PLATFORM: PC, PS4/5, SWITCH, XBOX ONE/SERIES (REVIEWED) | RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW
The early 90s were an absolute minefield of questionable movie tie-in games. A small handful managed to hit the mark (Batman on the NES being a prime example of how to get things right), but many others sank without a trace due to how dreadful they were. The Jurassic Park games fell somewhere in the middle, retaining the characters and setting of the films but straying far enough away from the source material that they might as well not have been related to Jurassic Park at all. However, at the time, dinomania was running wild and 90s kids didn’t give a hoot about whether the stories stayed faithful to the movies or not – all that mattered was that you were running around Jurassic Park, having scraps with rampaging dinosaurs and maybe, if you were lucky, getting to see some wonky digitised versions of Alan Grant.
The Jurassic Park Classic Games Collection rounds up seven titles from the 8 and 16-bit era – the NES, SNES and Game Boy versions of Jurassic Park, the SNES and Game Boy versions of Jurassic Park 2: The Chaos Continues, and the Sega Mega Drive’s Jurassic Park and its Rampage Edition follow-up. Of the three Nintendo versions of JP, which are pretty much identical apart from the obvious hardware limitations between consoles, the SNES edition is by far the most enjoyable with its blend of top-down exploration and dino-hunting, and mindblowing (for the time) transitions into Doom / Wolfenstein-esque first-person 3D sequences. The same can’t quite be said for The Chaos Continues, where the Super Nintendo version’s take on Another World / Flashback-style gameplay pales in comparison to the Game Boy’s more straightforward platforming. Meanwhile, Sega fans were the envy of their Nintendo-owning friends, as the Mega Drive’s side-scrolling run and gun version of Jurassic Park made it possible to play as a velociraptor. The less said about the Rampage Edition, though, the better…
No changes have been made to any of the games themselves, but the usual retro collection bells and whistles like a rewind feature, save states, optional scan lines and a music player are available to make these notoriously tricky relics a little more manageable. It’s a shame that a few of the games are pretty much the same as each other, as there are a fair few obscure JP tie-ins whose inclusions might have made for a more interesting and varied collection, but nevertheless it’s still a pleasure to see these titles getting a new lease of life. They might not all have aged too well, but if you were there at the time you’ll get a kick out of reliving this pixelated part of your childhood.
