Dinosaurs

Time Gentlemen, Please is what they say in English pubs when one of their statutory and inexplicable closing times is approaching, so everyone can buy a last round. It's also the name of a Lucasarts-like adventure game from Dan Marshall and Ben Ward, a sequel to their superb Ben There, Dan That.

"Too bad we haven't evolved into birds yet..."

I hear that.

Human beings generally assume that other brains just aren't ticking the same home-brewed quality of consciousness that we experience individually. This is true of our perception of animals and other human beings. Maybe some species actually possess acute intelligence, but they just don't speak our language. Like velociraptors -- they're hunters you know.

65,000,001 BC is a platform adventure where you play a raptor with certified ninja skills on a quest to save the world from meteoric doom. Unlike Dino Run it takes an exploratory pace with a dose of tongue-in-cheek writing, allowing you to experience raptor-hood not as a primal hunter racing for survival, but as an intelligent problem-solver saving the world with calculated method. The controls give a sense of Metroid: Redesign garnished with a taste of The Lost Vikings, not quite perfect but smooth enough once you sail through the first areas. The flow is supreme, like a slit eye focusing keenly.

As a mile high wall of dust and moldering flame devours mountains behind me, frenzied stamped stumbling at my feet, meteors knocking out a stegosaurus, boulders crushing eggs and trees, I take the instant to thrash the neck of a small lizard, consuming it whole, and gallop toward the distant call of salvation. The meteor has hit. I have a window of seconds, no mistakes. I am a velociraptor, an agile predator. As I attempt to beat Dino Run on Insane difficulty I'm listening to footage from the latest World Economic Forum, discussing the role of private equity and hedge funds. The irony is not lost.

Easter is the celebration of our divine ancestry from the lizard-people, Quetzalcoatl, Tammuz, etc., and their thirst for the blood of bunnies and other reptoids. Science seems to indicate that some dinosaurs, like these feathered raptors, did evolve into birds, but did you know they also evolved into mammalian hybrids, and that these hybrid bloodlines of shapeshifters now rule the world? Ergo, Off Road Velociraptor Safari is probably the best way to celebrate Easter - ever - because it taps into the reptilian consciousness of predation that drives our totem sacrifices, in the form of a jeep, driven by a raptor, mauling other raptors for mad points.