I was looking for a random SNES game to write about, so I skimmed through a list of games and landed on Hungry Dinosaurs because it had a funny name and I've never heard of it. It was released in Europe under that title, and as Harapeko Bakka in Japan, but was never released in the US. It is a fairly mysterious game to me because I couldn't find much information about it online. All I really know is that it was developed by Magical Company and was published by Sunsoft. I couldn't find out much about Magical Company either, and all I know is they were around for about ten years and started out by porting Fatal Fury to some Japanese home computer. They never made any games I've heard of.
Hungry Dinosaurs is a simple puzzle game that is something of a mix between the Tron lightcycle game and Go, better known as Reversi, I suppose. Two to four dinosaurs of different colors walk around on a grid laying eggs. You can capture eggs of different colors by creating a straight line between two eggs of your own color. So, if you have in egg in all four corners, and there are eggs between those, you will capture all the eggs along the edges as well as in an “X” through the middle. If you are surrounded by eggs, you may eat eggs of any color to clear the way, and it will replaced with an egg of your color, but this will slow you down.
The art design of this game is unusual. The dinosaurs look suspiciously like yoshis, and they even stick out their tongues to eat eggs. The colors, music, and overall look give it an off-brand Mario feel. The main difference between these dinosaurs and yoshis is that these dinosaurs appear to be legitimately retarded. Maybe this is what happens to Yoshi when Mario is done with him. After being repeatedly donkey punched by his master every time he wants Yoshi to eat, Yoshi is thrown down a pit and into Hungry Dinosaurs. Overall, Hungry Dinosaurs is a boring, no frills puzzle game that doesn't do anything special.
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