Boy, this takes me back.
When Jurassic Park came out in theaters back in 1993, moviegoers were exposed to the most astounding digital effects ever seen up until that point. Dinosaurs never looked so real (well, except for maybe when they were real... unless you're a member of the extreme religious right... in which case the debate between hundred-ton monsters who died out for no perceivable reason leaving behind giant stone bones and a supreme being that looks like an old man sitting on a cloud surrounded by light and naked winged babies urging the republican party to outlaw gay marriage is ongoing)! Even though the movie was for the most part mediocre, it was directed by Stephen Spielberg, back when that actually meant something other than, "Sigh. Are we going to see yet another bad, mediocre, or overly schmaltzy Stephen Spielberg movie?"
In the marketing blitz that followed, Jurassic Park became a hot property with a line of action figures (courtesy of Kenner, the Star Wars toys people), children's clothing lines, and unique video games for every system out at that time - no two were alike! This is part in the individual licenses going to different developers, but it also seemed like they were drawing on the unique aspects of the various systems; the Sega Genesis had a side-scrolling action game, the Sega CD had a Myst-like point-and-click adventure, the 3DO got a series of pointless "multimedia" games, the NES got a two-player exploratory shooter, the PC got a buggy 2D/3D shooter, and the Super Nintendo got an action adventure experience.
The SNES game was developed by Ocean Software and it was an impressive package back in its day, with a large Legend of Zelda-like overworld, 3D interior environments, Dolby Surround Sound, a colorful color palette, multiple weapons with limited ammunition (akin to the survival horror genre), huge sprites, digitized sound, a great soundtrack, mouse support - the list just goes on and on!
So why is it here, on the list of games that I hate? Because for all of its exciting innovation, it has several flaws that could have (and should have) been dealt with before its release, and they just ruined the game completely. As such, I'm going to forgo the usual review structure and concentrate on what's wrong.
5 THINGS THAT MAKE JURASSIC PARK FOR THE SUPER NINTENDO UNPLAYABLE.
1.) THE TEXT POP-UPS DO NOT PAUSE THE ACTION. There's nothing more irritating than walking into an open field in the game, only to have that annoying little twerp, Tim Murphy pop in and tell me not to shoot the Gallimimus, because they could stampede, right before the aforementioned dinosaurs trample me to death because Tim's shit-eating grin is preventing me from seeing them. Better still is when I was collecting eggs from the raptor nests and Ian Malcolm pops up to tell me how many eggs I have left, basically blinding me in a dark room with giant disemboweling dinosaurs. They could have put this message at the bottom of the screen, or at the top, or made it transparent, or paused the game while it was on the screen, or NOT HAD THE FREAKIN' USELESS INFORMATION THERE TO BEGIN WITH. It seems obvious to me that Ocean looked at all of the design options and decided to go with the worst one.
2.) THE BUTTONS ARE MAPPED BADLY. The control actually isn't all that bad, even giving me the carte blanche to manually pick up weapons, deciding what I want to take with me... in the overworld. When I was in the inside stages the character automatically picked up weapons and health, which required me to backtrack every time I accidentally walked over a less-effective weapon. When I was on the overworld, I noticed that the button on the right of my controller (the "A" button) controls the weapon that is on the left of the display while the button on the left (the "X" button) controls the weapon displayed on the right, making the simplest and most often used command in the game something that hurts my brain. As with most games of this era, there is no way to change it in the options.
3.) I CAN'T STRAFE IN THE 3D ROOMS. There is no excuse for this one, as the game came out well after Wolfenstien 3D on the PC, and strafing by then was a standard, not an option. It's not like they ran out of button space: as established earlier, the "pick up" button from the overworld is not used in addition to the "jump button." The "L" and "R" buttons on the top of the controller are used to turn the player slower than with the D-pad, for precision aiming, but there is little reason that they couldn't have skipped that feature and just let the player strafe left and right with them. The mouse is used entirely by itself inside: pushing forward makes Alan Grant walk forward, pulling is backwards, left and right turn, button one is one weapon and button two is the other, so no strafing option there either. This makes the game much, much harder than it has to be.
4.) THERE IS NO AUTOMAP. If any game needs a map, it's this one. Some environments tend to look the same, and the island is actually much bigger than one would expect for an SNES game. Granted, auto-mapping wasn't really widely used when this game was made, but if Zelda: Link to the Past can have a map that shows the general area of goals then there's no reason that this couldn't have one either, as it came out much later than Link to the Past.
5.) As I have mentioned before, this game is quite large, and to collect all of the dinosaur eggs, key cards, and various other items one has to spend a considerable time backtracking or remembering where they've been. I have a friend who took notes as he played and managed to get through the game in about ten hours using his notes from start to finish (I have heard of "speed gamers" beating the game in an hour, but I can't imagine anyone playing it enough to do that). He left it on overnight so that he could continue the next day, but if the power had gone out he would have lost everything and had to start over, because THERE IS NO WAY TO SAVE THE GAME, AND NO PASSWORD TO CONTINUE. Imagine playing The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. Now imagine playing the game, but never getting any more heart containers than the three that you start out with, out of the potential twenty that you could normally end the game with. Now imagine that the battery backup on your cartridge has died, and that in order to see the end you have to play through all three palaces of Hyrule and all seven of the Dark Palaces in one sitting. Now Imagine that when you used up all of your fairies that the game was over, and you had to start from the beginning. That's hardcore gaming right there! Jurassic Park even goes one step further by giving an inhumanely cruel "Congratulations! You escaped Jurassic Park!" text on black screen ending, giving no payoff to hours of torture! This is basically the developer saying that they hate me, this despite the fact that I bought their crappy movie tie-in game.
OVERALL: This is the classic example of how something could have been phenomenal was destroyed simply by lack of common sense. The game's art direction and scope really is impressive for the day it was made. As it stands now, it is merely a long-forgotten footnote in an otherwise impressive SNES library.
It's still better than the last two Jurassic Park movie sequels, though.
When Jurassic Park came out in theaters back in 1993, moviegoers were exposed to the most astounding digital effects ever seen up until that point. Dinosaurs never looked so real (well, except for maybe when they were real... unless you're a member of the extreme religious right... in which case the debate between hundred-ton monsters who died out for no perceivable reason leaving behind giant stone bones and a supreme being that looks like an old man sitting on a cloud surrounded by light and naked winged babies urging the republican party to outlaw gay marriage is ongoing)! Even though the movie was for the most part mediocre, it was directed by Stephen Spielberg, back when that actually meant something other than, "Sigh. Are we going to see yet another bad, mediocre, or overly schmaltzy Stephen Spielberg movie?"
In the marketing blitz that followed, Jurassic Park became a hot property with a line of action figures (courtesy of Kenner, the Star Wars toys people), children's clothing lines, and unique video games for every system out at that time - no two were alike! This is part in the individual licenses going to different developers, but it also seemed like they were drawing on the unique aspects of the various systems; the Sega Genesis had a side-scrolling action game, the Sega CD had a Myst-like point-and-click adventure, the 3DO got a series of pointless "multimedia" games, the NES got a two-player exploratory shooter, the PC got a buggy 2D/3D shooter, and the Super Nintendo got an action adventure experience.
The SNES game was developed by Ocean Software and it was an impressive package back in its day, with a large Legend of Zelda-like overworld, 3D interior environments, Dolby Surround Sound, a colorful color palette, multiple weapons with limited ammunition (akin to the survival horror genre), huge sprites, digitized sound, a great soundtrack, mouse support - the list just goes on and on!
So why is it here, on the list of games that I hate? Because for all of its exciting innovation, it has several flaws that could have (and should have) been dealt with before its release, and they just ruined the game completely. As such, I'm going to forgo the usual review structure and concentrate on what's wrong.
5 THINGS THAT MAKE JURASSIC PARK FOR THE SUPER NINTENDO UNPLAYABLE.
1.) THE TEXT POP-UPS DO NOT PAUSE THE ACTION. There's nothing more irritating than walking into an open field in the game, only to have that annoying little twerp, Tim Murphy pop in and tell me not to shoot the Gallimimus, because they could stampede, right before the aforementioned dinosaurs trample me to death because Tim's shit-eating grin is preventing me from seeing them. Better still is when I was collecting eggs from the raptor nests and Ian Malcolm pops up to tell me how many eggs I have left, basically blinding me in a dark room with giant disemboweling dinosaurs. They could have put this message at the bottom of the screen, or at the top, or made it transparent, or paused the game while it was on the screen, or NOT HAD THE FREAKIN' USELESS INFORMATION THERE TO BEGIN WITH. It seems obvious to me that Ocean looked at all of the design options and decided to go with the worst one.
2.) THE BUTTONS ARE MAPPED BADLY. The control actually isn't all that bad, even giving me the carte blanche to manually pick up weapons, deciding what I want to take with me... in the overworld. When I was in the inside stages the character automatically picked up weapons and health, which required me to backtrack every time I accidentally walked over a less-effective weapon. When I was on the overworld, I noticed that the button on the right of my controller (the "A" button) controls the weapon that is on the left of the display while the button on the left (the "X" button) controls the weapon displayed on the right, making the simplest and most often used command in the game something that hurts my brain. As with most games of this era, there is no way to change it in the options.
3.) I CAN'T STRAFE IN THE 3D ROOMS. There is no excuse for this one, as the game came out well after Wolfenstien 3D on the PC, and strafing by then was a standard, not an option. It's not like they ran out of button space: as established earlier, the "pick up" button from the overworld is not used in addition to the "jump button." The "L" and "R" buttons on the top of the controller are used to turn the player slower than with the D-pad, for precision aiming, but there is little reason that they couldn't have skipped that feature and just let the player strafe left and right with them. The mouse is used entirely by itself inside: pushing forward makes Alan Grant walk forward, pulling is backwards, left and right turn, button one is one weapon and button two is the other, so no strafing option there either. This makes the game much, much harder than it has to be.
4.) THERE IS NO AUTOMAP. If any game needs a map, it's this one. Some environments tend to look the same, and the island is actually much bigger than one would expect for an SNES game. Granted, auto-mapping wasn't really widely used when this game was made, but if Zelda: Link to the Past can have a map that shows the general area of goals then there's no reason that this couldn't have one either, as it came out much later than Link to the Past.
5.) As I have mentioned before, this game is quite large, and to collect all of the dinosaur eggs, key cards, and various other items one has to spend a considerable time backtracking or remembering where they've been. I have a friend who took notes as he played and managed to get through the game in about ten hours using his notes from start to finish (I have heard of "speed gamers" beating the game in an hour, but I can't imagine anyone playing it enough to do that). He left it on overnight so that he could continue the next day, but if the power had gone out he would have lost everything and had to start over, because THERE IS NO WAY TO SAVE THE GAME, AND NO PASSWORD TO CONTINUE. Imagine playing The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. Now imagine playing the game, but never getting any more heart containers than the three that you start out with, out of the potential twenty that you could normally end the game with. Now imagine that the battery backup on your cartridge has died, and that in order to see the end you have to play through all three palaces of Hyrule and all seven of the Dark Palaces in one sitting. Now Imagine that when you used up all of your fairies that the game was over, and you had to start from the beginning. That's hardcore gaming right there! Jurassic Park even goes one step further by giving an inhumanely cruel "Congratulations! You escaped Jurassic Park!" text on black screen ending, giving no payoff to hours of torture! This is basically the developer saying that they hate me, this despite the fact that I bought their crappy movie tie-in game.
OVERALL: This is the classic example of how something could have been phenomenal was destroyed simply by lack of common sense. The game's art direction and scope really is impressive for the day it was made. As it stands now, it is merely a long-forgotten footnote in an otherwise impressive SNES library.
It's still better than the last two Jurassic Park movie sequels, though.
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