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Jurassic Park: Operation Genesis

PUBLISHER: UNIVERSAL INTERACTIVE

DEVELOPER: BLUE TONGUE SOFTWARE

GENRE: JURASSIC PARK MANAGING SIM

ESRB RATING: TEEN; VIOLENCE

PRICE: $29.99

REQUIREMENTS: PENTIUM III 400, 128MB RAM, 700MB HARD DRIVE SPACE

RECOMMENDED REQUIREMENTS: PENTIUM III 800, 256MB RAM

MULTIPLAYER SUPPORT: NONE

Not many games have given as pitiful a first impression as Jurassic Park: Operation Genesis. It’s 10 years too late (based solely on the original 1993 movie) and at first glance, it appears to be a desperate mishmash of the ever-popular tycoon genre with dinosaurs, shooting action, and bad celebrity imitators. But, once you get past such silliness as looking at imperfect portraits of Richard Attenborough, Samuel L. Jackson, Laura Dern, and B.D. Wong (Sam Neill’s portrait is actually quite accurate), you’ll see that Jurassic Park: Operation Genesis isn’t as bad as you might think.

The basic concept for the core game is that the movie never happened; you’re put in place to be the new manager of Jurassic Park. Bundle of cash in hand, you lay down structures and enclosures, breed and hatch dinosaurs, and hope that your customers don’t get eaten. As you attract and impress more visitors, you earn star ratings, ultimately working toward being a five-star park.

The actual park administration is pretty easy to grasp, letting both newbies and tycoon-fans dive easily into dino management. Besides laying down buildings to bilk money out of people, you also have to assign dig sites to your fossil excavation teams (more sites are unlocked as you increase the star rating), and then use the genetics lab to extract the DNA used to hatch the dinosaurs themselves.

Enhancing the tycoon aspect of the game is the option of letting you experience the park firsthand. Not only can you track individual visitors throughout their stay, but you can also look through all of your attractions, drive a land speeder on safari, or pilot a helicopter when “retiring” rampaging tyrannosauruses.

There are also numerous minigames and scenarios, such as “take photos of dinosaurs” or “rescue the president,” in case you want to stop being a park manager altogether. They’re entertaining enough distractions, but no real substitute for the Jurassic Park tycoon mode. There’s also the Site B mode, which is essentially a sandbox in which you can mess around all you like with dinosaurs, without worrying about money or visitors.

Despite the amount of stuff to do, JPOG isn’t particularly deep. For example, there aren’t that many structures available, so your park tends to have a whole lot of the same buildings scattered all over the place. Though there are 25 different dinosaurs, there are only five dinosaur-centric buildings to charge visitors for. None of the dinosaurs swim or fly; they’re all landbound. On the whole, while the dinosaurs do act “realistic” in terms of herding together or being territorial, they can also be pretty dumb, often getting caught in clipping errors, or ignoring a huge lake while complaining of thirst. The reports aren’t helpful enough, focusing on crises-of-the-moment rather than overall progress.

For casual gamers and dinosaur nuts, it’s an entertaining enough romp into the Jurassic Park universe. More hardcore players will want for more, and even the diversionary minigames aren’t quite enough to cover up the lack of depth. It’s like either the second or third Jurassic Park movie (whichever you prefer): It’s not nearly as good as the first, but it’s not as bad as the whichever-you-feel-is-inferior one.

VERDICT (3.5): A decent take on the tycoon genre, with the extra bonus of seeing people get chewed up by a T-Rex.