Platform: Sega Genesis

Developer: BlueSky Software

Publisher: Sega

Release Date: 1993

Genre: Platform, Action

Nerd Rating: 4 out of 10

Everybody remembers the 1993 Steven Spielberg movie, Jurassic Park.  It was an incredible movie and it was very entertaining, special, and unforgettable!  With the wild success of Jurassic Park the movie, the rights were sold to have this game produced on just about any and every current video gaming platform on the market.  For the purposes of this article, we will focus on the Sega Genesis
version of this game.

Everybody knows that classic blue SEGA logo with the white lines going through the letters.  The beginning of this game kicks off with a very well-animated Tyrannosaurus Rex roaring the word “SEGA” which just sounds awkward and the concept is just goofy.  It should have been a huge dinosaur roar to set the tone of the game!  But no, have this T-Rex roar “SEGA” in the silliest fashion.  Oh well.

Jurassic Park offers some fair experiences for the player and tries its hardest to captivate the feeling of the movie and the feeling of actually being there in the action.  The graphical limitations of the early ‘90s made it impossible to truly capture an even similar feeling to that which we felt when we first saw the movie.  But that doesn’t make the game suck.  It just

means that we need to keep an open mind when playing this game and try to let it be a stand-alone game, and NOT compare it to the movie too often or we’ll never enjoy this game!

Some of the cut-scene animations in Jurassic Park are spectacular and the artists should be commended.  What I first notice when I start the game is that the first stage in the forest looks wildly similar to Flashback, the Quest for Identity (but not as good).  You begin as paleontologist Doctor Alan Grant.  It’s a traditional platformer in the sense that you have to navigate your character from one end of the level to the next avoiding / killing enemies (dinos), picking up health packs and power-ups, and jumping from platform to platform (or in this sense, tree branch to tree branch).  The controls are very uncomfortable and awkward.  Dr. Grant makes some weird jumps at times. Sometimes it’ll be a huge leap, and other times he’ll barely jump at all.  There’s this awful thing that happens: I only had bombs to use at my disposal, and they are thrown in the air and land about 8 feet in front of you.  When the dinosaur is DIRECTLY in front of you, it goes right over their head.  This is just poor planning on the developer’s part.  They could have done better. But let’s continue.

I felt like the first level would never end.  I traversed this wild prehistoric land for about 5 minutes, collecting more and more tranquilizers, killing more dinosaurs, getting mauled by a triceratops, and overall feeling annoyed at the length of this level and for what purpose it would need to last so long.  And then, I thought I could jump on top of a brontosaurus’s head, but no.  I fell and died.  And wouldn’t you know it, the game started me back at the very beginning.  Talk about frustrating.

I continued to play Jurassic Park, discovering that each level is all too similar.  Some of the cool features of the game are the ability to ride in a raft down some white water rapids, control a velociraptor, control Dr. Alan Grant, and the ability to have multiple weapons at your disposal in a simple-to-use “press A button to select weapon” scheme.  Some of the not-so-cool features are having to start over at the beginning of the levels after a lot of progression, not being able to shoot low enough to kill the compi’s, and the really annoying music (Where’s John Williams when you need him?!).

Overall, Jurassic Park is a standard platforming game with very little to offer in the way of gameplay, storyline, game mechanics, variety, or replayability.  The graphics are pretty nice though, but it can sometimes be difficult to separate the foreground from the background in dark areas (which is most of the game).  I did not really enjoy this game much, and from what I remember, I didn’t really like it as a kid either.  But the movie… that’s still in the top 10 best movies ever made on my list.

PS: Watch out for the triceratops dude… he’ll mess you up good.

Nerd Rating: 4 out of 10

Submitted by NerdBerry