It's about prioritising capitalism over humanity. See? You simply could not devise a better gaming representation of the first Jurassic Park: a document of a half-mad tycoon's doomed attempts to make a crapton of cash from a weird science experiment that can only go disastrously wrong. Your constant tasks are three-fold: make a ton of money, breed more dinosaurs, and try and stop people from getting killed. But it's all about the bloody dinosaurs, so to imagine the game without them would be ridiculous thing to do and a ridiculous thing to criticise it for. That's why I'm not going to plunge into much detail about its various systems: your best guess about how it deals with placing cages and attractions and toilets and burger stands is bound to be right. It wouldn't be, I hasten to add, an especially great tycoon game if you took away the dinosaurs. There's no reason why the two of them put together wouldn't work. I can't remember who reviewed it or what they said, but I can remember seeing the 80-something-percent score and my surprise turning to a sort of self-loathing for being so snap-judgemental.
Farm it out to a desperate freelancer, half a page, they'll probably give it 58%, done. I wasn't aware there'd been a similar but more rudimentary Gameboy title, Jurassic Park: Park Builder, a few years previous, but I don't imagine that wouldn't have swayed my presumptive mind.
A Jurassic Park tycoon game? Gotta be awful. At that time, its two core attributes were things to be scorned: Jurassic Park 3, two years previous, didn't lend much dignity to the movie series, and if I threw a rock in the air I'd hit at least five cheap, lousy tycoon games that we couldn't/wouldn't find the space to review. Operation Genesis flickered somewhere in my peripheral vision back when I was reviews editor on a magazine. After all, I can remember desperately wanting to shoot digital dinosaurs around the time of the films too. Hindsight is 20/20, of course, so it's far too easy to slam all those developers for not stumbling across the total sense that a tycoon game made for the license. They had their moments, but they were so staggeringly ignorant of what the Jurassic Park concept really was. Most attempts at bringing Spielberg's dino fantasy into interactivity concentrated on the action: the running, the jumping, the shooting and even on the being-a-Velociraptor thing. It's just a brilliant, brilliant idea for a game.
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