The Flintstones: The Surprise at Dinosaur Peak is a sequel to The Flintstones: The Rescue of Dino & Hoppy for the NES.
This game features a swappable character between Barney and Fred by pressing the select button.
Some general notes about the game:
- Swapping characters freezes the character in place for one frame. The rest of the game still progresses, only the character is halted.
- certain surfaces stop the character from moving horizontally with invisible barriers. Ropes that barney grabs onto will stop him horizontally if you jump into them. Switching to fred since he bypasses them even though it costs a frame to do so saves time. Similarly, ledges that can be grabbed onto with fred will stop him horizontally.
- Grab ledges by holding A. Pull yourself up by pressing up. Fred can grab ledges, Barney can grab tightropes.
- Thrown items such as axes or bowling balls use up from the square meter in the bottom right. Axes use up 2 blocks on the meter. Bowling Balls use up 3 blocks. The meter gradually refills automatically.
- Barney has a shorter hitbox than Fred. Since all jumps are at a fixed height this hitbox discrepency can sometimes be abused.
- Fred's charged club swing can actually damage enemies and bosses behind him by releasing B just before turning around.
- Attacking while on the ground will halt your momentum, so all attacks should be done in the air.
- The large chunk of meat in the canyon stage allows your basic attacks to be twice as fast, including faster slingshot projectiles.
- Some bosses (unknown if all of them are like this yet) can be damaged twice at the start of the fight when they become activated. This can be used on the monkey boss for double damage with a slingshot and the spider boss for double damage on the bowling ball.
- Burger pickup in canyon costs 69 frames.
- Burger pickup in introduction level costs (?) frames. (there is still the issue of the dragon fire at the end slowing you down)
- In the underwater stages, spikes near a ceiling corner can be abused for a damage boost and a super jump. For whatever reason it adds a normal jump speed to your underwater jump speed (?) I have no idea why.
- You can jump 1 pixel shorter by switching to barney the frame before jumping. Never really useful since you get frozen in place during character swap anyway.
- the basic club swing (which normally only does 2 damage) can be timed to deal it's damage on the last possible frame can actually deal 6 damage by pressing B when the animation hits the first frame of raising the club over his head. Why this happens, I do not know.
- resetting your console on the 2nd valid input frame will skip the intro text at the beginning of the game, and go straight to the title screen instead.
Fully Charged Club swing damages
Your club can be charged by holding B and deals more damage if the meter is full. There are 3 states your club meter can exist: small (around 12 bars), medium (16 bars), and large (20 bars). The meter is extended by grabbing the powerups in the shape of a burger.
- Small fully charged club: 6 damage to bosses.
- Medium fully charged club: 8 damage to bosses.
- Large fully charged club: 10 damage to bosses.
These are in comparison to other attacks:
- Basic Club swings by Fred deal 2 damage to bosses.
- Slingshot projectiles deal 1 damage to bosses.
- Thrown Axes deal 6 damage to bosses.
- Rocks repelled at the caveman boss deal 11 damage each
- bowling ball deals 10 damage to bosses.
Bosses
Strat: use the backwards hitbox to force the boss to the center of the screen (this is determined by which direction fred is facing when the boss takes damage). Since he doesn't have as far to run to the edge of the screen his invincibility timer will be a little bit shorter. Also 3 fully charged medium hits are just enough to kill the boss. (8 x 3 = 24)
Strat: Manipulating double rock falls which are determined before entering the boss room, and then making sure the rocks both spawn close enough to the boss for quick hits. 2 slingshot hits on the way to the boss, followed by an axe toss will deal the perfect amount of damage (2 x 11 = 22) + (2 x 1 = 2) + 6 = 30
New strat: this strat does not require any RNG manipulation for the falling boulders. start with 2 shots from slingshot (2 dmg) then an axe toss (6 dmg). This is followed up by some glitch club swings (without the quick weapon this only does 4 dmg instead of 6) to get him down to 12. A backwards axe toss will spawn the axe inside of the caveman and it turns out it will double hit him in the right spot (6x2=12)
Strat: For some reason your first slingshot projectile can hit the monkey boss twice dealing 2 damage instead of 1. This combined with 3 10 dmg attacks makes for a perfect boss kill. Need to make sure the monkey is on the left side of the screen so his death animation is offscreen faster. 1 bowling ball + 2 large club charges combined with the slingshot can accomplish this. (1 + 1 = 2) + 10 + 10 + 10 = 32
Strat: Throwing the bowling ball at a certain timing deals 2 hits to the boss to start off with 20 damage. This is similar to the double slingshot projectile damage on the monkey boss (?). Then either 3 club swings or another bowling ball will kill it. (2 x 10 = 20) + 10 + 10 + 10 = 50
Strat: There seems to be no real good strat here. Can not double hit the boss at the start like the spider or monkey bosses. Bowling ball is fastest way to get 10 dmg so that should be used first. Afterwards it doesn't matter, the spawn times seem to be the same no matter how fast you kill the bats. The locations are RNG though. So just 5 10 dmg hits
- Baby Dinosaur: 60 hp (actually 45)
Strat: since this boss dies at 15 hp instead of 0, his hp value is actually 45, for whatever reason. 4 10 damage hits and then a regular club using the 6 damage glitch is enough to kill it.
New Strat: Turns out this boss can be dual hit by a bowling ball and a regular club swing. Using the overlapping 6 damage club swing alongside the bowling ball means I can deal 16 damage in 1 hit. This is enough to eliminate the previous last hit meaning it will die in 4 strikes instead of 5. A little bit of time loss by charging the club, but saves 44 frames over the previous method. 60 - 10 = 50 - 10 = 40 - 16 = 24 - 10 = 14. (boss dies at 15 hp instead of 0)
- Final Boss: baby dino (24 hp) mama dino (80 hp)
Baby Dino strat: Throwing a bowling ball at the start of the fight will result in a faster hit since the ball rolls faster than the character can run. That leaves 14 hp so an 8-charge club swing followed by a 6 glitched instant club swing and it is dead.
Mama Dino Strat: Deal 80 damage. Timed fully charged club swing to hit the frame the boss becomes hittable, followed by a bowling ball to deal a quick 20 damage. After that, you can actually use the 6 damage basic club swing trick during a bunch of rapid jumps because the boss's invincibility timer is incredibly short compared to other bosses. You have just barely enough time to even sneak in a 2 damage regular club on the way back down. This means you can deal 8 damage every jump which is way quicker than fully charging your club for 10 damage each. (10+10=20) takes boss from 80 to 60 hp. Followed by 6 basic club glitches that deal 8 each, 8*6 = 48. 60-48 = 12. This means that 2 basic club glitches at 6 damage each is enough to take it out. 6*2 = 12. 12-12 = 0.
New Strat: Same as the old strat, except you can actually get 2 overlapping club hits that deal 6 damage each. This means that each jump can deal 12 damage with basic club swings, as opposed to fully charging your club for only 10 damage, not to mention it's slower to charge it. Saved a bowling ball for the final hit because it would hit for 10 damage before the second glitched club would.
TODO Currently useless tricks/glitches
- triggering the raft in the first stage and then falling into the rapids in such a timing that you'll land back on the raft as it's falling will trigger an interesting glitch where you'll slide along the raft and then the alligator and even clip through the wall. Unfortunately you will still die and are unable to ever move.
- You can clip into the ceiling anywhere there are rising log platforms that rise into the spike ceilings. This is done simply by ducking as Barney the entire way up. You can actually jump up all the way to the top of the stage by using duck inputs and switching to fred, but you will then be softlocked up there forever.
- when talking to characters at the beginning of some of the canyon stages you can actually jump on the first 2 frames and move around until you land. Unfortunately landing will still freeze you in place triggering the cutscene and it will take longer to load so it is currently useless.
- During the start of the armadillo fight, if you turn around just after triggering the automatic camera movement you can grab onto the ledge to the left of the boss arena and 2 things can happen. 1: you get pushed by the screen if you just let yourself hang there and you can actually jump in the air on the first frame after pulling yourself up. 2: you can pull yourself up immediately as long as the ledge is still visible you will pull yourself up to the ledge and the camera will not affect you, meaning you get lost off screen. You can still throw axes which for some reason will come out of the visible screen, but doesn't seem like there's much you can do, no screenwraps.
If you fall off a rightwards facing ledge with 0 momentum you will be slightly inside terrain. Turning around at certain points will actually trigger a standing animation which you will have 1 frame to jump from. Currently unknown whether this will have any use or not. (now used in the volcano level after damage boosting and jumping off the side of a row of spikes)
- During the witch boss fight your character is actually started inside solid terrain of the giant jar. If you are barney and jump your jump will be stopped short. Switching to fred immediately will cause his hitbox to push you down and below the level killing you. Nothing results from this as you get reset to the last checkpoint.
- I wasn't aware of this until reading old logs in the flintstones discord, but apparently at various places there are invisible blocks hidden off the top of the screen that break when hit with fred's club. Why this is there is anyone's guess, and makes you wonder what else could be lurking off screen...
- The start of the final boss fight has 2 frames where you can insert inputs before the text starts. Throwing a bowling ball early will result in the bowling ball never appearing but still eating up 3 blocks from your meter. Useful if you ever want to just waste power for no reason.