Jurassic Park (NES) Playthrough
584A playthrough of Ocean's 1993 license-based action game for the NES, Jurassic Park.
It was no surprise to anyone that a movie as big as Jurassic Park came with a full compliment of video games. What was a surprise, however, was that despite being created by Ocean, the games for Nintendo's consoles turned out to be not terrible.
This adventure puts you in the shoes of Dr. Grant, a famous paleontologist who arrives at Jurassic Park shortly before the dinosaurs escape and take over the island. You'll need to save Dr. Hammond's grandchildren, lay waste to countless monsters, and make your way across Isla Nublar to the helipad where salvation awaits.
There are six stages, and each one follows a similar pattern: you have to collect or destroy all of the dinosaur eggs in the overworld in order to find a card key that will open a door to one of the nearby buildings. Once you enter the building, you'll look for more eggs in order to find new key card that'll open up yet another building which will contain yet more eggs, and the cycle repeats until you've opened the way to the end of the stage.
These areas are of course swarming with animals that want to eat you, so you'll also need to keep an eye out for ammo unless you'd like to be caught completely defenseless. The dinos are in constant pursuit, but it's a good idea to plan ahead and conserve your more powerful weapons for bigger game. Your pea shooter isn't going to put much of a dent in a tyrannosaurus rex, after all.
The structure of the game and its mechanics are sound, the controls feel good, and there are some neat moments, like the stampedes and the river rafting segment, to break things up. The game suffers from a few annoying design decisions, though.
Boxes marked with question marks litter each area, and picking one will either fill your life gauge or kill you. These boxes are your sole source for health items, but until you've memorized which are which, it's all a matter of trial-and-error.
The other major issue is the game's reliance on backtracking. The later areas force you to wander through the same areas again and again in an obnoxiously transparent bid to pad the length of the game, and the fun the game initially offers slowly gives way to an overwhelming sense of tedium by the time you reach the end.
The game deserves credit for its presentation, though. The colors are vivid, the sprites are sharp, the backdrops feature a lot of detail, and the bigger dinosaurs look impressive rampaging across the screen. The soundtrack is a real win, too, and is probably the best part of the entire game. Jonathan Dunn's sample heavy tracks have a great sense of rhythm and are super catchy. The music in the first stage is particularly memorable.
At the end of the day, Jurassic Park for the NES is just alright. It suffers from too many cut corners, but the core experience is solid enough to carry it - perhaps with a bit of a limp - over the finish line.
At the very least, it has aged far more gracefully than its SNES counterpart (https://youtu.be/iWePCTDfsFs).
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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