Platform: PC
Genre
- Jurassic Park: Operation Genesis falls under the category of being a construction and management simulation game as well as a tycoon game in genre, being made in the three dimensional plane with the help of models to produce a whole new lost world to mess around with. Like many other games of it's genre the game runs in real time as you look down from above to manage your own park as you build it from the ground up, working your way from a tiny, not so successful park to the five star attraction that Jurassic Park should have been in the first place, you'll have to manage your money and make quick decisions to events and disasters that happen all over the place, but in the end, it's always worth it. Considering it's nothing amazing by concept the game itself stands out pretty well from the other games that so happened to be competing against it at the time, for one thing they didn't stick Tycoon on the end of their name, thankfully, but they also decided to focus on a subject that a lot of people would surely love. Building your own Jurassic Park. Think back to when you first watched Jurassic Park. Ever tried to imagine what it would be like if nothing went wrong, and the park worked perfectly fine? I'm sure you did. Which is why, by the time this game came out, it was something every fan of the movie would have thought of at least once, and the possibility of seeing that become a reality, not to mention by the hands of you, made everyone all the more excited to play it. I know I was, considering I spent so many hours of my childhood on this game, albeit being on the PlayStation 2, rather than the PC. They also added in a ton of new features and things to do relevant to the movie it was based on, but we'll get to that later.
Narrative
- I'd talk about any sort of storyline here, but to be honest there just isn't one present in this game, it's more so that you play as yourself, having been hired by InGen, in high hopes that you can create and maintain a successful park. As a self insert the game does a good job with creating that sense of atmosphere, relying on in game tutorials, reports, text and voice acting to create that feeling of immersion by referring to you as... well, you. With the lack of narrative that you would normally have to stick close to you now have total freedom to do whatever it takes to create the park of your dreams, but if you think you're going to get off scott free when you demolish the fence to the Velociraptor pen to unleash a horde of the ruthless carnivores onto the defenceless visitors of your 'perfect' park, think again. You don't have a story, true, but the characters that are there within the game serve as either helpful co-workers or minor annoyances depending on which way you want to play god. You're going to interact with them either way, storyline or none, and how you do so is entirely up to you. Considering this is your time to shine the story will only ever connect to you personally through the fact that it's yours to make up, and everyone's fate rests in your hands. You can be the best park builder the world has ever seen or you can let everything fall into ruin as every dinosaur you own breaks free of their pens, either devouring or trampling your guests to death as you sit there and giggle in delight. Your choice.
Production Process
- The game was made using an engine by the name of TOSHI, which is a sixth generation cross platform game engine. The engine was actually made by Blue Tongue Entertainment themselves, who were also the makers of the game. Obviously in developing a game things are going to be implemented and things are going to be removed before we see the final product, and interestingly enough Jurassic Park: Operation Genesis was meant to have more dinosaurs than the twenty four species that they included within the game. In an interview Blue Tongue said they originally were wanting to add in forty dinosaur species, but this was cut thanks to the console versions. If you take a look at the game's data, only on PC, mind, you can see they didn't remove the names from some of the files, as in the Eng locale you can still see some species listed within the rest of the lines. In the final version of the game, the list of dinosaurs we could hatch were as followed:
Acrocanthosaurus, Albertosaurus, Ankylosaurus, Brachiosaurus, Camarasaurus
Carcharodontosaurus, Ceratosaurus, Corythosaurus, Dilophosaurus, Dryosaurus
Edmontosaurus, Gallimimus, Homalocephale, Kentrosaurus, Ouranosaurus
Pachycephalosaurus, Parasaurolophus, Spinosaurus, Stegosaurus, Styracosaurus
Torosaurus, Triceratops, Tyrannosaurus, Velociraptor
Taking a look at the files, the one's that were cut from the game were these:
Alioramus, Apatosaurus, Baryonyx, Deinonychus, Diplodocus,
Iguanadon, Maiasaura, Ornithomimus, Panoplosaurus,
Tenontosaurus, Thescelosaurus, Wuerhosaurus, Yangchuanosaurus
And, with one last thing to add, the only dinosaur on the above list to actually begin development into the game was the Iguanodon. Going back to the Data folder again, if you take a look into the Unit folder you'll notice that there are several files entitled as shorter, almost nickname like aliases for dinosaurs, such as Homalo/Homalo.inx/Homalo.nwt for Homalocephale, or Alberto/Alberto.inx/Alberto.nwt for Albertosaurus. Have a look at the files beginning with I. Yup. Iguan and Iguan.nwt. No .inx file though, but those two files contain the parameters for that particular dinosaur. Pretty neat.
Characterisation
- The characters within the game are obviously relevant to the target audience, if they so happen to be fans of Jurassic Park, and you'll see a few familiar faces within this game. John Hammond returns as the CEO of Jurassic Park, who will often contact you throughout the game to report on your performance and park ratings. Alan Grant manages the fossil hunts as the chief palaeontologist that he is, and will notify you whenever the fossil market is restocked or new fossils come in thanks to your dig teams out on the field. Ellie Sattler takes the role of the parks dinosaur manager and will only really contact you if one of your dinosaurs health changes, such as it becoming comatose, sick, or dead. Henry Wu as the lead geneticist is in charge of both the research department and extracting DNA from fossils for your dinosaurs, and Robert Muldoon remains the cautious man as he is, being the park warden and warning you whenever a security breach of some kind is made, usually thanks to a rampaging dinosaur or similar causes. Peter Ludlow is now the financial director and InGen and Ray Arnold is back as a park administrator. The only character that wasn't in either the film or novel of some kind is the public relations manager Jane Powers, but she fits well enough into the atmosphere to make her a believable character. Obviously the game takes it's own spin on the story and neither the film nor game are connected, considering a lot of the characters are either completely different to their film counterparts or, more importantly, they're not dead. Another thing to note is the voice acting, whilst it's not exactly the same if you listen close enough they sound a lot like the people they're portraying, which is impressive to say the least. These characters are pretty strong in my opinion to carry over the personalities from the film and alter them to fit an new criteria, and the fact that they're being helpful is sort of expected in a genre like this.
Gameplay
- Dream it. Build it. Survive it. That's how the tagline goes to this game, and I don't think it could have been any more spot on than that. Despite how simple the game seems just by saying the objective out loud it isn't going to be that easy, and the more your park grows and expands the more challenging it is to maintain. The more you unlock and the more you gain is simply more things you have to pay attention to, but if you keep on top of everything, research items, extract genomes and actually look at your messages rather than sighing at the tenth repeat of 'urgent message from the park administrator', you'll be fine. No pain, no gain. I don't think there was a single moment in the entire time I played this game that I could sit back and think that there's nothing for me to do, the game is always throwing things your way and it forces you to multitask, unless you want all your hard work to slowly fall apart. As I mentioned above, you have to research items. It's a must. The second your current topic is finished you have to choose another and get through them all as quickly as you can considering the game likes to show little to no mercy in the things it hurls in your direction, and you never know what you'll need. Halfway through researching that High Security fence? Sorry, but your dinosaurs are now all infected with rabies and will probably kill one another faster than it'll take to stop your research and start a vaccine on it. If only you'd chosen that one rather than the security fence, huh? It's aggravating sometimes, but it only feels all that more rewarding when you have all six vaccines researched, and the immune from birth programme to go along with it, so you never have to worry about your little reptiles ever being sick again. Bless.
Let's also not forget Fossil Hunts, either, where you can hire teams to go into three dig sites of your choice to uncover remains of the extinct beasties that lie beneath the surface. If these bones are then returned to the Genetics Lab they can be extracted of the DNA they contain to create genomes. The completion percentage increases with each part that's extracted, and once the genome reaches 50% you can breed that dinosaur, but to increase their lifespan and endurance one should keep going until you get to 100%, just to make it that little bit easier. You can also sell off any fossils you find of a species that has 100% completion for quite a bit of money, too. Among all of this you also have to make sure your visitors are happy. Yeah. You managed to bring back a creature that's been extinct for millions of years and someone will leave the park unsatisfied because there wasn't a toilet around. Amazing. Be it placing down benches, kiosks, restrooms or gift stands, along with viewing platforms and vents, safari rides or balloon tours for their own enjoyment, you'll have to look after your people, too. That means activating Emergency Mode and letting them take shelter in the nearest park entrance or visitor shelter when there's a tornado ripping through your island, you heartless thing. There's also Exercises that act as tutorials and missions that act as separate self contained games with set goals. Upon completing them all you unlock Site B, allowing you to hatch a ton of dinosaurs on an island and you can let them roam free. Various characters from the films work on different sectors of the park whilst you work as an overseer, and they'll send you messages about what's going on or if something's gone wrong to help you reach your goal. Again, being that there's no narrative, it's up to you to decide the future of Jurassic Park.
Target Audience
- Primarily I think this game is aimed more towards boys than it is for girls, as dinosaurs have always been associated with boys, especially with things like toys, cartoons, movies and, of course, games. It doesn't mean a girl wouldn't enjoy this game, I adore it, but even if it had nothing to do with gender I can say for certain that fans of Jurassic Park were the main targets here. It was answering a dream tons of people had thought about ever since they first saw that movie, and it gave them a chance to recreate that and ultimately have fun with it all in such a simple but effective way. Everything from the theme to the logo to the characters and the famous tyrannosaurus roar ripping through the island appealed so much to those who loved the film that it made the gaming experience all that more enjoyable. A lot of games back then were male centric and when it comes down to it this game may have got lost in the ocean of them all if it wasn't for the Jurassic Park licence that they acquired, and through that and that alone they managed to narrow their market down to the fans, which came through for them in the end.
Platform
- The platforms in which you can play this game on are PC, the one I went with, the PlayStation 2, the one I used to play, and the Xbox, which is extremely rare. Seriously. It's considered one of the rarest titles for the system and apparently online auctions see the game going for around $100+. Although I've never seen the Xbox game first hand or got to handle it, I would roughly assume that it's controls were similar to that of the PS2 game, with the analog sticks used for movement and camera positioning along with the buttons doing various things such as bringing up menus and selecting certain objects. I wouldn't say the game is any more suited to one specific version of the game since they're all different, but I would go to say the computer has a slight advantage over the others by the fact that the controls are quite intuitive and, if you're struggling with them, you can easily configure and change them to suit your play style better. The mouse is used for moving the camera around by moving the cursor either to the sides to move that way or the corners to pivot in that direction, and it's also used for selecting on a lot of things, which is what you'll be doing 90% of the time, most probably. The scroll wheel is also used for zooming in and out. You can also use the WASD keys to move in each direction and use E and Q to move both left and right, and if this is what you'd prefer you can easily disable the edge scroll in the options menu and use them instead. You also use this set up to control safari cars, whilst using the left click button to take a picture or shoot depending on which mission you're doing. It's also the same with helicopters, yet the left click brings up Shoot Mode whereas the right click brings up Utility Mode. The numbers then select which ability you want to use and pressing L over a ranger station lands the helicopter, whilst just pressing ESC returns the helicopter to base automatically. ESC makes you go back to the main game most of the time, anyway. [ and ] are used to turn objects around and they, along with the directional keys, can also be used to enter cheat codes. Those were the ones that I found out almost instantly whilst playing, but taking a look at the controls in game shows most actions have one or two buttons that correspond to a single action, so it can get a little confusing. As said, you can simply configure them to your liking, and it won't be a problem anymore.
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