Clearly, the folks who built the original park were guilty of a few oversights. Think you can do any better? Try your hand at plotting out all of the details of the creation and management of a dinosaur park in JURASSIC PARK III: Park Builder. A strategy-simulation title of the highest caliber, the game leaves you in charge of 100 dinosaur species you have the task of placing them and maintaining their health. Of course, there's also the matter of the restaurants, shops, rides, and other attractions. If the park you create is too boring, poorly maintained, or excessively expensive, no one will show up, so you'd better use some seriously discerning judgment. In addition to managing the park, you'll have to pick up DNA strands from throughout the park to create new dinosaurs to keep the people coming back. Does it sound like too much to handle? Just wait until one of your prehistoric pals escapes on opening day.
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Sending teams on fossil expeditions, as they then return over time with bits of DNA for specific dinosaurs from across the world, is actually pretty thrilling! It's like completing a puzzle, hoping you can find that final piece and finish the picture! Collecting all of the genetic code for every dinosaur, marine reptile, and flying reptile, has a fun Pokemon element to it, certainly the highlight of the game, highlight of the game other than creating your own Jurassic Park that is! Yeah, it's very simple and basic, but it's really exhilarating placing attractions, exhibits with gates, foliage, decorations, and roads for the tour cars. Sure, you might have to squint to really push your imagination into being able to see a fully realized and operational dinosaur theme park, but the chibi dinosaurs runnin' around in every exhibit and the little guests and their tour cars zoomin' this way and that suspends the disbelief just enough to make it work. When it's full and bustling, the magic of Jurassic Park comes to life, in the ways that John Hammond could only dream of! Well, in a 16-bit chibi graphic art style anyway.
Cons: While the dinosaur portraits are unique to each species you unlock, and are pretty cool looking, very CGI and very Jurassic... The overworld dinosaurs, well, they're not unique. There's less than a dozen different looks to the dinosaurs on the overworld that you can see roamin' about on the field, and each species fits into one of those different types of overworld dinosaur sprites... Every theropod looks the same, every sauropod looks the same, every pterosaur looks the same, etc... They don't even make them different colors for the different species... So when scrolling around the map, you can't see any difference between the unique dinosaur species as you'd want to see, as you can see in their portraits... which makes unlocking new ones less exciting, when you've seen them all on the map already, at least what they look like there. That takes the wind out of things... What also takes the wind out of things, is that the game ends, I mean, it forces you to stop playing after a certain number of in-game years go by. All the time you've spent customizing and creating your park, all the time you've put into trying to unlock every dinosaur... Well, if you haven't gotten them all by a certain point, oops, it's too late! Start over! Major bummer.
What it means to me: Despite those shortcomings, this game's charm and gameplay loops were more than enough to keep me glued to my then, brand new Game Boy Advance, for days and days on end. Yeah, this was my first GBA game, as Jurassic Park III (a movie that I really don't like...) came out around the time of GBA's launch. And considering I was such a big fan of SimCity and Zoo Tycoon around then too, this was perfect timing for my next step in the sim management genre journey. And one that I could take on the go!