Whilst ‘Point-n-Click’ isn’t everyone’s ‘ leckere kekse’ I’m a big believer in it as a format, but even this enthusiasm for the source material and genre couldn’t hide some pretty tedious gameplay. Sattler, welcome to Jurassic Park!”įrom an underwhelmed start I was still relatively hopeful that the gameplay would be involved enough to make up for the shortcomings of the opening and story. Much of the who, why, and what is told through video messages that the player picks up in the park control room delivered by a lady in a white coat, so you know she’s a scientist (I always wonder what happened to actors from early FMV games, like the undertaker from ‘Mad Dog McCree’), but I got pretty bored of strolling back to the visitor centre every few minutes when I had another message from her so I may have missed out on some plot whilst I was collecting eggs. The awkward act of our faceless protagonist negotiating the island’s sub-tropical terrain with a hefty incubator slung over their shoulder is never addressed. The player is required to collect dinosaur eggs, take them to the incubator in the visitor centre, and presumably escape with them in tow. The helicopter sabotage and subsequent crash has no impact on the plo and given that it doesn’t provide a visual spectacle at the opening of the game it is difficult as a player to see why it was included. Likewise, the plot continues in this half-hearted manner the game is set after the events of the film, although it’s not really mentioned or relevant, with the park overrun with dinosaurs. Immediately I began to wonder why I wasn’t listening to the distinctive Jurassic Park melody, or seeing any visuals lifted from the film (or at all)? For a system so pro-FMV there isn’t a single frame taken from the source material and whilst that would have been a lazy choice, it certainly isn’t as lazy as the ‘text-on-blank-screen’ approach taken. As openings go, for a console that Sega was trying to convince everyone belonged in a post 16-bit era, it is lacklustre at best. JP:CD’s title screen and ‘intro sequence’ are bland, they didn’t even get the font right You know? The distinctive Jurassic Park font that was the first of the ‘1000 Fonts’ anyone installed from those boot-fair CD’s in the 90’s? The logo followed by a brief few paragraphs explaining that you are heading to the Island to recover dinosaur eggs… but ‘oh no!’… There is an explosion and your helicopter crashed… screen flash white. … Ooooh… Ahhhh… is not how it all started… I’m going to avoid criticising the technology too much, these early CD games were necessary for the development of the medium, havn’t stood the test of time (I think that the controversial ‘Night Trap’ is possibly the only one with any kind of following), but even by these standards, this is a pretty terrible game, so let me walk you through my experiences of it… as opposed to what?… Half Motion Video?… No Motion Video?) relying on actors and grainy footage to cobble together some kind of game. At the time of writing that article, I mentioned the mysterious draw of the SegaCD Jurassic Park game, so one idle Friday evening I set out to play it.Īs my opening paragraph alluded, this is a game that had been on my radar for some time as a child the SegaCD was an enigmatic system where everything seemed to be FMV based (Full Motion video. Having said that, there were aspects to the flawed TellTale offering that I also found enchanting, mainly the devotion to the source material and plot (even if the gameplay was weak… to be super-nice to it…). Arguably my favourite JP game was the recent ‘Lego Jurassic World’ which made both the ‘ list of top 5 games I played in 2015’ and also my recommendation for ‘ the best game for non-gamers’. Unfortunately it’s a franchise which has never really found its place in the videogame world to the loss of gamers everywhere as it is a setting that is more than ready. The characters are all larger than life and caricaturish, each with a distinctive personality and matching wardrobe. It’s enchanting, exciting, and mysterious, but most of all it is set in a world with blurry edges everywhere making it feel real and expansive rather than enclosed. My only guidance was a few grainy images from in a well-thumbed issue of ‘Mean Machines Sega’, but as a child I had made up my mind that the Sega CD’s Jurassic Park Game was the definitive way to experience first-hand the wonder of John Hammond’s ill-fated theme park…įor those of you who havn’t picked up on the subtlety with which I’ve mentioned it in the past, ‘Jurassic Park’ is one of my favourite films.
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