nest looking at some eggs are rudely interrupted by a meteor crashing in the distance and the end of 99% of all life on the planet suddenly bearing down from the left. Seeing as how you’re a small, bipedal dinosaur rather than Bruce Willis, your only hope for survival is to leg it in the opposite direction. While not the deepest of stories, it certainly provides the necessary motivation to send you tearing across the landscape in hopes of outrunning the wall of burning earth bearing down on you.

Of course, not all your dino-chums are so lucky. Along the way you’ll run into creatures great and small, some of which are small enough to be gobbled up (earning you points to be used later for upgrading your little dino – y’know, obviously) while others, like the lumbering stegosauruses, will need to be lept over or sort of climbed. There’s also petrodactyls flying in the background, happily flitting ahead of the wall of death bearing down from stage left while ignoring your plight on the ground. This only confirms what archaeologists already suspected – petrodactyls were the pricks of the prehistoric world, and nobody was sad to see them go.

What else? There’s eggs to gather along the way, either to be scooped up off the ground or snatched out of trees through sudden, frantic jumps. Your momentum, that thing keeping you alive while the rest of the world around you gets smashed to little bits by meteor chunks, can turn against you in a flash, with a mis-timed jump carrying you just far enough to bounce off a cliff instead of landing on it or sending you flying over eggs or critters you meant to eat. It’s light and fun, full of little surprises and more than a little sweet, and even comes with a multiplayer mode to see who among your group of friends is fit to survive the coming destruction of the Earth. Between this, Velociraptor Safari, and the forthcoming Jetpack Brontosaurus, PC gaming (this one is browser-based, by the way, and can be played on whatever) seems to be having a little dinosaur renaissance. Is there any better kind?

Filed under: Monday Games