I am honestly upset I enjoyed Battletoads & Double Dragon so much, it had obscene difficulty but the shear variety on offer and my wussyness using the lives/warp cheat meant I was able to experience the game and actually get something out of it.

That said, I wanted to play a true abortion on video gaming, so here we with Jurassic Park on the Super Nintendo which is considered the better of the 16bit Jurassic Park.

Gameplay

Oh Lord, Jurassic Park does that thing where it tries to be too many things. It is a top-down run and gun puzzler and a stilted 1st person shooter. I am not sure which it does worst.

The top down sections require in-depth knowledge and/or cheating to be able to get past the first screen. If you don’t know you need to find a semi-hidden item you won’t be able to kill the 5 t-rexs that appear and molest you in a way only a trex could. Your aim here is to navigate the park,and finding the buildings where yo do something with a computer inside. Well, the first mission is. The buildings change, and you do visit a volcano at some point but what kind of a fucking Melvin has the patience for that?

In 2d the cattle-prod has range, in 3d it does not…

Inside the buildings is the terrible “3d” bits. I say “3d” in air quotes patronisingly as they aren’t. They are first person 2d perspective, that are blotchy, low res, and it is next to impossible to navigate the varying degrees of samey grey. I am completely puzzled as to why anyone thought this would be a good idea for a Super Nintendo, as a PC in this era would have struggled to pull this sort of game of well.

My EYES!!! They bleed!

Luckily for the SNES the sprite scaling works, so you can judge enemy distance when in “3d”. But your starter weapon (cattle prod) is melee distance, so you’ll take damage as you damage the enemy. Which obviously means you’ll die fairly quickly. I guess this is realism at its core. As I reckon Dr Alan Grant would get wrecked in a fight with a raptor, never mind the T-rex. There is the obvious question of who brings a cattle prod to a T-Rex fight as this makes less sense than bringing a knife to a gun fight. Dr Alan Grant therefore is a right twonk.

The Goldbloomblum

Conclusion

What can I say.  Jurassic Park is one of those games that are so bad people dedicate their lives to buying all the copies of it to trash. I can play for 10 minutes before I get a migrane, and it’ll take a person who is good at the game to beat it in an hour. But you have to be a right fucking Melvin to want to play this game enough to be good at it.

It isn’t broken, it isn’t “buggy”. It is just shit. Sonic Adventure levels of shit, although Jurassic Park deserves a higher score due to the fact it is less buggy and at a max 10 minutes of me being able to stand playing it, it beats Sonic Adventure by a whole 5 minutes and percentage.

Pros: it isn’t Sonic Adventure

Cons: it really is huge amounts of terrible, a lack of Jeff Goldblum, a cattle prod to a trex fight, no really it is huge amounts of terrible

5%

Back in the Day:

Scoring between 60 and 90% is simple proof you can’t trust videogame reviewers. It was fucking awful then, it is fucking awful now.

About Van Rockingham

I'm awesome. I write about videogames and play bass guitar.