“Jurassic Park Interactive”, can you believe it? Yet another 3DO game movie tie-in? Is it a pattern forming I hear you cry. No. No it isn’t. Just a happy coincidence
I also have another confession. Another confession from 3DO Kid? Madness you're thinking to yourself. Again -- no. The last review of Jurassic Park Interactive I did, way back on Christmas Day 2005, was feebly attempting humour. You know what? It wasn’t funny. My coverage doesn’t tell you anything about the game, what’s in it, what it is about, whether you should buy it or not, or whether it’s rare or collectible. Plus I’m a hypocrite too! Because? Well, because it’s a collection of small games and puzzles, in a similar vein to that of Warps Short Warp that I raved on about, yet I felt in some way compelled to belittle this particular game. I let you, my loyal readers down. I let myself down. And more importantly, I let Trip Hawkins down. So now, I’m going to set the record straight.
… NOooooooooooooooooooooooo! NO! NO! NO! …
O.K. I’m kidding, I’m kidding.
The Jurassic Park Interactive concept is a simple one You have two main objectives. Get all the characters to the Heliport and get the cargo ship to turn around and go home.
This is done via a series of mini-games, loosely, based on scenes in the movie. E.g. Escape the perusing Tyrannosaurus Rex by driving as quickly as possible through the forest, or by fending off those, if you remember them, spitting little dinosaur things or by sneaking about in 3D maze bit, trying to fit a fuse.
So good. It has some structure and as game concepts and movie tie-ins go, on the surface it’s not all that bad. You know, I know you think I’m being facetious at this point. I’m not. After all, that is the plot to the movie isn't it? A bunch of people wander about in the woods, having little adventures, avoiding killer dinosaurs, until they can escape. Movie and game in perfect harmony so far then.
Yet all is not well. The first swift kick to your dino-regions is when you discover that while the game features the characters from the film, it doesn’t feature the actors. The FMV is filled with uglier versions of Jeff Goldblum, Laura Dern and Sam Neill. I don’t claim to be an oil painting myself – but then I’m not an actor. Why the hell Universal Interactive Studios couldn’t convince the, and lets be honest, quite clearly b-list cast of Jurassic Park to take part in the making of the game is beyond me. Think about it. 1993 plus CD plus 32Bit plus blockbuster movie plus the word Interactive, you would have thought the game makers would have been fighting Richard Attenborough off with an amber encrusted Brontosaurus bone or something. …but no - we got Sam Neil’s uniquely less talented double. The role requires chinos, a neckerchief, and slightly educated look. Amazingly they failed.
But if you are going to whip a dinosaur game, you better tie it down with something strong – so let’s use game-play to tie-down JPI. It’s bad, there is no hiding from it. There is not one of the mini-games that is actually any good.
One of the ‘system’ games is a shoot’em up. O.K. You’ve got the Jurassic Park visuals, a 32bit CD system and the world watching – but they still managed to cock it up. The driving sequence is by far the best bit – and that’s a sorry look out for the other parts of the game. The controls are minced and the frame-rate? The images below are representative of the expected frame rate. I’d like to thank Eurogamer for that gag by the way.
The spitting dinosaurs sub-game would have been better placed on an 8bit system and given away free. The Asteroids clone is in-fact an insult to the memory of Asteriods, and the Galaga rip-off? It reduced me to tears. It’s all pretty rubbish. It’s not pretty actually – it’s just rubbish. If I was to be cynical, then I would say that the real actors were not invited to be in the game. Why? To keep costs, read ‘royalties’, down, Jurassic Park Interactive is cheap. It’s nasty. It’s rushed.
Which is all a bit of a shame – because like I said, the foundation, I mean the concept, wasn’t all that bad.
But wait, what’s that I hear? “it's-a-meee”, you know, the world is a different place. Small, easy to grasp games are all the rage – perhaps I’m a trifle too hard on Jurassic Park Interactive? Sadly -- no. The combination of frame rate, controls, difficulty and, in the case of the shoot ‘em bit, where you could be killed off screen three times and not realise it. Trifle hard? The trifle, sponge cake, and a handful of boiled sweets aren’t hard enough. It’s all bad.
Any redeeming points? Some of the music from Jurassic Park is included in the disc in CD quality and well digitized sequences from the movie are also included. However these titbits are not enough to rescue a below average game. SO if you like the movie – don’t soil it’s good memory by putting this into your 3DO machine. By the way – this game doesn’t run well under Freedo.
It’s also pretty rare. Especially in the U.K.
3DO Kid.
Edit: Defunct games said that this game is immersive. I have one question: Do those guys bury themselves in shhhh....I better stop there!