Jurassic Park (Sega of America) - 1993
This review is part of the “Let’s Adventure!” series. See all reviewed games sorted by rating here.
Jurassic Park is a 1994 point-and-click adventure game developed and published by Sega for the Sega CD. The video game is based on the 1993 film of the same name, and includes elements from Michael Crichton’s 1990 novel Jurassic Park, which the film is based upon.
The story takes place after the events of the movie/book. You are sent back to Jurassic Park to retrieve dinosaur eggs from around the park and put them in an incubator. You only have 12 hours to retrieve one egg from every species of dino in the park. Unfortunately, shortly before arriving at the park, your helicopter crashes!1
I didn’t have any Sega systems when I was growing up, so having an opportunity to play some of these games on either the Genesis or Sega CD is not something I’m going to pass up. I don’t really know anything about the system, according to the technical specs I guess the Sega CD was just an expansion unit for the Genesis, so it’s not going to really improve the look or feel of these games - though it did have a CPU that ran 5 MHz faster than the Genesis 💨.
Once you hit START to begin the game, your objective is very succinctly splashed across the screen, you hear the crash and the adventure begins and you get to start trying to figure out the UI and how to interact with the game world.
The game splits the view into 3 “strips”. The top strip shows the currently selected item/action, the direction you’re facing, how much time you have left and your health. I don’t really know what the satellite icon represented and couldn’t find anything in the manual about it either.
The middle half of the screen is the game view, which is typically a 360 degree view of the current location. As you move the cursor left or right you can see the game screen scroll and the direction in the top strip will update accordingly.
Moving the cursor around the screen will give you an idea what you can interact with or where you can go. The cursor helpfully turns into a little hand if you can pick something up, an arrow if you can move in a certain direction, or a magnifying glass so you can inspect the thing you’ve hovered over.
There are quite a few items you can pick up and use, though where you can use things can be a bit unintuitive. As you move around the park there are paths blocked or doors that are inaccessible but the cursor doesn’t always give you a visually appropriate cue that there’s something you need to do - such as use an item.
Keep your eyes peeled for that green X cursor change
If you’ve got the cursor icon selected (and not an item) you may get a green Xto show up as you sweep the cursor across the screen. This is typically an indication that you can use an item on that spot, but it’s up to you to pick the right item for the situation.
In the case of the above screenshot of the raptor’s nest, you need to throw a rock at the boulders to cause them to cave in and scare some of the raptors to run out of the cave - allowing you to sneak in and steal their eggs.
Speaking of rocks, make sure you pick them ALL UP! The game doesn’t tell you how many you have, but you’ll need at least 5-6 and some puzzles involve using 2 at a time.
The bottom strip of the screen shows your permanent items, such as the night vision goggles or the motion detector. The latter is extremely useful when you’re navigating an area with dinosaurs as it lets you know what direction they might attack you from.
If you’ve picked up any dinosaur eggs it will also let you know. This reminder is important because the goal of the game is to get those eggs back to the incubator. If you hold onto the eggs for too long, the dinosaur inside dies.
Every time you pick up eggs you should high tail it back to the visitor center to load the eggs into the incubator. You only need to collect one sample per dinosaur, so if a few sample die along the way you still have a bit of a buffer.
Pausing the game will also bring up a summary that lets you know how many eggs you’ve collected, along with how many samples have died.
Navigating through this game is pretty straightforward, and though figuring out which items to use where isn’t always intuitive, you can typically just cycle through all your items on a given action area and trial and error your way to a solution.
Picking the wrong item will give audible feedback that you chose wrong, so it’s obvious you need to try again. The one exception I found was putting the gas in the boat.
For this puzzle you need to fill the boat with gas, but unlike every other interaction in this game, you need to hold down the C button to keep filling the tank until the cursor changes indicating you can now move in that direction.
This threw me off for a while because I would just “use” the item and expect it to work … but apparently you had to “keep using” it in this case.
Jurassic Park incorporates an arcade shooter style mechanic as well. You can pick up various weapons throughout the game that you can use on the dinosaurs to get them out of your way, or distract/stun them.
When you select a weapon the cursor changes to a target and your ammo will be displayed at the top of the screen. You have very limited ammo, and you can only replenish your tranquilizer darts once.
These arcade sequences get harder and harder as the game goes on, and you have very limited health. I’m fairly certain you can top your health up as many times as you want at the visitor center, but having to constantly backtrack to do this is a pain in the ass.
As you move between areas you’ll sometimes get a brief animation, which acts as a screen transition with some background music.
The sound effects and music definitely add some ambiance, but it’s a bit weird that none of the music from the movie was included. Not sure if this was a technical limitation, an oversight or something else - but having at least one entry from the iconic soundtrack on the title screen or something would have been a welcome addition.
Right from the beginning the game lets you know you only have 12 hours to complete the task of incubating one of each dinosaur species’ eggs. If you can pull this off you’ll see a helicopter fly by and land, which you’ll have to get to - but first a group of 4 “bad guys” will try to take you out.
This final arcade sequence is really hard - especially if you don’t top up your tranquilizer dart supply. I had plenty of stunner charges, but these do nothing in this scenario so going into this fight with only 15 darts was a guaranteed game over …
I’m not really sure why these guys are trying to prevent me from getting to the helicopter, but for this sequence I was extremely grateful to be playing the game on an emulator. I was using save states pretty heavily here, and ended up using pause/frame-advance for the last enemy just to finish the game with like 1 health bar left.
Once the credits roll you’ll be greeted by the same “Game Over” screen as if you’d died
For an adventure game, Jurassic Park is definitely interesting. It’s sort of a cross between Myst and an arcade-style shooter. The fact that you’re on a timer adds a sense of urgency to the game, but your objectives are clear from the outset so you know what you’re trying to accomplish at all times.
My biggest issue with the game is how unintuitive a lot of the puzzles are. Getting the raptor key by throwing rocks into the water to make the water level rise wasn’t obvious - and once I did finally try throwing a rock in there it turns out I needed at least two rocks, so I had to backtrack (or reload) to make sure I came back to the area with the right items.
The T-Rex fight didn’t make a lot of sense either. The info disc you can watch in-game indicates you should shoot him in the cheek to stun him, so you do that a whole bunch but I don’t really know how you’d come to the conclusion you should use the gas grenades on him twice to get him to raise his head so you can dash under him into the sewers.
Jump to any screen in the game using the handy debug menu
While researching this game I stumbled across Doug Landford’s website, where he shares a blog post about his experience working on this game - including how you can trigger the debug menu.
I enjoy learning about the behind the scenes experiences of the teams that build these games, as it can shed some light on how we ended up with the final product. It seems this game used QSound to augment the audio, but this isn’t something I was able to experience (not sure if it’s emulated or not - but I don’t have a stereo setup anyway).
Overall the game isn’t bad, but I can’t imagine there’s much of an audience for this. Maybe if the game had taken advantage of the Sega mouse it might have made the arcade sequences a bit more fun, but as an “adventure game” I think you can pass it up.
Game Information
| Game | Jurassic Park |
| Developer | Sega of America |
| Publisher | Sega |
| Release Date | December 17, 1993 |
| Systems | Sega CD |
| Game Engine |
My Playthrough
| How Long To Beat? | 5 hours |
| Version Played | Sega CD via OpenEmu > Genesis Plus GX |
| Notes | Walkthrough, Manual |
Score
See here for a refresher on how we’re scoring these games.
| Atmosphere (20) | 8 |
| Story (25) | 8 |
| Experience (15) | 6 |
| Impact (10) | 3 |
| 36% |
Gallery
Footnotes
Description from Moby Games ↩
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