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Humpday Gaming: Jurassic Park: The Rest Of The Best And Worst

Hey folks, it’s time to finish up where we started. So as promised, here’s a list of the rest of the best and worst from the Jurassic Park stable of video games. RAR!

Jurassic Park SNES

One of the best, and strangest, of all the JP games ever released, JP SNES decided to not go for the obvious side-scrolling action game that everyone on Earth was doing, and instead opted for an overhead Zelda-like adventure game. Furthermore, the developers decided to go for a very rarely used first-person perspective for the game’s “dungeons.” Keep in mind that this was in a time where anything that even resembled 3D on a console was considered nothing short of a miracle, so it was pretty amazing the first time you walk into a building and the perspective changes to you staring down a raptor. Of course that raptor was the crudest 2D bitmap you ever saw, and had a maximum of 3 frames of animation, but it didn’t matter. I’ll be damned if I didn’t fall back out of my chair the first time one lunged at me.

The amazing thing about the game though was that it could have easily just been a throwaway gimmick that barely worked. We would have still eaten it up in droves simply because it was Jurassic Park, and we could shoot dinosaurs right in the face with a stun rod in first person. But the game was actually really good. One of the better adventure games on the SNES actually. The overhead stuff worked great, and had just enough action and exploration to keep you interested, while the first person stuff was totally playable and atmospheric for the time. It also helped that this was one of the rare games that used true Dolby Surround Sound(!!!). So when that raptor screeched like a banshee and jumped at you from behind, you instantly knew where it was, and that it was in fact time to change your underwear. Again.

Jurassic Park 2 SNES

Apparently the awesome adventure game that was the first SNES game didn’t see too many sales, so the follow up decided to go full Contra on that ass. JP 2 actually came out before the JP 2 movie, and thus had absolutely nothing to do with anything. The plot is actually laughably bad, but was actually told in fully animated cut-scenes, which were cool enough at the time to make you forget the stupidity of corporations wanting to clone dinosaurs to run restaurants or some shit. The game was straight side-scroller action all the way, though it seemed to have a slightly more plodding pace to it than most. It actually felt a lot like the excellent Alien 3 game for the SNES, which isn’t really a bad thing. It was just… weird. Overall, the game looked great, played okay, and had one of the better SNES soundtracks you’d hear. Definitely worth a look if you never played it.

Jurassic Park Sega CD

You know, the Sega CD version of JP gets a lot of hate. I guess I can see why. At a time when everyone else was getting sweet ass JP games featuring awesome crazy action, the all-powerful Sega CD gets… a point and click adventure. Getting past the disappointment of it all, the game wasn’t bad. It was a decent little adventure game. It’s just that it was offered to a crowd that wanted absolutely nothing to do with a decent adventure game. It was also weirdly jarring in its art style. Most of the time featuring okay hand-drawn scenes, but then randomly switching to fully animated cg interiors. Neither fit with the other, and this isn’t even mentioning the bad fmv featuring some guy with a pretty boss beard telling you shit about dinosaurs that you don’t care about. An odd game all around, but it’s aged better than the other JP games. Well, certainly better than our next game:

Jurassic Park 3DO

I should take back what I just said. To even suggest a game has aged well or not so great would at least say that it was at one point sort of good. JP 3DO was not good. In fact, it was so bad that its release was literally an 11th hour decision because of quality concerns,  and also the fact that there really wasn’t even a finished game to release. What was promised by 3DO was a new standard in immersing movie-like entertainment for video games. Early shots looked jaw-dropping, and most of us 3DO owners (all five of us) were waiting patiently for the next level in 3D dinosaur gaming. What was released however, was basically a few shitty minigames that resembled old arcade games, while the rest of the game was padded out with what best can be described as a few not even half finished tech demos. The “best” being a FPS where you wandered down identically textured hallways until a giant-assed Raptor jumped at your face. Sorta like how the SNES version mentioned above did on a woefully underpowered console (compared to the 3DO) five years earlier. It also did it far better, and actually remembered to put a game around it.

Jurassic Park The Lost World PSX

What was looking to be the best JP game ever from early previews and demos, JP on the Playstation turned out to be the sort of tease that haunts you for years. Promising the best part of the Genesis game (playing as  hella dinosaurs), while offering state of the art graphics that only the Playstation could provide. Throw in a few levels where you actually played as the damn T-Rex, and you had me sold. The actual game turned out to be a competent and pretty 2.5D platform game, hindered by one small thing:

It was impossibly hard.

And I don’t mean it was just a frustrating game. I mean it was, quite literally, virtually impossible to beat. Now I consider myself pretty OK with games. I’ve been playing them for a long time, and I can make my way through some pretty hard shit. But with this game, I never made it past the second level. The SECOND LEVEL. To tell you just how hard it was, Electronic Arts released a Greatest Hits version of it with a few extras added in. The most prominently mentioned being that it is now actually possible to see past the first few levels without crying in frustration. By that time though, nobody gave a shit about JP, so it was a lost chance for what should have been the definitive JP console game.

Jurassic Park Trespasser PC

Notice above I said definitive console version. That’s because the PC was host to its own epic JP flop, known as Trespasser. Trespasser was hyped for over a year as the single most advanced PC game to ever be released. Not to mention the best thing that had happened to the JP franchise since the original movie. It was actually supposed to stand on its own as story canon, taking place years after the first movie. You played some woman who happens upon the now derelict island, and basically have the entire place to yourself in an epic adventure/action game. It even featured the voice talent of Richard Attenborough reprising his role as John Hammond to talk very calmly while a pack of raptors try and murder you. This is how the game was supposed to be. This is not how the game turned out.

Trespasser is so, so bad. It is what to this day many game development teams look at as insight on how a project with so much potential can turn out to be so completely broken. The worst of many bad things being that the game relied on you to control your character’s arm to do most everything in the game. Yes, you actually had direct control over her arm. To picture how this worked, imagine you picked up a dead body, held it out in front of you, pointed their arm forward, and ran around trying to do things with it. Mindlessly trying to pick up and move things with an arm that was just flopping around willy-nilly. There is no exaggeration in that at all, and it worked just as badly in game as it would if you did the same thing in real life. This is also not even mentioning that it still barely runs on modern day PCs, let alone your shitty 500 MHZ Compaq from back in the day. God what a mess, and probably the last real attempt to make a JP game that wasn’t already preconcieved to be played by a few five year-olds smashing buttons on a controller. Speaking of which….

Jurassic Park Warpath PSX

At this point JP had basically become a kid’s franchise. All of its coolness factor had worn thin, and the only people still giving much of a shit about JP were little kids that just wanted to buy toy dinosaurs and make them eat their other toys. So with that in mind, here comes JP Warpath on the Playstation. Warpath is a fighting game. It is also so bad that it makes Primal Rage look like Street Fighter II. Not much else needs to be said of this mess. Instead, check out the video above for a look at just how unplayably bad this mess is.

And so there you go. That’s a lot of Jurassic Park. There are a ton more, but most are budget games made for the PC that you’d find in the kid’s aisle in the PC section at Best Buy. I’m not about to get into that shit, so consider this the only list of JP games you should care about. The only one I didn’t mention worth a look is the sequel to the original Sega Genesis JP game, which is totally worth playing. It’s basically just more of the same from the first game. So that essentially means it is by default better than 80% of the games mentioned above. So until the day JP 4 decides to grace the theaters with its presence, I suggest you check some of these out to take you back to a time when dinosaur games weren’t generally laughed at and found in your local clearance bin 3 days after its release.

Just don’t play that 3DO game.