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One day, some employee at Virgin Games was smoking a joint, and was having a trip with trippy dinosaurs. He needed to make a game quick, so he took all of the elements of that trip and wrote them down. The people at Virgin Games were probably high on the same substances, and thus, Color a Dinosaur was born!. All jokes aside, this Nintendo Entertainment System game is a true collector's piece, as it has two ingredients for collectibility: 1-Being an educative game, and furthermore, targeted at audiences from age groups 3 to 6, makes it valuable, as most of kids from that age group weren't able to properly play most games on the Nintendo Entertainment System, but also because little kids don't show as much care to their stuff, unlike grown-up collectors take good care of their games. These factors already make the game hard to find loose, but they make it even harder to find complete, as the small children didn't care about the manual and the box, and were likely to tear and toss it around, making most of them end up in the waste bin. 2-Being a late-release NES game makes an already rare game even harder to find, as most people have already moved on to the SNES, which offers much better software such as Mario Paint. These two factors make Color a Dinosaur a solid buy for any collector of retro game stuff, but even though it has no gaming value, gamers may still buy it for a quick laugh at this obsolete coloring software.Read full review
Color A Dinosaur (CAD) is a pretty unique game in the NES library. I loosely refer to it as a game as there's very little acquisition of skill involved and there's really no concrete goals for the user to achieve. There is, however, as many dinosaurs as you can color. With your 8-bit palette, you can color prehistoric creatures for a few minutes until you come to the realization that you could have bought a coloring book at the dollar store instead. It's a viciously boring game. To be honest, Cheetahmen II may actually be more fun and the code was never actually finished. I will say that one nice facet to the game is the music, artfully-composed by Tommy Tallarico, cousin of Aerosmith's Steven Tyler. We aren't treated to lot of it, but what little we're exposed to is very catchy (Tallarico went on after his NES days to compose tunes for the Earthworm Jim series). However, that's far from the reason anyone would buy Color A Dinosaur nowadays. It's a collectible now --- the gameplay has become secondary to its value to NES enthusiasts. Because it was published late in the Nintendo Entertainment System's commercial lifespan, not many copies were released or sold. The copies that did make it to homes were often not cared for (target market was 3-to-6-year-old children). Thus, you see very few cartridges in mint condition, you seldom see the manuals for sale, and you almost never see the box on the market. Among the NES collector's community, the cartridge is known to be only slightly more common than rarities like Little Samson and about as common as the coveted Duck Tales 2. What kind of boxes are as rare as CAD's box? Games like Donkey Kong Jr. Math, Flintstone's 2 Surprise at Dino Peak, and Chubby Cherub are among its peers, causing it to be highly desirable to complete-in-box collectors. The manual is not as hard to come by as the box, but it's still very rare (we can only assume that these unessential materials were destroyed/mutilated/discarded by the game's original, young owners). The interesting thing about the manual is that it not only contains numerous dinosaur illustrations, but also has a slew of facts about dinosaurs and their world, their extinction, and several popular species. This is all geared toward children, but it's noteworthy specifically because most NES manuals don't veer off into encyclopedia territory, while CAD's does. A lot of folks will give this game a low rating because the gameplay has aged very poorly --- technology has ultimately proven that digital coloring books are not conducive to console gaming. However, I'm inclined to give it 5 stars simply for collectibility. I'd even give it more, if given the chance, because it's a prime example of a late-release NES title geared toward children. Two decades later, everyone knows that finding these games in good condition is a challenge. While it's not a video game you're going to be able to sit down with your grandkids and impress them with, it will always going to be one of the original NES premiere collector's items.Read full review
Great classic game!
Verified purchase: Yes | Condition: Pre-owned
kids game fun to play
Verified purchase: Yes | Condition: Pre-owned
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