Description of Jurassic Park - MAME

This game Jurassic Park - MAME working perfectly with emulator version mame64ui, you can download on this web site.

Being a 1990's kid, I love Jurassic Park; both the movies and the books that have inspired them (especially the books, in fact). And ever since I was a kid I always loved the dinosaurs; and rail-shooters too, you know.

This game is a combination of both; a very broken combination, though, to be frank.

Several months have passed since the final events of the first movie; All the Nublar park equipment lays in ruins and the escaped animals roam free around the island, and so the InGen Corporation sends in a team of scientists and hunters to catch them, and—eventually—help clear up the mess Dennis Nedry managed to make when stealing the dinosaur embryos.

And that's exactly where you, the player, come in. You take the role of one of the hunters, driving around with your partner in a hunter jeep, and your job  is to basically shoot everything that moves. And while the ending animation, showing the dinosaurs being loaded into cages, makes it look as if all the poor creatures (you'll be forced to shoot at) were merely sedated throughout the process, the fire-animation featured in the game itself looks suspiciously similar to a stream of machine-gun tracer rounds (rather than tranquilizer darts).

Suffice to say, as a dinosaur lover, it makes me feel somewhat uncomfortable at least. But I understand that somebody else might feel altogether differently about it, and thus I do not count it as one of the reasons as to why do I hold this Jurassic Park game to be broken.

The thing is, how do you define a rail shooter? Well, yes, a rail-shooter is a game where you aim with a light-gun (or a similar device) and shoot the targets on the screen. And that is the point at which Jurassic Park hits the proverbial tip of an iceberg and starts to sink. Because in Jurassic Park you don't have to aim at all. In fact, I think you could just tape in the trigger so that it stays in the squeezed position, and you'd do about just as good as otherwise. The targets... eh—I mean the dinosaurs and other inanimate things like cars, rocks and fallen trees, they just spawn at such an enormous rate that you can never possibly hit them all. And so it's just a matter of time, really, until you eventually run out of all your HP's (represented by a red health-bar in the left-down corner of the screen) and have to pop in some more money.

Yet the people in SEGA apparently are the single meanest and cruelest creatures in the whole universe, for selling you a broken game is nowhere near good enough for them, and they have to ridicule you and kill even the last remaining bits of self respect left in you, by forcing you to play through some really—like really—ridiculous scenes as well.

Like, a car driving on top of a brachiosaurus neck? Really? A car chase inside the visitors center? Really, SEGA!?

And it's only so much more sad, when you realize that Jurassic Park actually could have been a good game; were it only given a tiny little extra bit of care and second thinking. For the visual aspect of the game is—at least with respect to the date of its release (1993)—pretty much unmatchable. Both the high quality sprites and the super-immersive pseudo-3D effects, make Jurassic Park an excellent visual experience.

But what is it worth, if the rest of the game sucks such a big deal, that it puts even the strongest Dirt Devil vacuum cleaner at shame? Exactly, it's all worth nothing. The game is a prime example of how to waste an official license; and—aside from being curious and wanting to look how good a game can look and yet how badly its gameplay can suck at the same time—I don't actually see why would anyone want to play this thing at all, really.

Download only at your own risk.