“Welcome to Jurassic Park”
That is the first thing you hear when you start the game known as Jurassic Park on the SNES and you won’t forget it that quick either because this game will keep you occupied for at least 2 to 3 hours if not longer. It took me about 5 hours to beat this game because it involves a lot and I mean a LOT of back-tracking.
This is where hell begins
If you never played this game before then chances are you’ll get lost in a matter of minutes. You basically get thrown right into the game without any info whatsoever. The only info you do get are from little checkpoints that look like lamp-posts, but even these hints are very vague and basically help you about as much as a 5 year old would in a Zombie fight. You get told to turn the power back on so you can restart the Mainframe which allows you to unlock other gates and also restart your motion-tracker which is pretty much useless half the time.
But here is the kick you have no idea where you are supposed to go, you don’t have a map system and there aren’t any in game maps. I’m not sure if you got a map along with the game if you bought it originally but that would have helped seeing as the game is pretty big, for SNES standards.
Anyway if you are anything like me you’ll probably just wander around, picking up eggs (which seems to be an objective) and walking into buildings trying to find as much crap and help as you can. Now as I mention the buildings I also have to mention the 1st person mode. Each time you walk into a building it starts the 1st person mode, which is kinda cool on one hand and massively crappy on the other here is why.
Going up?
The controls are horrid, you move ultra slow, turning around takes about half an hour, trying to walk into a door so it opens and then past those said doors is harder than anything you will have done in your entire life. But to add a little to the fun factor you get to kill dinosaurs…which is very easy seeing as they mostly just stand around if you aren’t close enough, thus giving you an easy opening to just blast em. What the FP-mode really would have needed is a strafing option, this way you could easily look around corners, but with the controls that the game has it is beyond hard and also a Map system would have been fantastic since every building is a maze thanks to every room looking EXACTLY THE SAME. Remember is said it was kinda cool though to be in the FP-mode? Well there are two redeeming factors, one you can play the FP-mode with the SNES Mouse and second, you can get infinite 1-Ups, Ammo and Health Regenz. All you need to do is just enter, pick up, leave the building, enter and the items have returned.
I’m gonna wrap this up because there’s not really much to say about this game other than it is very hard and can become tedious. There was a point, right before the end of the game where I didn’t even care anymore, I felt like just turning off the SNES. I was sick of the backtracking because 9 out of 10 times it meant I had to go back into one of the buildings, which was gonna take up another 5 to 10 minutes of my life, thank you Ocean.
I actually had to use a Walkthrough for this game, which I am glad I did, if I hadn’t I might have gone insane, no joke.
If you are a fan of the Jurassic Park series, it’s worth looking into it just so you can walk around and shoot some dinos, but in all honesty if you really want a good Jurassic Park game you should go pick up Jurassic Park 2 on the SNES, which is kinda like Contra, which is good, but you should know this, especially by now.
Oh and the T-Rex….well he can kill you with one hit, you can’t kill him and you’ll see him maybe once or twice in the game IF you are lucky, though his music is kinda kick-ass.
OM NOM NOM NOM!
Anyway thank you for reading my review of this “piece of art” comments and such are always appreciated. This has been Chaotic and I’ll see you next time.
Buy Jurassic Park for the SNES Here
