Carnivores (series)



""2190AD. On a routine exploration, science vessel FMM UV discovered a planet with a suitable climate for humankind. During the initial scouting expedition this young planet, code-named FMM UV-22, 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 created the unique opportunity for paying customers to become dinosaur hunters for the first time in 50 million years."

"You are the newest client of DinoHunt Corp.""

- The introduction to Carnivore's user's manual

Carnivores is a 1998 First-Person Shooter/Hunting Game where you, the player, get to be an Egomaniac Hunter on a quest to kill "prehistoric reptiles". However, the game is not a generic Deer Hunter clone. No, you are not an invincible god able to slaughter your foes in droves. You are being hunted as much as you are hunting, and your foe is bigger, faster, stronger, and, occasionally, smarter than you. Can you survive?

Carnivores spawned two sequels: Carnivores 2, and Carnivores: Ice Age. Carnivores 2 is generally considered the best of the series, although all three are good in their own right. They boast impressive (for The Nineties) graphics which include semi-realistic water effects and well-detailed environments, in addition to an incredible AI system for the dinosaurs, though it can be spoty at times. They were considered Abandonware for a long time, until in 2010 they ported the games onto iPod (or at least, Carnivores 2 and Ice Age) as well as the PSP. The series Needs More Love.

If anyone asks, there was, in fact, a fourth game, entitled Carnivores: Cityscape. It turned the game into a full-out generic FPS based around a semi-recycled plot (from Jurassic Park: The Lost World; at least, the movie version). In it, DinoHunt Corp. is running out of clients; interest in the dinosaurs is waning, and most of the people who might have jumped at the chance to hunt prehistoric creatures are already dead because they tried and failed miserably. So they decide to bring the dinosaurs to the people as a kind of traveling zoo. As can be expected, the dinosaurs escape into the city that the spaceship carrying them crashes in, and it's up to you (as an "Agent") to kill them, or, if playing as a dinosaur (the campaign has five missions for each), to kill the agents... or something.

It's not brought up in polite conversation with fans of the original series, and is, at best, So Okay It's Average.


 * Absurd Altitude: Possible to achieve, but only when using debug mode. Comes in two flavors: Hulk-style jumping and an actual "fly mode" where gravity is removed from the game, and if you stop moving in the air, you just float there.
 * AKA-47: The Dragunov SVD in the first game is just called "Sniper Rifle." In the later games, the model is changed to a normal rifle with a scope.
 * All There in the Manual: The entire plot is literally in the manual. See the page quote? That's basically it.
 * Anachronism Stew: The game's animals are taken from many different periods and real life landmasses. Justified (read: Handwaved) in that this is merely convergent evolution, and none of these dinosaurs are really dinosaurs. Also, a Dragunov SVD in the year 2190, although this is at least kind of plausible, since it could be an antique (though why you'd use an antique to hunt the most dangerous animals ever seen by man is kind of troubling).
 * Bullet Time: Debug mode's "slow" feature.
 * Critical Existence Failure: Averted in a Nintendo Hard kind of way. You get a life bar if you go underwater or near lava. If any dinosaur so much as touches you, you die. No retries, no health kits, nothing. It adds to the experience.
 * Convection, Schmonvection: Averted, but in a half-hearted manner. If get too close to lava, you get a health bar. Unfortunately, your character will not set on fire, though. Played straight in debug mode, where you can stand on (and yes, it is on; the lava is just a texture, not an actual liquid like the water) the lava without a care in the world.
 * Death World: The planet in Carnivores is described as this when looked at from the prospect of colonization, but in practice it really isn't that bad. It seems that most of the land mass is island-based, and although it is very rough terrain, it's not entirely unworkable. The dinosaurs wouldn't be that big a deal, either, although it could be Gameplay and Story Segregation and there are in fact intended to be a lot more than the game could feasibly handle, engine-wise. As for deterring development, you'd think that they could just exterminate the dinosaurs like any other animal; then again, they're making a killing on it.
 * Dummied Out: Many things, like the Brachiosaurus being a hunted animal (it is invincible without cheating), a "poacher" in Ice Age who could have shot at the player (taken out because it was deemed too difficult to fight), etc. Most of these things can be brought back into the game, but often not entirely; for example, the poacher still retains the model, but the AI is lost. One can replace the AI with one of the animals', but then it will just act like said animal, without firing at the player as was originally intended.
 * Egomaniac Hunter: You, more or less. Of course, you get to decide whether you kill one dinosaur on each map or clear the whole island, but, in the end, you are a guy who paid who knows how much to hunt dinosaurs because apparently you had nothing better to do.
 * Everything Trying to Kill You: Well, not everything, but anything that can feasibly kill you will do so if it is given the chance. So, that Velociraptor? It's going to gore you before it eats you. How about that Cerotasaurus? Him too. How about T-Rex? He throws you around like a ragdoll instead of actually eating you.
 * Everything's Better with Dinosaurs: Duh.
 * Evil Poacher: Would have been an enemy in Ice Age, but was scrapped because it was deemed too difficult.
 * Fake Difficulty: Results from Fridge Logic. Yes, the dinosaurs (and later, mammals) hunt you, too, but they don't hunt each other. At all. It's actually kind of noticeable after awhile.
 * Featureless Protagonist: Your character has no name past the one you give him, and you never see him unless you die.
 * Ghost Town: The abandoned settlement, Fort Ciskin, is this. It was abandoned after an angry T-Rex went on a rampage and destroyed its so-called "Dinosaur Wall." You can go in to find a few buildings and a huge gate, hanging on its hinges. It's rather eerie when thought about too much.
 * Hunting the Most Dangerous Game: Played With. It's the AI animals doing it to you, but since you are human, it more or less still qualifies.
 * Immune to Bullets: The T-Rex is, in a practical sense. It's an instant kill if you hit it in the eye, but otherwise it has a stupidly large amount of health which can't even begin to be chipped off unless you enter debug mode (it has somewhere around 1000 health; compare to most of the other dinosaurs, which peak at about 30, and the rifle's damage score, 4).
 * Implacable Man: The T-Rex, but only in debug mode. You die too fast to put up a chase, outside of debug mode.
 * Mega Corp: DinoHunt Corp. is a fairly mundane example. They just act like a normal African safari company, albeit one that charges absurd rates (presumably; the narrative implies it), and with good reason. Unless one takes the fourth game into account, but most players like to act like that game is a different series altogether. However, if one does do so, they start to look a bit like InGen, though leaning more towards the incompetence rather than outright malice.
 * Mighty Whitey: The Player Character avatar is white and, via the game's backstory, implicitly insanely rich and out hunting for the sake of it. It's like how rich people were in the early 1900s... but in space...
 * Misplaced Wildlife: Par for the course, considering the game's subject matter.
 * Nintendo Hard: The dinosaurs have an annoying habit of detecting you long before you have a chance to spot them. You, at least until you become stupidly rich in-game, cannot have all the dinosaurs at once for a hunt, which means they won't all be on radar. That means they can sneak up on you. This is even more pronounced in the iPod version, where accessing the map for the radar is only possible when relocating, which has a 30 second cooldown.
 * Ninja Pirate Robot Zombie: Results from Fridge Logic; all of these dinosaurs are not only dinosaurs, they're all aliens, too!
 * Noisy Nature: Subverted in an intriguing fashion. Almost all of the hunted animals (the ones that give points) are almost silent, only calling back if you use the dinosaur call. Some of the critter dinosaurs make noises (specifically, the flying ones) but not all that often--meaning that it's rather jarring and creepy when they do. Ultimately, the islands are disconcertingly quiet--often, the noise you make from walking are about all you hear.
 * One Nation Under Copyright: DinoHunt Corp. owns the rights to the planet, and can basically do whatever they like on it. In the second game it's shown that they even tried to put down a colonial settlement--even after they said the planet was "inhospitable for colony life"--though it doesn't end particularly well.
 * Precursors: A loose, generally unconnected plot thread goes through some of the maps, talking about how there used to be a race of sentient beings on the planet who built pyramids in one map and a temple in another, as well as a reproduction of Stonehenge in the Fort Ciskin map. The game, with what little information it gives, says that they worshiped the Velociraptor, although little more is said past the ruins' strategic resource to the hunter.
 * Roar Before Beating: The T-Rex does this; it's basically a grace period for you to get a shot in before it kills you. It will be subverted if you're lucky enough to get a shot off before the T-Rex notices you, because if you hit it but do not land the killing blow, it skips to the running-you-down bit.
 * Somewhere a Paleontologist Is Crying: This game is practically the poster child.
 * Super-Persistent Predator: Played With. Most things will stop chasing you after awhile (if you're lucky enough to get away, anyhow), and sometimes the carnivores will even run away instead of coming after you, assuming you hit them from far enough away. But good old Mr. T-Rex? Oh no. He's on your ass the moment he detects you, and unless you go into debug mode, you better hope you can bring him down before he reaches you. If you do go into debug mode, he will continually chase you across the map until you kill him.
 * Standard FPS Guns: Pistol, Shotgun, Double-Barreled Shotgun, X-Bow (a crossbow that automatically pulls back after shooting), Rifle (which is both full- and semi-auto), and Sniper Rifle.
 * Stock Dinosaurs: They are present, but the trope is subverted anyhow by the presence of many non-stock dinosaurs (and many non-dinosaurs). Also, Allosaurus is more similar to this game's Velociraptor than to the T-Rex, while Spinosaurus has been demoted to being a slightly-larger version of said Allosaurus. A full list can be found at the wiki.
 * This Loser Is You: The Player Character is slow as a sloth when walking, compared to the dinosaurs, can barely climb a hill, and "runs" at an elderly person's pace. It's hard to tell sometimes if it's that you're really that bad, or if it's just that the dinosaurs are overpowered, though.
 * Twenty Minutes Into the Future: Happens a bit farther into the future than most examples.