Jurassic Park - Sega Genesis

I've played a lot of games in my lifetime. Across every genre, every console, and every generation. I've played games that I consider excellent and I've played games that I consider absolutely awful. I'm not going to say that Jurassic Park for Sega Genesis is the worst game that I've ever played, but I will say it's damn near the top of the list. I will say it's probably the worst game I've played in the last year.

Before I play a game I kind of research it on the internet. Find out what kind of game it is, look at what kind of scores it received, find out what kind of cheat codes there are for it, basically just kind of look into the game.

I was actually kind of excited to play Jurassic Park, on GameFaqs the reviews were actually very good. There's only one review that's negative. Most of them are between eight and tens. I've come to the conclusion that this is either trolling at its finest, or these people are absolutely crazy and or stupid.

Where to start... there's so many bad things about this game. Maybe we should start off with the fact that this game controls like everything is submerged in Jell-O. Though I can't tell if it's because the controls are bad or because every time you try to move more then three feet the game suffers from horrible slow down. Maybe it's a mixture of both, you never really know. All I know is trying to make Dr. Grant land on a very tiny ledge while trying to combat bad controls and slow down? Makes the game perhaps one of the most frustrating things I've ever played.

I also ran into the problem on numerous occasions where for no real apparent reason dinosaurs became invincible. No matter how many darts I shot at the dinosaurs nothing would happen. This was almost always a problem with velociraptors. On the subject of velociraptors it wasn't uncommon for them to knock you down and then proceed to trap you in a corner knocking you down over and over until they killed you. So on top of everything else, the game also had some bugs!

The level design was awful, absolutely horrible, and broken. On several levels there were places where you could fall through the solid ground you were walking on and die. There were occasions where a small fall would lead to you having to jump at the exact right moment, or perhaps land on a small ledge and if you missed it you died. Littered throughout the game were little problems with the level that could easily kill you for no real rhyme or reason. Sometimes over and over again. On the first level there was a spot where you have to crawl out on to a branch, three out of four times I'd live, the other one time? Fall to my death. Nothing changed, I didn't go out farther on the limb I wasn't running, nothing was different. Hell, I even was landing in the same spot... sometimes you just died.

Here's the interesting thing. There's quite a few things about this game that aren't too bad. The music is decent, the graphics are fairly good, the ability to play as Dr. Grant or a velociraptor is cool... I can see it being a somewhat decent game. Here's the problem though: all those problems I listed above? Those are all so irritating, so awful that they make the game almost unplayable. It took me 45 minutes to beat the first Dr. Grant level. I watched a YouTube video on how to beat it and still couldn't. I played it over and over again and just couldn't beat it. It's not that I'm bad at games, it's not that Jurassic Park is hard, it's just that it's broken.

That's the best way to describe Jurassic Park: broken. Not bad, broken. When you're trying to play a game that is broken it starts to become frustrating. It starts wearing on you. You want to beat a level but you just can't because it's broken.

The absolutely best thing I can think to say about Jurassic Park is that it's short. You can beat both campaigns in about two to three hours. In all honesty if the game wasn't broken I would guess that you could beat it in about a half hour or so. That shows you just how broken it is. For the love of God skip this game. It's absolutely awful.

Squid.