Gift Recommendations

Product Description

This software is BRAND NEW. Packaging may differ slightly from the stock photo above. Please click on our logo above to see over 15,000 titles in stock.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #7121 in Video Games
• Brand: Atari
• Released on: 1999-07-01
• ESRB Rating: Rating Pending
• Platforms: Windows 98, Windows Me, Windows 95
• Format: CD-ROM

Amazon.com Product Description
On a routine exploration mission in 2190 A.D., science vessel FMM UV discovered a planet with suitable climate for humankind. During the initial scouting expedition, this young planet, code-named FMM UV-32, was declared inhospitable for colony life, due to its unstable terrain and immense population of prehistoric reptiles. News of this amazing planet spread, and articles on the "Dinosaur Planet" lead an earth corporation to purchase the rights to the planet and create DinoHunt Corp. DinoHunt creates the opportunity for paying customers to become dinosaur hunters for the first time in 50 million years. You are the newest client of DinoHunt Corp. Each location is unique, with varying difficulties and terrain. The new hunter will be given three choices, with two more added for the advanced hunter, and a final area for the expert hunter, for a total of six locations. Keep in mind that regardless of which dinosaur you choose to hunt, there are others living on the islands that do not appear on your radar. You may be hunting a Stegosaurus and be surprised by a Velociraptor!

GameSpot Review
Any way you look at it, a dinosaur hunting game is a brilliant idea: It's all the action, tactics, and strategy of a true hunting simulation, with none of the guilt. Turns out, Carnivores is even more than that, more than enough to be tantalizing yet not quite complete to be entirely satisfying. Still, not only is it a solid hunting simulation, but it features first-rate graphics and sound and a fully customizable challenge that'll test the mettle of both would-be hunters and action gamers alike, even as it leaves both categories wishing there were more to the game.

There's a loose plot to justify why it is that you're hunting dinosaurs with high-powered weapons, but when you get right down to it, Carnivores is a simulation not unlike Deer Hunter or anything in its class. You grab yourself a gun, designate a species of dinosaur as your target, pick a place to hunt, and get to work. The dinosaurs can see, smell, and hear to varying extent, so you'll need to take heed of wind direction, keep quiet, sit still, and shoot straight if you hope to bring one home. Options like cover scent and camouflage can make life easier, but using these deducts points from your total. In a humane touch, however, using tranquilizer ammunition actually increases your score, although tranquilized dinos won't be on display in the keen 3D trophy room. You need those points to advance in rank, so that you can hunt bigger and badder dinosaurs in more challenging areas.

Chances are, these are going to be some of the best-looking 3D dinosaurs you've ever seen, and the best that you'll see for a while. They're big, and they look real. They go plodding about, over hills and around obstacles, stopping to graze if they like to eat plants or charging and leaping straight for your throat if they prefer meat. Shooting down the dinosaurs isn't easy and may be especially difficult against certain types that are either vulnerable only in specific regions or highly aggressive. For instance, you'll need to do better than a head shot to bring down a triceratops; you'll need to shoot him in the eye, the throat, or the back of the neck if you intend for him to fall. Meanwhile, the velociraptor demands lightning-fast reflexes and offers no second chances. If you manage to kill a target, it'll topple over dramatically, although perhaps not quite as dramatically as you might like. Shoot a dino with a tranquilizer round instead, and you can see and hear it breathing heavily as it lies paralyzed. There's quite a bit to shoot at: There are seven varieties of dinosaurs to hunt, from the meek parasaurolophus with its telltale head crest, to the small but ferocious velociraptor, to the enormous, nigh invincible tyrannosaurus rex.

You'll get to track these through half a dozen different environments, which look surprisingly authentic. They're mostly plains, hills, and jungles, although you also get coastal, swamp, and volcanic regions that look especially good. Everything warps underwater, and a mist hangs in the air as you trudge through the swamp, and special effects like these help make Carnivores look not just good, but great. It doesn't look perfect, though. Your field of vision isn't very far, and fleeing dinosaurs will vanish into the horizon long before they should. There's a clever use of atmospheric fog to help hide the pop-up, but it won't fool you for long. Meanwhile, you'll spot the occasional graphical glitch when a dinosaur's shadow clips through a hill, but it's nothing serious. The dinosaurs themselves will get stuck on objects once in a while, but most of the time they're every bit as smart or as stupid as you'd like to believe they were back then. There's no music in Carnivores, a decision presumably made in the interest of realism, but you get plenty of well-suited ambient sound effects to keep your ears busy. Beyond that, the dinosaurs all sound different, and although no one can be sure just what they sounded like, you'll find that their calls are both plausible and appropriate. At the same time, the three guns with which you'll shoot them sound as good as the best that first-person shooters have to offer.

Those guns, including a high-powered shotgun, a hi-tech crossbow, and a sniper rifle, carry varying amounts of ammunition and are ideal for specific situations. The shotgun's your best bet against small, aggressive dinosaurs, the sniper rifle's perfect for precision shooting from long range, and the X-bow is virtually silent but slow to reload, making it your best bet for stealthy kills. The weapons all look great, and they're different and effective. You'll wish, however, that there were more, and just as well wish you had even more to shoot at and more regions to explore. That's really the only shortcoming of Carnivores. Although it forces you to earn a certain number of points before you can use the sniper rifle or hunt the more advanced dinosaur species, that just seems like an artificial constraint to camouflage the game's slim content. And that'll invariably disappoint you a little, since you'll more than likely enjoy what Carnivores has to offer. --Greg Kasavin
--Copyright ©1998 GameSpot Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part in any form or medium without express written permission of GameSpot is prohibited.

Customer Reviews

Most helpful customer reviews

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful.
Very fun! A great idea neatly done...great value.
By A Customer
Carnivores is a really fun game to play. The interface is quite simple, just like a first person shooter, but the object is to hunt dinosaurs. You choose a weapon (limited to X-bow, shotgun, or rifle), a hunting terrain, and a dinosaur species to hunt. You have options like tranquilizers (for you PETA folks), radar, scent mask, and camouflage, but these lower your score. As you progress in skill, you get to hunt more ferrocious beasts, until as an expert you can hunt T-Rex. The first time I used my game call on the Tyranosaurus, I about fell out of my chair! The game can be set at varying degrees of difficulty. If you set the choice to AGGRESSIVE DINOSAURS and HIGH SENSITIVTY, you are just begging to wind up in T-Rex's jaws. Also, while you are hunting stegosaurus, it is not uncommon for an Alosaurus to stalk you. The sounds are well done and set an eerie, lonely atmosphere. The graphics are good, so you can run it on a low-end Pentium. Don't expect Quake 2 or the like....this is a simple game with basic graphics, but is one heck of a lot of fun. There is no gore here, the violence is not graphic.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful.
Suprisingly good budget shooter
By Ian
I've only bought two budget games (those cheesy ones that sell for less then twenty dollars) in my life. One was a mind-numbingly awful shark hunter game, and the other was Carnivores. To my suprise (Which is still intact today), Carnivores is a suprisingly good budget shooter, well worth its bargin bin price.

Carnivores takes place in the far future, where you are the newest client of a dino-hunting corporation that's set up on a planet in space. Yes, the story is non-existant, but at least they tried to give a solid reason why you're hunting dinosaurs with a shotgun.

For your dino hunting adventures, you get to hunt with three weapons. A shotgun thats powerful (but very noisy), a silent crossbow that features a complex aiming system, and the powerful but limited sniper rifle. Although you only get three weapons, thats more then enough for plenty of dinosaur hunting action. One feature I really liked is that you can choose to hunt with sedative rounds (tranquilizers), which puts your prey to sleep instead of killing it, thus earning you more points.

The dinosaurs you hunt are varied, each offering a uniuqe challenge. The Parasarlophosis for example, is harmless, but has an excellent sense of hearing and can detect you from a mile away, making it almost impossible to find one. The Triceratops is peaceful, but if you disturb it (or shoot it) from close range, its going to come after you and stomp you to death. And of course, the meat eating dinosaurs want to eat you, and all of them have excellent senses of smell, so be carefull!

To make your hunt easier, you can equip items and equipment such as camoflage, scent reducing chemicals, and a very handy radar. Bear in mind though, that using the equipment will lower your score (you get points by killing or sedating your target dinosaurs).

The world of Carnivores is quite amazing to walk through. Although the graphics are average at best, each world feels alive and vibrant. Lush tropical forests, desolate deserts, jungles, beaches, ancient temples, and even a pyramid or two are some of the places you'll encounter on your journey. Other dinosaurs such as Galamimuses walk around, looking for food and running from you when you fire or get too close. The audio portion of the game is excelent. Birds and insects squack and screetch in jungles, desolate and lonely wind blows across the deserts. A lake splashes under a late afternoon sky. A T-rex roars in the distance. All of it adds up to a rich and imersive atmosphere.

Suprisingly, Carnivores is a scary game. Unlike games where you hunt Bambi or turkeys, the dinosaurs in the game fight back! If a meat eater sees you, it will stop at nothing (literaly) to get to you. If you're hunting a stegosaur, theres a good chance you might run across a velociraptor (who will immediatly come after you). There were several moments during my playtime where I lunged out of the chair in fright! Such as the time I had an Allosaur lined up in my crosshairs, and I was suddenly ambushed and killed by a velociraptor from behind. Staying on your toes and remaining alert will save your life many times. And when you first hunt the T-rex? Be prepared to be scared out of your wits. The first time I sounded the T-rex roar, I jumped out of my seat! (When you hear a T-rex roar, RUN! Not that it will do you any good).

Other little touches add nice depth. If you want to leave a hunt, you have to go through a brief waiting period ("Preparing for evacuation"), meaning that if you're being chased by a hungry dinosaur, you cant just leave the game instantly. You can change the amount of dinosaurs in a hunting area to suit your tastes (fancy hunting three T-rex's at once?). There's even a feature where you can view your trophies in a hunting room.

I do have a few complaints with the game though. Hunting the meat eaters (the velociraptor and Allosaurus) is more difficult then it should be, due to the fast walking speed of the creatures. They walk very fast, making it extremly difficult to line up a head shot (which you need to kill them), meaning that you'll die many times due to one missed shot. This may be realistic, but it does get annoying. There could also be some dino vs dino struggles that could take place. Its a bit strange to see a Stegosaurus calmly eating some grass while a gigantic T-rex thunders right past it (ignoring the stegosaurus as well). My other complaint is once you unlock all the weapons, stages, and dinosaurs, you really dont have anything else to do except just keep playing over and over again, meaning that the game can get repettitive.

But in the end, Carnivores is a suprisingly good budget game that I dont hesitate to recommend. If you find it for under ten dollars, I'd get it. Its a great bargin.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
Best Extinct Animal Hunting Game Ever
By L. Kukla
This game is the bomb. it has good graphics, extremely realistic terrain. It is a wonderful game if you get bored with the normal hunting games. No blood in the game, but it isn't needed to keep you at the edge of your seat when hunting the big meat-eaters.