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Tonight I Will Play a Licensed Video Game of Your Choice
This game just looks delightful.
Zef beat me to it but yeah, the main thing I vaguely remember from watching fansubs of this back in my anime club days was that it was way up there in the running for the title of "least animated anime" along with some bits of Record of Lodoss War and a few other things. (I think half the show's budget must have gone into the OP with it's sweeping cathedral fly-over shot and all that.)
Johnny Unusual
(He/Him)
This reminds me of what little I saw of the Black Cat anime vs the manga. The anime (or the first episode) was very black with crazy colors and was full of "grrr" and the manga was just basically Trigun again but bouncier and sillier and not as good. I kinda don't really recommend either.
It's been over a month since I touched this thread, and the reason is because the last time I rolled the dice, they landed on
Jurassic Park (SNES)
I popped this game in for a few minutes and I realized that it'd take an effort to give it a good go. Whether that meant making my own map or using someone else's I wasn't sure, but I wanted to make that effort.
After about a month of nights where my thought was "maybe I'll try more Jurassic Park tonight" and then not doing that, I decided it's about time to
So here's my post-mortem.
What it's All About
Jurassic Park is a game-ified version of the 1993 American blockbuster film, considered by many in my generation and others, including me, to be among the greatest films ever made. The movie spawned multiple sequels and tie-ins, a famous Kenner toyline, and, of course, video games.
The SNES game follows paleontologist Alan Grant as he wanders around Isla Nubar, shooting escaped dinosaurs with rocket launchers and trying to unfuck all the problems on the island.
How it Works
The game has a top-down perspective like your typical Crystalis or Neutopia. Alan Grant starts off in the south-central part of Isla Nubar and is armed with a cattle prod which is only enough to put a stop to the lowliest bird-evolved dinos. But, it does have unlimited usage, unlike some of Alan's other weaponry. He can also pick up shotgun shells and rockets, which are more effective at taking out bigger dinos like velociraptors.
Alan will also find buildings he can explore. In the buildings, the game switches to a very rough and janky first-person perspective, letting Alan stumble around pixelated laboratories and bunkers and hoping his gun is aimed the right way before he's pounced on by raptors from all directions.
There's lots of other stuff in the game - bigger dinos, equipment, and so forth, but I didn't really get far enough to deliver a full report.
One fun little thing is when you pause the game, Mr. DNA pops up and starts delivering dinosaur factoids.
How It Feels
"Squishy" is the best word I can think to summarize it. You know how the SNES synth tends to sound sorta muted? JP's got that feel all over. There's also almost no structure in the game. You're dropped off in the middle of the island and you can walk anywhere, including south into a forest where raptors will instantly kill you. It's got that open-world feel, long before that was a big thing for console games.
Paired with the 3-D segments, the game feels like it's trying to be almost as ambitious as the film, but not exactly succeeding. It's also intimidatingly hard - if you're taken off-guard by a dino and you don't have the right weapon, your life is over in seconds. Which does feel appropriate to the film!
What I Played
I wandered around the island for a bit and found my way to what might be the "first" underground lair section, and I managed to survive most of it.
Would I Play More?
Yeah, probably! It's a weird, interesting game, but it's not all that pleasant to play, which means I gotta be in the right mood. Maybe someday.
Jurassic Park (SNES)
I popped this game in for a few minutes and I realized that it'd take an effort to give it a good go. Whether that meant making my own map or using someone else's I wasn't sure, but I wanted to make that effort.
After about a month of nights where my thought was "maybe I'll try more Jurassic Park tonight" and then not doing that, I decided it's about time to
So here's my post-mortem.
What it's All About
Jurassic Park is a game-ified version of the 1993 American blockbuster film, considered by many in my generation and others, including me, to be among the greatest films ever made. The movie spawned multiple sequels and tie-ins, a famous Kenner toyline, and, of course, video games.
The SNES game follows paleontologist Alan Grant as he wanders around Isla Nubar, shooting escaped dinosaurs with rocket launchers and trying to unfuck all the problems on the island.
How it Works
The game has a top-down perspective like your typical Crystalis or Neutopia. Alan Grant starts off in the south-central part of Isla Nubar and is armed with a cattle prod which is only enough to put a stop to the lowliest bird-evolved dinos. But, it does have unlimited usage, unlike some of Alan's other weaponry. He can also pick up shotgun shells and rockets, which are more effective at taking out bigger dinos like velociraptors.
Alan will also find buildings he can explore. In the buildings, the game switches to a very rough and janky first-person perspective, letting Alan stumble around pixelated laboratories and bunkers and hoping his gun is aimed the right way before he's pounced on by raptors from all directions.
There's lots of other stuff in the game - bigger dinos, equipment, and so forth, but I didn't really get far enough to deliver a full report.
One fun little thing is when you pause the game, Mr. DNA pops up and starts delivering dinosaur factoids.
How It Feels
"Squishy" is the best word I can think to summarize it. You know how the SNES synth tends to sound sorta muted? JP's got that feel all over. There's also almost no structure in the game. You're dropped off in the middle of the island and you can walk anywhere, including south into a forest where raptors will instantly kill you. It's got that open-world feel, long before that was a big thing for console games.
Paired with the 3-D segments, the game feels like it's trying to be almost as ambitious as the film, but not exactly succeeding. It's also intimidatingly hard - if you're taken off-guard by a dino and you don't have the right weapon, your life is over in seconds. Which does feel appropriate to the film!
What I Played
I wandered around the island for a bit and found my way to what might be the "first" underground lair section, and I managed to survive most of it.
Would I Play More?
Yeah, probably! It's a weird, interesting game, but it's not all that pleasant to play, which means I gotta be in the right mood. Maybe someday.
I should just watch an LP of that game. A friend had it but he, nor I when I was over there playing, ever got very far in it. And there always seemed to be a lot more to the game than we ever saw.
Oh god, Jurassic Park SNES
I played it when I loved the movie and adored the book, and I desperately wanted to convince myself that I liked the game, but... no. Just no.
The music itself is nice, especially the three overworld themes, but once, an uncle passed by while I was playing it and he commented that the flute music sounded like porno BGM and... yeah. I didn't even KNOW what porno music even was but... yeah. The sound effects were the definition of perfunctory and the dinos must've been wearing covid masks because they all sounded muffled.
The overworld exploration wasn't too bad, even though its only major purpose was to get you from facility to facility and, as you find out at the very end of the game, collect all those dino eggs you thought were just for scoring. I did appreciate the T.rex making regular appearances at set locations, as he was always an instant kill and you could neither fight nor outrun it. Raptors would gate you off in terms of armament--you don't have bolas or rockets, you're not getting past here--but Rexy would block you off from facilities you weren't supposed to access yet. And you DID get an ominous, angry BGM in Rex-controlled areas, so you knew you were playing with Grant's life if you ventured any further.
I never played any PC FPS, so JP was the closest I ever got to one until I played Halo 3 in 2007. With that context, it wasn't too bad, and I liked the whole "restore power, reboot mainframe, access computers, call the mainland for help, destroy raptor nest" sequence, even if the latter was the worst 1st-person dungeon I've ever seen. Pretty sure, with today's post-Halo, post-Metroid Prime experiences, I'd tear my hair out at it.
But even if my uncle hadn't made the porn music association, even if the overworld were less hostile, even if the 1st-person dungeons were any good, the one mortal sin, the one thing I will NEVER forgive this game for, is this:
This is the game's intro:
Keep those first 9 seconds in mind, Etch them into your brain. Fairly generic for an intro, right? Just the logo on a solid green representation oof the inverted teardrop of the island. Nothing spectacular, but eh, it's the SNES.
Then, after 2.5 hours' play (unless you're speedrunning) or, if it's your first time through, closer to four hours, collecting all the eggs, completing all the objectives, carefully eluding the T.rex and the trike, conserving your ammo to mow down raptors with, with NO battery save or password (you have to do the whole thing in one go), and you finally go to the helipad to escape the island, you get this ending:
No further comment.
I played it when I loved the movie and adored the book, and I desperately wanted to convince myself that I liked the game, but... no. Just no.
The music itself is nice, especially the three overworld themes, but once, an uncle passed by while I was playing it and he commented that the flute music sounded like porno BGM and... yeah. I didn't even KNOW what porno music even was but... yeah. The sound effects were the definition of perfunctory and the dinos must've been wearing covid masks because they all sounded muffled.
The overworld exploration wasn't too bad, even though its only major purpose was to get you from facility to facility and, as you find out at the very end of the game, collect all those dino eggs you thought were just for scoring. I did appreciate the T.rex making regular appearances at set locations, as he was always an instant kill and you could neither fight nor outrun it. Raptors would gate you off in terms of armament--you don't have bolas or rockets, you're not getting past here--but Rexy would block you off from facilities you weren't supposed to access yet. And you DID get an ominous, angry BGM in Rex-controlled areas, so you knew you were playing with Grant's life if you ventured any further.
I never played any PC FPS, so JP was the closest I ever got to one until I played Halo 3 in 2007. With that context, it wasn't too bad, and I liked the whole "restore power, reboot mainframe, access computers, call the mainland for help, destroy raptor nest" sequence, even if the latter was the worst 1st-person dungeon I've ever seen. Pretty sure, with today's post-Halo, post-Metroid Prime experiences, I'd tear my hair out at it.
But even if my uncle hadn't made the porn music association, even if the overworld were less hostile, even if the 1st-person dungeons were any good, the one mortal sin, the one thing I will NEVER forgive this game for, is this:
This is the game's intro:
Keep those first 9 seconds in mind, Etch them into your brain. Fairly generic for an intro, right? Just the logo on a solid green representation oof the inverted teardrop of the island. Nothing spectacular, but eh, it's the SNES.
Then, after 2.5 hours' play (unless you're speedrunning) or, if it's your first time through, closer to four hours, collecting all the eggs, completing all the objectives, carefully eluding the T.rex and the trike, conserving your ammo to mow down raptors with, with NO battery save or password (you have to do the whole thing in one go), and you finally go to the helipad to escape the island, you get this ending:
No further comment.
While it clearly couldn’t stick the landing (or the flight, or the takeoff), I do respect the sheer ambition of the game.
Violentvixen
(She/Her)
I think I borrowed the Game Boy one from somebody. I just remember Timmy or whatever his name was getting stomped on in the stampede level.
4-So
Spicy
My first encounter with a game version of Jurassic Park was on PC. My grandfather decided one day, randomly, to buy me a PC from Walmart. It was an i386 HP with Windows 3.1 (for Workgroups!) and this game was a pack-in. Only game I ever owned or played on that computer, in fact. I remember being bummed because the Sega Genesis version of JP looked so much better. (I still have never played the Genesis game.) This SNES version looks like a better version of the PC game? They're definitely similar, both made by Ocean.
Wasn't that patch made by Canadian romhackers?
Mr. Sensible
Pitch and Putt Duffer
As previously stated, while Jurassic Park SNES isn't really a good game, I have to admire the designers' chutzpah for trying to craft an open-world adventure with objectives that are at least decent approximations of the movie's set pieces, like trying to reboot the park's systems and restore power. As a result, I feel like this game gets a lot closer tonally to the original film than many of its licensed contemporaries. Plus several of the BGM tracks are legit bangers:
ArugulaZ
Fearful asymmetry
That Home Improvement game is really something. Something rage inducing. Few games are so eager to give with one hand while pickpocketing from you with the other. Here's a platformer with a concept that fits the license well... Tim Allen loves cocaine bilking morons tools, so why not put a bunch of 'em at his disposal? The only problem is, the ones he starts out with are kind of useless, with a sledgehammer used to break walls, a hook that doesn't like to hook onto anything, and a jackhammer with no apparent use but to make Tim Allen look like a ho-ho-asshole. Tools you pick up in each stage are more handy as weapons, including an electric blade and a nail gun, but they have weird trajectories and you can't lock Tim in place to aim at difficult targets. When creatures like fire-breathing dinosaurs take five or six hits to kill and Tim goes down in two, the lack of precision is a bit of a problem.
Tim takes some cues from Sonic, in that he's got a dedicated run button that gives him lickety split speed, and that he collects items which spill out of him whenever he takes a hit. The big issue here is that he's slightly slippery, and the platforming seems purposefully mean at times. Oh hey, there's a shiny gold bolt at the edge of that nearby platform! Which you'll never be able to keep because you'll take a header into a patch of spikes set right next to the bolt. When nuts and bolts jump out of Tim Allen, they race to the edges of the screen and quickly vanish, as if he offered them free copies of The Santa Clause. If you retrieve any of them, you're lucky, unlike Sonic who might be able to catch three or four loose rings as they scatter. It's annoying, a recurring theme in this game.
Speaking of annoying, finishing stages requires you to find five crates, which are tucked away in the nooks and crannies of each labyrinthine, difficult to navigate area. You'll frequently find a crate happily bouncing nearby, except it's trapped behind a wall or stuck on a floor beneath you, and you have to stumble around blindly until you find the unlikely path to that item. Good mouse, here's your cheese. Squeak, squeak. I'm more of a "move to the right until you reach the goal, with occasional north and south detours" kind of platform player, but I don't mind hunting for occasional collectibles if it's fun to do it, the goodies are suitably rewarding, and they're not required for progression. Home Improvement doesn't make it fun to find this crap, doesn't make their discovery rewarding, but does make you do it anyway, because someone told Tim Allen you think Patrick Warburton makes a better Buzz Lightyear than he does, and this is how he's getting his revenge.
I've got some other petty complaints. I mean, pettier than the ones I've already made. The first stage is loosely based on Jurassic Park, which is the most predictably 1990s setting this side of a coffee shop. The game introduces its plot in the show within a show Tool Time, except all of Tim's kids are there, which is not really the way the Home Improvement series worked. He'd do the TV show with his Bob Vila knock-off sidekick Al, run home, and engage in some light family dramedy with his wife and kids. I'm not saying the game should incorporate all the family stuff- it just barely holds together as an extension of the metashow Tool Time- but it's just weird how they've crossed the wires. Anything to give Jonathan Taylor Thomas more exposure, I guess.
One thing that's maybe not so petty, and which the patch at least partially addresses, is that the default button configuration is odd, and there's no apparent way to change the assignments. You're still stuck with whatever you're given in the patch, but at least the choices are sane, with run assigned to L so you can hold the shoulder while making a leap. It doesn't really save the game, but you take your mercies where you can get them.
Tim takes some cues from Sonic, in that he's got a dedicated run button that gives him lickety split speed, and that he collects items which spill out of him whenever he takes a hit. The big issue here is that he's slightly slippery, and the platforming seems purposefully mean at times. Oh hey, there's a shiny gold bolt at the edge of that nearby platform! Which you'll never be able to keep because you'll take a header into a patch of spikes set right next to the bolt. When nuts and bolts jump out of Tim Allen, they race to the edges of the screen and quickly vanish, as if he offered them free copies of The Santa Clause. If you retrieve any of them, you're lucky, unlike Sonic who might be able to catch three or four loose rings as they scatter. It's annoying, a recurring theme in this game.
Speaking of annoying, finishing stages requires you to find five crates, which are tucked away in the nooks and crannies of each labyrinthine, difficult to navigate area. You'll frequently find a crate happily bouncing nearby, except it's trapped behind a wall or stuck on a floor beneath you, and you have to stumble around blindly until you find the unlikely path to that item. Good mouse, here's your cheese. Squeak, squeak. I'm more of a "move to the right until you reach the goal, with occasional north and south detours" kind of platform player, but I don't mind hunting for occasional collectibles if it's fun to do it, the goodies are suitably rewarding, and they're not required for progression. Home Improvement doesn't make it fun to find this crap, doesn't make their discovery rewarding, but does make you do it anyway, because someone told Tim Allen you think Patrick Warburton makes a better Buzz Lightyear than he does, and this is how he's getting his revenge.
I've got some other petty complaints. I mean, pettier than the ones I've already made. The first stage is loosely based on Jurassic Park, which is the most predictably 1990s setting this side of a coffee shop. The game introduces its plot in the show within a show Tool Time, except all of Tim's kids are there, which is not really the way the Home Improvement series worked. He'd do the TV show with his Bob Vila knock-off sidekick Al, run home, and engage in some light family dramedy with his wife and kids. I'm not saying the game should incorporate all the family stuff- it just barely holds together as an extension of the metashow Tool Time- but it's just weird how they've crossed the wires. Anything to give Jonathan Taylor Thomas more exposure, I guess.
One thing that's maybe not so petty, and which the patch at least partially addresses, is that the default button configuration is odd, and there's no apparent way to change the assignments. You're still stuck with whatever you're given in the patch, but at least the choices are sane, with run assigned to L so you can hold the shoulder while making a leap. It doesn't really save the game, but you take your mercies where you can get them.
Did they not make Richard Karn player 2?
ArugulaZ
Fearful asymmetry
Not that I'm aware. He just appears in lightly animated cut scenes as a huskier video game character than Tim, with a postage stamp sized portrait offering more detail. They spared most expense with this one.
It's not as bad as Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: Crossroads of Time, where tiny icons on the bottom of the screen make all the cast members look like they have Tic-Tacs for heads. Apparently a lot of the game's faults can be traced back to a limited cartridge size and constant interference from Paramount. I was just starting to geek out to the show and was still squeaking by with a Genesis in 1996, so you can imagine my disappointment when I rented this.
It's not as bad as Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: Crossroads of Time, where tiny icons on the bottom of the screen make all the cast members look like they have Tic-Tacs for heads. Apparently a lot of the game's faults can be traced back to a limited cartridge size and constant interference from Paramount. I was just starting to geek out to the show and was still squeaking by with a Genesis in 1996, so you can imagine my disappointment when I rented this.
Am I supposed to believe David Crane's tennis game was NOT amazing?