Jurassic Park (SNES) Playthrough - NintendoComplete

A playthrough of Ocean's 1993 action-adventure/first-person shooter for the Super Nintendo, Jurassic Park.

When the game came out, I remember looking at reviews and photos thinking it looked sweet. It was probably in part because the movie was like the most hyped thing ever, and it was amazing (at least so I thought as a kid - those special effects back then were pretty revolutionary), but it still looked good as a game. Doom+Zelda+dinosaurs? I mean duh, that's an obvious win.

When we rented it, I was amazed. It looks choppy and lame now, but the 3D levels were kind of terrifying back then, and just the fact that they were 3D really made them a big deal. I never made it very far in the few times playing it: I got so lost in those indoor levels! But, I had a good time with it anyway. It was an incredibly difficult game, and it still makes me grind my teeth in unhealthy ways.

It's kind of neat to reflect on now, but as an adult playing it again almost 25 years later, I'm thoroughly unimpressed with it. Maybe I should've just not gone back to Jurassic Park..

Haha, it's not that it's bad. The mechanics are solid enough, and the 2D graphics still look reasonably good. The soundtrack is as good as I had remembered, though I never understood why it so randomly shifted to just ambient noise or another song as I'm getting into the jungle music :)

The place that the game suffers the most is in the 3D levels. They impressed at the time, but today they border on unplayable. I spent hours mapping out these stages before doing a final recorded run of it, and I still had a hard time with it. The frame rate seems to always be in the single digits, so turning feels like driving a Mack truck, and since so many rooms look identical, it takes about two seconds to get lost. And these levels get massive - the biggest has five floors. No wonder I never got anywhere as a kid. I suppose I have much more patience now.

It was a great game for its time, but for how modern it was, it has aged less gracefully than even Donatella Versace. If you don't know her, look her up. A picture really is worth a thousand words.

Looking at it now is fun through nostalgic eyes, but if you have fond memories of it, don't go back and play it again. I assure you, disillusionment won't be far behind. It's better than many of Ocean's style-over-substance titles at the time, but this one had a lot of potential to become a classic. So many of the elements were there. But they never came together properly, I'm guessing because the thought of flashy money-maker shots on the box won over the guys in charge.

The other huge disappointment is the ending. I mean, seriously?! You made a game this hard, and the ending is just about identical to the intro? Mode 7 isn't that cool, guys - what a kick in the teeth after making it through the gauntlet.

Jurassic Park was just soooo cool when I was 11, but in hindsight it tripped over its feet for how it soooo wanted to do things that it could never properly hope to do. The SNES wasn't a Ferrari. Hell, it wasn't even a Corolla. It was a Skoda with a nice paint job. The devs set their sights a bit too high, for sure.

I did get a kick out of the random Kenner logo on the Visitor Center, though. I'd totally forgotten about that one. It was also shown in the ending of the NES Jurassic Park, which is a significantly better game than this one, despite everyone's belief (mine included) at the time that the SNES was unquestionably the version to get.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.

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