Cadillacs and Dinosaurs review: the brawl where the dinosaurs pick no side

A mechanic, a diplomat, an engineer and a very large man called Mess fight their way through a world where dinosaurs walk around like weather. You can pick up a rifle off the floor. You can drive a car. You can get eaten by a raptor while you are busy punching a poacher. It is a lot of game for one cabinet.

The dinosaurs are the design

The smart idea is simple. The dinosaurs are neutral. They attack the players and the enemies alike, so every fight has a third party that nobody controls. A careful player lures a dinosaur into a crowd of thugs and lets it do the work. A careless one walks into its path and loses half a bar. That turns a standard brawler into something closer to managing a stampede.

The best enemy in the game is the one that is not on anybody's team.

Guns on the floor, and a clock in your face

Players can find and use firearms, along with rocks, explosives and clubs, and nothing in the genre felt quite as good as picking up a rifle in a Capcom brawler. The four heroes play differently, too. Jack is the balanced pick, Hannah is the skill character, Mustapha is the fast one and Mess hits hardest.

Then there is the continue screen. Lose your last life and a villain holds a gun up to the screen and says "Eat lead, baby!" while a counter runs for 20 seconds. It is a cheap trick and it works. Plenty of pockets got emptied by that one image.

A cartoon, a comic and a car

The game is based on the comic book series Xenozoic Tales and was built as a tie-in to the animated series that ran the same year, which is how a lot of American kids met these characters first, on television. There is even a stretch where the heroes use their car to cross a desert, and the moment you get behind the wheel the cabinet stops feeling like a brawler for a minute.

What it meant back then

By the early nineties the American arcade was thinning out, and a big three player Capcom cabinet was the kind of machine that still pulled a crowd. You found it in a mall arcade with carpet that glowed under the black lights, or wedged beside the pool tables at a bowling alley. Three kids who did not know each other would lock in, and the one who picked up the rifle first was king for a stage.

Playing it today

It holds up because it keeps handing you new toys. Weapons change, the dinosaurs change the fight, and the stages rarely repeat an idea for long. Play it with two friends and it is still one of the most fun hours a side-scrolling brawler can give you.