Diary Entry #31: Jurassic Park: The Game Sucks

             All throughout 2012, Telltale Games popularity skyrocketed with every successive episode of the Walking Dead. Sales in the millions and countless game of the year accolades gave the company a whole new audience, one which its previous licensed titles failed to gather. Home Star Runner, Back to the Future, Bone, CSI, and Law & Order have all been turned into episodic adventure games with varying success. I've actually been waiting years to try out Jurassic Park: The Game, which I've heard is a veritable quick time extravaganza.

              What is up with the title? Despite being preceded by dozens of Jurassic Park titles going back to the NES, somebody had the gall to title it Jurassic Park: The Game. Am I supposed to imagine that all the previous Jurassic Park games weren't really games at all? If anything, Telltales product barely qualifies as a game.

              Little arrows constantly pop up on the screen. It's sort of like Heavy Rain, except there are no choices: you either run away from dinosaurs or get eaten real quick. It devolves into a Dragon's Lair rip off, but while Dragon's Lair had the benefit of short quick time sequences that randomized, Jurassic Park makes you sit through long and tedious cutscenes with little excitement. The story focuses on a park maintenance man who for some reason was allowed to bring his daughter to the park around the same time of the film, a pretty phenomenal feat considering the billionaire mogul who built the park just got around to inviting his grandkids that very same day.

              Hope you like the scenes where people wander around in the jungle, because that's all you're going to do. Sometimes raptors attack, sometimes you fall down cliffs, sometimes your faceless friends will get eaten, and all the time you'll be pushing one button at a time.

              Perhaps the most unique feature is the mind steadying feature, which requires me to move the mouse to a target. It occurs once in the first episode when a raptor runs past you really fast, somehow driving you to the brink of madness even after you almost got eaten by dozens of raptors a few minutes prior.

              In short, this game's garbage. I'd rather play with a T Rex turd than this game. 

              I've been buying way too many games, difficult to keep track. My next blog post will detail all of my recent acquisitions. I'm currently playing through Alien: Resurrection for PS1, a neat little Half-Life clone from 2000. All of the corridors are really dark, similar to Doom 3, except without any memorable scripted sequences. Enemies will often randomly generate behind you and have weird attacks that can almost instantly kill you, leading to some interesting and frustrating situations. It's pretty cool, definitely better than Alien Trilogy. My hope is to blaze through this over the next few days and start up Ogre Battle 64 over memorial day weekend at some point.