There’s something ironic about Jurassic Park the movie showcasing cutting-edge rendering technology while Jurassic Park the arcade game has graphics on the verge of being extinct.
It’s summer 1994. Arcadegoers have already had two years to enjoy the slick untextured polygons of Virtua Racing, Virtua Fighter birthed the 3D fighting genre a year later, and the hot new thing as of March is the stunning Daytona USA. Those texture-mapped 60fps polygons made jaws drop around the world and teased a graphical standard that wouldn’t be matched at home until at least the millennium (arguably longer).
With Sega unwilling to re-license their classic 1997 light gun shooter The Lost World for any kind of home release, there’s been slim pickings for anyone desperate to blast rampaging dinosaurs in a rail shooter. That all changed in 2015, when arcade specialists Raw Thrills released Jurassic Park Arcade.
This is a fairly common machine to see in arcades and, thanks to its user-friendly stage and sequence select options, I’ve been picking away at a few levels every time I see it. I played most of it in the Namco Funscape down on the South Bank of the Thames, but polished off its final stages in a Taito Game Station in Shinjuku, Tokyo.
I’ve got to admit, I was a little wary of developer Raw Thrills at first. When it comes to light gun games I’m a Sega purist, having grown up with Virtua Cop and The House of the Dead. On top of that, their other cabinet I have the most experience with is Terminator Salvation, and I’m not a fan.
But Raw Thrills knocked it out of the park with Jurassic Park Arcade. A fixed gun shooter, it clearly takes heavy inspiration from Sega’s The Lost World, combining rapid Raptor attacks with chase sequences in which you must blast areas (usually the mouths) of large dinosaurs as they attack.
The game is set on Isla Nublar where you’re tasked with capturing three dinosaurs: Triceratops, Tyrannosaurus and Spinosaurus. Along the way you blast a tonne of Velociraptors, and have run-ins with Dilophosaurs, Archaeopteryx and Brachiosaurs (among many others). The dinosaurs are a bit sexed up for the game, with the big predators having noticeably larger teeth and inexplicably glowing eyes. But hey, it’s an arcade blaster. It goes with the territory.
I also enjoy the little touches of personality, especially the bit when a Stegosaurus whomps a bunch of portaloos, sending toilets flying through the air that you must blast in time.
As an arcade game there’s a few minor credit chomping difficult spikes but by and large it’s fair – if you really practised I’m sure you could one-credit the game. The only real small flaws are that there’s a few too many sequences where a swarm of bugs flies at you and that it’s sometimes confusing as to when friendly fire is and isn’t enabled.
Also, as a longtime Jurassic Park fan, I’m a bit miffed that Spinosaurus gets top billing as the final boss. T-Rex is clearly the cooler dinosaur, and the finale of the second stage when you’re escaping from two Rexes at once is easily the most exciting bit of the game.
After I’d beaten it I did a little research on the game’s background. In doing so, I discovered something that explains why this is so damn good: Raw Thrills was founded by Eugene Jarvis. Now that’s a goddamn shooter pedigree.
Everyone says this sucks, with the most common criticism that it’s a QTE fest. Thing is, I don’t really mind QTEs, I really like Jurassic Park and generally like Telltale. How bad can Jurassic Park: The Game be?
Well it turns out the QTEs are FAR from this shitpile’s worst feature. First up are some genuinely shoddy half-arsed graphics. It’s obvious that the dinosaur models have had the most care lavished on them, but they have a weird plastic sheen that makes them look like toys. The rest of it looks like early PS2 game at best, with perhaps the single worst facial animation I’ve ever seen in a video-game. The human characters’ faces twitch and squint like broken automatons, and the lip syncing is atrocious. I mean check out the mug on this guy:
On top of that, the environments are ultra low effort. It’s hard to screw up concrete corridors (in which you spend a decent portion of the game), but the jungle scenes are a flat box with some cheap looking plant models haphazardly scattered around.
Fine, well Telltale never were known for their graphical prowess. They’re a storytelling company – the clue’s in the name! Well, the dialogue is atrocious and character motivations flip around at random.
At one point you control two characters as they argue with one another, which is just confusing. I think most of the lack of consistency is down to each of the four episodes having a different director and a different writing team. Episode 1 is merely mediocre, but things really nosedive in Episodes 2 and 3, especially with the introduction of wisecrackin’ mush faced cretin Yoder – who’s grating every single second he’s on screen. Then the game starts to rip off Aliens with a new dinosaur that cocoons people and lays eggs inside their bodies. And… well it’s real dumb.
Finished it only because it was short and wanted to see how bad it’d get. Total trash.
Pixel Hunted 