Jurassic Park (Genesis/Mega Drive)

Many Jurassic Park adaptations put players in human roles, it a fairly natural way to adapt the films as the main source of suspense is seeing people fleeing for their lives from the towering and fearsome dinosaurs revived by overambitious science. Making the dinosaurs into enemies isn’t a bad approach at all because it can tap into that thrill of taking on something powerful, and Jurassic Park on Sega Genesis offers this experience with one campaign where you play as Dr. Alan Grant as he tries to make his way out of the overrun dinosaur theme park. However, there is a second way to play that sounds even more exciting, the ability to play as one of the iconic raptors through its own similarly sized platforming adventure seeming like it would offer the more thrilling experience. Technically, the raptor does come out on top in most ways, but sadly, Jurassic Park on Sega Genesis is not smooth sailing no matter which side of the conflict between man and dino you choose to play.

 

In this action platformer, most of the time your success just involves reaching the end of the levels, the player starting in dinosaur filled jungles, heading to pumping stations as they try to make their way to an escape from the overrun island, and oddly enough ending up in a volcanic region as well. Grant and the raptor both have unique level layouts and even a few full locations specific to them like a river rafting section for Grant, but the two playable characters will approach levels quite differently. Grant has the more complex range of options, the archaeologist needing to find ammunition as he explores so he can be properly armed when he runs into dinosaurs. Strangely, his options seem entirely non-lethal, the player mostly finding darts and smoke grenades with even the rockets you can collect just being a stronger way of dishing out sedatives. The different types of ammunition can range in effectiveness so you’ll start to favor the heavier stuff to knock out dinosaurs for long enough they’re not going to get back up and bother you, but shuffling your inventory gets to be a bit tedious and if you do end up light on ammo, utilizing the weak tranqs can lead to annoying situations where enemy raptors are getting back up quite quickly or Dilophosauruses who might not even be on-screen anymore get back up and start spitting poison at you once again.

The raptor’s adventure, by comparison, seems like it should be a much easier time. It can bite, kick, and its size means it can land on top of many foes to knock them out. However, beyond scooping up Compsognathuses in your mouth as your way to heal, you’ll find the raptor won’t even kill certain enemies either, meaning it can also feel the unfortunate sting of a Dilophosaurus you had thought you were done dealing with. Your bite and kick attacks also have pretty pathetic range, something that feels like an incredibly poor fit with the fact it also has to face human enemies. All the weapons Grant can use, including a stun gun that can charge to unleash a bit of a lightning bolt, are much more dangerous in enemy hands, the Raptor getting shot backwards by them so efforts to run in and strike are often stopped. Human enemies can often be found in groups and bombard you, and even worse, in the game’s final level, there are tight hallways where a human can guard the only way onward through the vent system and you have to just hope he decides not to attack to actually reach him and take him out. Healing is scattered with some knowledge that you’ll be hurt quite often as the raptor or Grant, although eating those Compys runs into an issue where you need to be standing just right so your mouth leans down perfectly to scoop it up. It might run off or start attacking you if you can’t set it up swiftly, making some later levels where it’s the only healing available for long stretches even rougher.

 

Detection issues are generally a major reason Jurassic Park on Sega Genesis ends up pretty hard to get invested in. Climbing up ledges is a necessity as both playable characters, but you need to stand just right for the character to grab on, and an animation where you pull yourself up leaves you vulnerable, something that makes that mentioned vent enemy meaner since he’s positioned atop a ledge and will often knock you down or attack you when you try to jump towards his perch. The river raft stage is a particularly rough level for Grant, for touching any pixel of the water will cause him to immediately sink and drown. Jumps can be dangerous commitments and the raft section has you leaping out periodically to collect fuel, take out enemies, or swap rafts, but also, the raft sections have you needing to take specific waterfalls to lower areas but without any good hints on which ones to take. Take the wrong one and you are dead, levels in Jurassic Park starting you over at the stage’s start unless there are midlevel area changes. The raptor gets its own woes when it comes to blind jumps and overly precise ones, especially in a sewer area where failure to grab onto the testy ledges is also quite deadly. You can at least move the screen down to look ahead a bit, but some vital platforms can hide just off the right side of the screen and you end up hoping you’re going to land when you take the game’s occasional albeit rare true leaps of faith.

Jurassic Park does have a password system, and across the two campaigns, there aren’t that many stages in total, the raptor having five and Grant seven. You can eventually learn where the instant death drops are and shove your way to the next password screen, although perhaps playing on Easy would also be recommended to avoid some of the more devious cases of highly aggressive enemies bunching up. You are given three lives per attempt and your health bar isn’t exactly puny, the instant deaths really being the main danger, but while there are some levels like the pumping station where there are far less cheap tricks or enemies placed in annoying spots, the level isn’t really standing out on its merits so much as just being more tolerable. You can get some impressive moments like having to safely work your way around a T-Rex who has smashed its head through the wall, and while it can chomp Grant up for another instant death, it at least feels more appropriate since you know you’re moving towards that danger and it’s not like the rafting level where you’re going to try and play by the game’s rules only for a ledge not to be completely solid or have the drop from one raft to another technically be too far a fall.

 

That T-Rex does play into one undeniable strength of the experience and likely one reason this game is remembered fondly. Jurassic Park on Sega Genesis has an undeniable wow factor when it comes to its appearance and ability to capture the important parts of the Jurassic Park look. The level of detail put into realizing the T-Rex on the Sega Genesis is superb, it looking both gorgeous and fearsome as it feels like the only compromise in transferring the dinosaur’s look into the game is that the system literally can’t put out more pixels to make it even sharper. The jungle backgrounds are lush and full of small variations in how the plants are designed and the raptors have a wide range of animations and include their distinct sounds from the film. The human characters feel a little flat, their faces hard to discern, and the Compys are so small they can’t show much detail, but then you see a sauropod or triceratops and can feel a tiny bit of that wonder that Stephen Spielberg’s film tried to create with its special effects. It almost makes it easy to forget both characters have a final boss fight where you perform actions you’ve never done elsewhere with very weak clues that you should do them at all. It almost makes you want to forgive those moments where neither character can take small movements that would help set up the precise jumps necessary at various points. But then you get to drabber interiors like the pumping station or the generic volcano setting and start to wonder why you’re putting up with the various nuisances just so you can see a T-Rex wave her head around for a bit or roar when you smack her with a smoke grenade. It does seem like the game might scale some dangers equivalent to the player’s skill, meaning some players may have an easier time with some deviously placed enemies because their performance lessens how dangerous enemies are, but the general level layouts still feel designed to provide cheap deaths whether the enemies are making it more annoying to overcome or not.

THE VERDICT: Jurassic Park’s Sega Genesis adaptation is impressive when it comes to bringing its dinosaurs to life, the detail in its most impressive predators still effective even all these years later. Something that far less effort was put into is the very basics of navigation, the game wanting you to do precision jumps with sloppy controls and sometimes applying a good deal of pressure with overzealous enemies. Your own attack methods always feel lacking in some manner, the raptor even feeling stiff due to the weak range of its claws and teeth. Soldiering through and learning all the rough jumps or poor detection issues during sections like the river rafting is possible thanks to a password system, but Jurassic Park’s gameplay rarely clicks since you end up playing most levels like another instant death danger is just around the corner.

 

And so, I give Jurassic Park for Sega Genesis/Mega Drive…

A TERRIBLE rating. At a time when fewer people played games to beat them and when wow factor could make replaying the same few first stages still enough for some players, Jurassic Park impressed because it chose to capture the look and feel of the film it’s adapting incredibly well. Sure, Alan Grant wasn’t sliding down rocky ramps to avoid the spikes at the bottom, but seeing such well-realized backgrounds and dinosaurs could distract from the uninteresting gameplay. Sometimes when Grant is well-armed, blasting your way through dinos is a decent time, and the T-Rex is a tense danger whenever it pokes its head in, but at other times you’re just trying to properly grab a ledge or leap to a small landing spot and miss due to weak controls or a foe harassing you in ways you can’t always counter. The raptor’s movement feels even rougher due to its large leaps, it able to cover more distance and get more height but also easily overshoot its targets. The game placing so many instant death drops really drags the experience down. The river rafting could have been a more engaging situation if you didn’t have to guess on the waterfalls on your first attempt and if the water didn’t cause you to instantly drown if Grant’s toe touches the water’s edge. The game supposedly adjusting enemy aggression based on your performance can make weighing how difficult the game is a bit imprecise, but it does in essence mean if you’re doing well for a while it tries to bring you down, even putting in some clear chokepoint moments that aim to whittle you down. The instant deaths feel like a really poor pair with such moments of deliberate sabotage, but it also might mitigate some of that difficulty by causing some foes to ease up as you frequently die thanks to the stiff controls.

 

Whether the adaptive difficulty is truly making things as rough as they get or not, Jurassic Park on Sega Genesis still can’t overcome the fact its characters feel a poor fit for its level designs. Be it their messy jumping or the limited effectiveness of their attacks, it’s hard to get invested in either hero’s playstyle at length, Jurassic Park hoping you’ll be too wowed by the well-realized dinosaurs to actually evaluate the rough time you’re having as you fight to push in further and see more of those impressive sights.