Thanks to Ratalaika Games for the review code
Title: Dino Land
System: Nintendo Switch
Price: $5.99
Release Date: 12/12/2025
Story
In this prehistoric themed pinball adventure, you take control of a green dinosaur as he sets out to save his friend from a bunch of evil dinosaurs in weird pinball fields. Not much of a plot here, but there is an actual ending you can see if you max out the score.
Presentation
The usual modern Shinyuden reissue tropes apply with Dino Land, as they have ever since Aero 2 rolled this new wrapper out. Sound test, manual/box scans, rewind/fast forward, cheats and screen options are all back yet again. Per usual, Switch 1 will have a harder time using the fast forward feature while the Switch 2 handles it just fine.
Interestingly enough, while most of these recent reissues use pretty terrible scans for the box/manual, Dino Land’s scans aren’t nearly as bad as say, Final Zone had it. There’s still come clear artifacts and sloppy editing/blanking out of material, but it no longer looks like someone used a 2010 camera and took a picture in a weirdly lit room. Still not as crisp as the scans in the Edia compilations, though.
The game itself looks OK for a Genesis game, but this is yet another downscale of a game originally meant for the X68000. That means Dino Land looks a lot rougher than the computer version, and I found some of the downgrades here to be way more annoying than they were for Final Zone and Granada, especially with the game feeling incredibly choppy and not fun.
The music and sound also took a gargantuan hit, with pretty obnoxious sound effects and some songs sounding like absolutely stupid circus music. Seriously, the bonus stage theme almost made me feel like I was getting an aneurysm.
Gameplay
Dino Land is a pinball game, and when I first played this on Evercade I loathed it with every fiber of my being; partly because I wasn’t playing it like the games it was clearly inspired by, (the Compile Crush series) but more modern 16 bit pinballers like Psycho Pinball and Pinball Dreams. Obviously with this being an older game, Dino Land is gonna suck compared to those. But after revisiting Alien Crush, really enjoying that and giving this a spin with knowledge that the Crush games were the inspiration for Dino Land, is this still a solid pinball score chaser?
No, of course not, but it isn’t dire nor the worst thing I played from Telenet/Wolf Team. The framerate is really janky here and makes Dino Land pretty annoying to play. The three board layouts are frustrating, but there are some clever point bonuses to go after and are easy enough to figure out if you’ve played a Crush game before.
The bonus games/”boss fights” are pretty dire, and all come down to playing keep away with this weirdo dinosaur trying to bother your friend as you also duel with the stage boss. Still, you do get the option to uncurl from the ball and just walk up to them, so you have some remedy that doesn’t rely on bad ball physics to try and clear them. You don’t get the ending even if you clear all three in a single life, and instead you gotta max out that score. You’re better off using the cheats to see the ending, since trying to get it legitimately will drive you insane.
Just casually trying to play for your own scorechasing purposes, though? It might have a lot wrong with it, but there’s still some fun to be had in Dino Land. Once I thought of it from the Crush perspective vs the Pinball Dreams perspective, I found myself enjoying this one slightly more than I did on Evercade. Key word being slightly. This is still a poor man’s Devil Crush.
Conclusion
In conclusion, Dino Land is just a really unfun Pinball experience, but far from the worst video game rendition I played from the era. It still has some fun parts and is a decent time if you want to scorechase for yourself, but compared to the magnificent Crush series, or even Rare’s own Pinball NES games, Dino Land is way behind the rest of the pack.
The bonus stages are annoying, the framerate is janky and the game sounds miserable. Throw most 16 bit pinball games at me and this one would be near the bottom for me to pick up and play. But I’d gladly reach for this over say, Super Pinball on Famicom.
I give Dino Land a 4 out of 10.