Jurassic Park

"One dinosaur that deserved to go extinct."

So there I was, stuck in the raft as it continued to inch ever closer to the gate. With every passing second, it became more of a reality and I could hear and taste and see the tropical environment all around me. As I looked around the raft, I saw the wild foliage gently swaying and inviting me to jump out of the moving buoy and swim until I was merely a speck in the distance. I looked away. After four minutes or so, I finally reached the dock and leapt out of the raft. There stood the gate, looming over me and casting its wide shadows over my tense body. It was kill or be killed, do or die. I went inside. The T-Rex bit my head off. I tore the Jurassic Park cartridge out of my Gameboy.

I think that there are some moments in life where we just have to stop doing what we are doing before we do something we'll regret, like those instances where we get so depressed that we actually resort to watching an episode of Friends to relieve the hurt. It just doesn't benefit anybody in the aftermath. In this instance, I went into a blind fury after dying for the seventh time on Jurassic Park's battle with the T-Rex. Before I could increase my frustration anymore, though, I safely put the game out of sight so I wouldn't think about it. Problem solved. The thought still stuck in my head like a bee sting, though: I had just played a game with no redeeming qualities to it whatsoever.

Jurassic Park (JP) for the original Gameboy is a very simple game in which you play as Dr. Alan Grant from the movie/book and hunt down dinosaurs with a cannon mounted to his hip. A majority of the game is spent fetching keycards and destroying dinosaurs when they charge out of a random bush. Aside from a few boss battles - such as a herd of Triceratopses and the fabled T-Rex - Jurassic Park never differentiates much from its basic formula of searching and shooting. Consequently, it's a fetch-quest at its heart. A very dull fetch-quest. With Raptors that bounce around like kangaroos. But I digress.

The graphics are fairly nice for an old Gameboy title, but that's the only decent thing JP has going for it. Aside from a few simple songs and sounds which constantly repeat, there is no trace of the storyline from either the book or the movie. The controls are downright sloppy and in some cases - like when Grant is rowing down a river for some inexplicable reason - utterly unresponsive. What should be a simple task of maneuvering the boat and pressing (A) turns into a giant clash with the controls and leads to either A) Grant getting hurt or B) Grant dying because he rammed the boat straight into a dinosaur's head.

That was the real kicker with Jurassic Park. It wasn't merely boring - the controls sucked too. It didn't matter how far I got - I just kept doing the same thing over and over again. I'm not quite sure how you could screw up the controls to a section that involves pointing a D-Pad and pressing (A) repeatedly, but Jurassic Park nailed it so bad that it was questionable as to whether or not I was actually in control. Even when the stilted controls actually lined Grant up with the dinosaurs for a shot, the dinosaurs just stood around doing nothing. On the rare instances that a Dilophosaurus (the dinosaurs that spit out acid) managed to shoot out a fireball (yep, a fireball), it still missed Grant while he was standing still just two feet away.

As an added precaution against anyone having fun with this game, the game apparently gives the dinosaurs special superpowers. Grant takes more punishment from the dinosaurs than Arnold Schwarzenegger has ever given out in all his movies combined. During the boss battles, Grant is hit no matter what he's doing. He could be standing still or running around the beasts in a figure-eight - it doesn't matter. Coupled with the limited number of continues, JP is a difficult game for all the wrong reasons: sloppy controls, pathetically easy deaths, and nonsensical boss battles. And this can all be seen within five minutes of playing the game.

Jurassic Park was a dull game with decent graphics that was unimpressive back in the day and is even more forgettable today. For everything it does right - the graphics, license, and workable gameplay premise - it does something completely wrong. Good for 50 seconds, but not much more than that. Save yourself the frustration and buy a soda instead. It'll provide more entertainment, guaranteed.

+ Decent graphics
- That's it
+ Stilted controls
+ Repetitive. Very, very repetitive.
+ Boring. Very, very boring.
- Extremely dull music
- Superhero-powered dinosaurs
- DVD menus are more controllable than some parts of this game

Reviewer's Score: 3/10, Originally Posted: 06/29/04