Man, the most memorable thing about this game was the music! Ocean games slapped in the music department back then.

Its really easy to get lost in this game, and that's pretty much what happened to me being a 9 year old and trying to figure out where to go to progress. Pretty fun dodging dinos, though.

Also the title screen to this game scared me a lot as a kid. That's all I really remember.

Games like this aren't entirely about your first impressions, or second, or third really. Many of my favorite NES games are ones that operate best when you just know them front to back, know how to move, know the patterns, know the rules. It's about how satisfying a full run of these games is once you learn them, and how fun the learning process is.

Jurassic Park is incredibly tedious and annoying to learn. It's all patterns. The Triceratops stampede can be beaten without memorization but you will lose several lives, and there are only so many continues. The T-Rex boss is an escort mission where if you or the guy who follows you at certain intervals touches his face, you lose a wholeass life. It is tough to memorize his entire pattern, but it's doable. Then there are the positions of each egg, knowing which doors to do in which order, knowing which consoles to do in which order, knowing which drops are health and which will instakill you (they look identical).

And when all is said and done and you do know how the game works... it's good! There is a bit of an issue with not being able to stop and shoot diagonally, and not being able to jump above certain obstacles, but its got tight hitboxes, different powerups that you can preserve between levels, the dinos look nice and their movements are interesting to work around. Dinos drop as much ammo as they take, and if you get a different weapon you can stack your regular one in the meantime with those pickups. It's also always clear as to what you're supposed to do as long as you read. If I had this game as a kid, I would be very satisfied with it... after the first week of beating my head against the wall to learn it that is.

It's just that... this is not a Jurassic Park game is it? You're a guy shooting dinos, murdering their population, collecting eggs. It's nothing like the movie. This is just an action game, and would maybe be better received if it was not titled "Jurassic Park."

The music bangs though. Maybe the budget from it being a licensed IP went to the music. I don't know.

Pros: EXCELLENT chip-tunes. Like, top-tier (though I will say, I'm more fond of the Game Boy renditions, which is what puts that version over this one in my book), keeps ya drummin' along blastin' pixelated prehistoric baddies. Also kinda cool to go through the events of the movie, playing as Alan Grant, protecting Lex and Tim in some stages even. I liked it when games did that back in the day, not bad.

Cons: The gameplay loop here is pretty dull, tbh, find a bunch of eggs hidden throughout the map, then collect a card key after finding them all, and then you're off to the next level, rinse and repeat... The graphics are also kinda not what you'd want out of a Jurassic Park licensed game, they're not bad, they're just... not impressive, and I don't know about you, but when I think of Jurassic Park dinosaurs, I think of impressive.

What it means to me: Mostly played this on Game Boy, but I was always curious about the near identical version on NES, turns out, yeah, it's near identical, haha! But it was nice to experience the game in full color here.