Jurassic Park
Hyper Spooky Game #5
Type of game
The huge hype surrounding dinosaurs turned into an incomprehensible bloodbath. Too awesome.
Release date on our machines
December 1993, at the same time as Nelson Mandela was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. The two events are inevitably linked!
Developer
Ocean of America, Inc. The guys renamed the Atlantic thirty years before Trump renamed the Gulf of Mexico.
Publisher
Ocean Software, a small tear for its demise in 1998, swallowed up by Infogrames.
Jurassic Park : available in the Jurassic Park Classic Games Collection on Steam, on Switch, on the Xbox Store, anf the PlayStation Store. Well well, not bad at all !
October 1993, Jurassic Park is released in cinemas in France. It's a huge hit, instantly becoming a cult film, with the hype around dinosaurs crazier than ever... 98% of kids know the story. OK, I didn't see the film before it came out on VHS, but I followed the trend even without having seen the images. In primary school, we could do that, wallowing in a 100% pure imposter syndrome. Following the trend meant playing dinosaurs in the playground. I would become an Allosaurus for half an hour, running and growling with my arms curled up. No objective, no goal to achieve, just running and growling. There are no Allosaurus in Jurassic Park? Yes, I know, I read about it in my favourite magazine at the time, subtly called Dinosaurs. Everyone wanted to be the T. Rex or the Velociraptor, and I liked to brag about completely useless things. And so, two months after the film, a video game arrived on Super NES! WHABAM! Second crazy slap! Hype of... oh no, I never had the SNES.
As cool as a compsognathus
The game on Mega Drive, then? Never bought it, no idea why. But that's okay! Because I still got to try out the Nintendo 16-bit version a little, again at my cousin Walter Valise's house. The best of all, of course. I think he got his hands on the cartridge on the day it came out, because he was such a fan and got everything he wanted. For example, the whole range of Kenner toys, and the Dino Riders before that. From what little I saw, Jurassic Park alone was reason enough to buy the console. I always thought in terms of superlatives when I was eight or nine, and it led me to make a lot of regrettable decisions.
As mysterious as a Parasaurolophus
In this case, I don't regret skipping the Mega Drive cartridge, since it's yet another horizontal action platformer (in quotation marks, but still), like all the other games in the series released at that time. Except for the Super NES version, which can be categorised as much more stylish. Because. It's free, it's baseless, it's my article, it's my own personal argument with myself. Who do we play as in this adventure? A velociraptor? Oh no, that's reserved for the Mega Drive. Big point for it and big bummer for me. Ian Malcolm then? Nah, he's just a nerdy scientist. In fact, I remember us thinking he was a bit lame as kids. Not manly enough, with weird phrasing. Today, I prefer him a thousand times more than all the others, because I've fortunately shed most of the manly clichés from my social construct. I still have plenty left, so my more virile readers can rest assured! No, of course we have the privilege of controlling Alan Grant, the obvious choice! Imagine if we had to play Ellie Sattler, a woman! Pfouhuahah.
The palaeontologist doesn't appear as a piece of paper seen from the side, as in games on other consoles, but rather as a shrivelled thingy that has forgotten how perspective works. Because of the isometric camera, all that... He doesn't appear at all in indoor sessions, since we switch to FPS, and therefore inside his eyes. Inside his eyes? Well, that sentence suddenly put me off my food. The goal? To escape from Isla Nublar, I think. No one could say, least of all brave Alan. The only thing he knows is that he has no one left to help him, and the dinosaurs have invaded every square metre of the island. Have the other protagonists already been eaten? Did they abandon their mate without even telling him? No idea. When in the film does this story take place? As I write this, a memory comes back to me.
Neither Walter nor I ever understood exactly what we were supposed to be doing in Jurassic Park. We wandered around without a plan, hoping to find something useful to trigger or discover. That was enough for us, because we were scared enough to be bored. Besides, we weren't wandering around. We were blowing up everything in our path! And by everything, I mean the dinosaurs first. The palaeontologist with the world's most beautiful shirt massacres living fossils by the dozen, just because he needs to enter a certain building or take a certain forest path. Armed with four or five different machine guns, he brings about a final mass extinction for these poor lizards, who never asked to be resurrected in the first place. A slightly different scenario from the original film, but still better than those in Jurassic World. A deserved stray bullet, who cares.
And when it comes to activating door or gate mechanisms... well, we blow those up too! What could be more effective than a missile for turning a lock, eh? Well, there are plenty of things to pick up, too. Cartridges for weapon 1, ammunition for weapon 2, magazines for... yeah, okay, what else? Dino eggs, too. So we're saving a few of them after all? No, no, we're picking them up to prevent them from hatching! The massacre continues! Goggles for seeing in the dark, or even Alan Grant's own identity card. Because why not? He lost it while visiting the park shop, before everything went haywire, no doubt. The others lost theirs too, for that matter. Such carelessness among these people!
As scary as a Therizinosaurus
While the scenes in the jungle or mountains have a certain graphic charm, the indoor areas are a real eyesore! I don't remember seeing anything this ugly before, yuck! It's worse than the dungeons in Warriors of the Eternal Sun, which is quite an achievement in itself. On the other hand, the less beautiful it is, the more frightening it becomes! In enclosed spaces, i.e. as soon as you enter a building, you can feel the anxiety rising; even more so in complete darkness, rendered green by night vision. And when a raptor appears out of nowhere to sink its claws into your back, you scream in terror. At least, that's what my cousin Walter and I did. We ran to the console to turn it off. That's why I remember so little about how the game played out. We were scared to death the whole time, and we replayed it twenty times from the beginning. Especially since outside, too, there's enough to scare us crazy. Particularly when the T-Rex comes charging out of a thicket to eat us. There are pop-up messages from the characters telling us to be careful, but they don't help matters.
I KILLED 250 COMPSOGNATHUS, 150 RAPTORS AND 300 DILOPHOSAURUS, AND THAT DIMWIT SMARTY PANTS TIM MURPHY IS TELLING ME FOR THE THOUSANDTH TIME TO RUN AND HIDE? THANKS A LOT, KID! You bet I will! I'm going to smash even more of them, what do you think? Anyway, I didn't understand a word of those warnings in English, obviously. And who are they to talk to me, when they left me to rot all alone on this island? Bunch of bastards! Well, Alan, not me. I'm still suffering from a few after-effects, sorry.
As melodious as a, um... Quetzalcoatlus
Jonathan Dunn, who was very active from the late 1980s to the mid-1990s as a sound designer at Ocean, composed a soundtrack that I would describe as dinosaur-esque. Yeah, that word fits pretty well, since “dino” means “terrible”. In a good way. Terrific, let's go for it. It could even have earned the title ‘Triassicly dinosaur-esque’ with a little more content and consistency. I find that each track could almost belong to a different game, but at least it's a great discovery every time! No redundancy, no boredom. No sick identity either, that said. But I didn't care at the time, and I still don't care today, because the tracks are all so awesome in their own way. The ecstatic rhythm of Raptor Rap, the improbable guitar of Gallimimus Gallop, the metallic heaviness of Interior Interlude... Oh, here's something consistent: the feeling of oppression that hangs over us throughout. Well, yeah, we spend our time getting eaten by dinosaurs! It's normal to feel a little uncomfortable, isn't it? But for me, the ultimate musical gem is called Triceratops Trot. Perhaps the least frightening composition of the bunch, but certainly the most melancholic. A haunting melody that could make us want to cry at just about any moment, like in the scene where the brachiosaurus dies in Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (a film I think is rubbish, but this passage, created solely to make us cry, works perfectly. But still a terrible film). This O.S.T. pays tribute to the capabilities of the SNES in a very different way from, say, Secret of Mana. In the sense that in Jurassic Park, the console almost manages to sound like the Mega Drive. Raw and rough. Better than the Mega Drive, even. I never thought I'd admit that. Just goes to show, anything can happen, even things more improbable than bringing dinosaurs back to life. Say what you will, this machine could produce incredible sounds when it wanted to. Now, I find it hard to understand why Jon Dunn was feeling down when he imagined a Triceratops trotting along. But good for him if it helped him produce this auditory marvel.
Verdict in Pachycephalosaurus mode
OK, Jurassic Park on SNES does have a few things going for it. Not its graphics, which won't impress anyone, nor its gameplay, which consists of playing reptile exterminator (personally, I think it's shameful to have dared to come up with such a basic concept, but it must have been acceptable in 1993). Not its storyline, since you never understand what the hell you're doing there. But I swear, there's still something good about it! It's not easy to explain why, but it really got under your skin. The atmosphere and immersion did the job really well.
Probably because we all hoped to meet the T-Rex, and we actually did. And it ate us. You're welcome for the manly human protein, bro. The success of the film may have helped too. I loved that game back then, I could only see its many qualities. OK, I can't remember what they were, but they were there, I swear. It would have looked great in my imaginary Super NES collection, alongside ActRaiser, Super Ghouls'n Ghosts, Final Fantasy VI and many others. Maybe Walter has kept all his games, come to think of it. I could ask him if he remembers how he used to send me to turn off the console when we couldn't take the stress anymore. I haven't spoken to him in over ten years, so that's a pretty good angle to get back in touch, right?
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