The Lost World: Jurassic Park is a light gun arcade game from Sega. It was released in 1997, and is based on the film of the same name. It is also a sequel to Sega's 1994 Jurassic Park arcade game. The game features five levels based on environments from the film, including a laboratory and a workers' village. Four of the levels feature a boss battle that must be won to advance the game. Boss enemies include Tyrannosaurus, Deinosuchus and Carnotaurus. Velociraptors are also featured as enemies throughout the game. Pachycephalosaurus, Compsognathus and venom-spitting Dilophosaurus are also encountered throughout the game. At times, the game presents the player with an opportunity to rescue a human who is being attacked by one or multiple dinosaurs. Saving the human results in the human rewarding the player with either a temporary weapon upgrade or additional health.
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I own this arcade cabinet, and for that reason, it holds a very very special place in my heart. It's a timeless shooter, and I really enjoy it. The T-Rex boss chase scene is so great, and the graphics hold up pretty well for its age.
One of the best shooting games on arcades. Classic.
Still one of the best dual player arcades. If you come across one of those closed in sit-down ones, you must play this. A short but sweet play through.
Sega x Jurassic Park, Sega was on a roll with IPs to the Supermodel 3!
As a kid, this was the game to beat. So much visceral action thrown at your and oh so many quarters to spend. Coming back once to see if this game was as exciting as it was as a adult, I would say it's a pretty solid on rail shooter all things consider.
As a tie in game with the movie, it certainly has some things that look from the movie and it ends with a good tease for your to go watch the movie but we all know what was the reception to that movie lol
This game some some good enemy variety and as well as some special challenges such as saving people. When you save the people it rewards you with some nice items that I would not have expected in this game such as a Lightning gun. Took me by surprise in all honesty. I felt at times the enemies were quite a little too fast for me and those generated cheap shots. Totally understandable from arcade perspective but had to mention it here. I will say some of the boss fights are quite repetitive in nature once you understand who you are fighting. I say this because the Male T-Rex and the Female T-Rex honestly play the same way ableit some minor hitbox locations. Just when I thought I was done with the game, there was still 1-2 more stages remaining which threw me by surprise as I selected the beginner course.
Overall I spent about 45 minutes to an hour with some continues and the standard 3 hits configuration. Super Solid Arcade shooter and glad I was able to finally beat it as this game is getting really hard to find at arcades since there is a RAW THRILLS version of Jurassic park. If you see it, toss in a few quarters and see how far you can make it, I'm sure its not configured to the hardest difficulty after 20 years lol.
As a kid, this was the game to beat. So much visceral action thrown at your and oh so many quarters to spend. Coming back once to see if this game was as exciting as it was as a adult, I would say it's a pretty solid on rail shooter all things consider.
As a tie in game with the movie, it certainly has some things that look from the movie and it ends with a good tease for your to go watch the movie but we all know what was the reception to that movie lol
This game some some good enemy variety and as well as some special challenges such as saving people. When you save the people it rewards you with some nice items that I would not have expected in this game such as a Lightning gun. Took me by surprise in all honesty. I felt at times the enemies were quite a little too fast for me and those generated cheap shots. Totally understandable from arcade perspective but had to mention it here. I will say some of the boss fights are quite repetitive in nature once you understand who you are fighting. I say this because the Male T-Rex and the Female T-Rex honestly play the same way ableit some minor hitbox locations. Just when I thought I was done with the game, there was still 1-2 more stages remaining which threw me by surprise as I selected the beginner course.
Overall I spent about 45 minutes to an hour with some continues and the standard 3 hits configuration. Super Solid Arcade shooter and glad I was able to finally beat it as this game is getting really hard to find at arcades since there is a RAW THRILLS version of Jurassic park. If you see it, toss in a few quarters and see how far you can make it, I'm sure its not configured to the hardest difficulty after 20 years lol.
amazing arcade game
Spielberg franchises didn't have the best start in video game history. Even though E.T. for the Atari VCS wasn't as bad (still not good though) as many say it is, it became the figurehead of the big crash in 1983. Steven Spielberg didn't show much interest in video game development back in the day, which many believe lead to a lack in quality control, but with his creative input to GameWorks, a 1996 joint venture of Sega, DreamWorks and Universal, things must have been different on the 1997 arcade adaption of The Lost World: Jurassic Park, right?
Fast forward to 2023, I'm at the arcades again, looking for the machines I haven't played yet and on a six hour gaming spree having a cabinet to sit down is always nice for a change. I'm just too old to stand at western cabinets like Gyruss forever, so I even started liking the Candy Cab section more recently. Anyway, I skipped The Lost World: Jurassic Park before, because it's been ages since I watched the movies and coming from a time when licenses had been almost a guarantee for a turd, my prejudice held me back as well.
On display was the original theater cabinet with two lightguns, a 50" rear projection screen, four speaker surround sound and a shaker. That might seem like a downgrade from the hydraulic Ford Explorer seat on Sega's 1994 Jurassic Park arcade game, though I didn't mind much as we've been playing plenty of racers like Midnight Maximum Tune 6R that day already and I prefer a lightgun over the then used joysticks. I sure wouldn't have played The Lost World: Jurassic Park in its standard upright version though, which has the same stereo sound cabinet as The House of the Dead.
That's actually a thing with the arcades, you know, having to draw from something to catch your interest. And even trying to spot hidden gems, I've got a little snob inside me, looking for something special. Producing a good game in that context could mean hoping for a sleeper hit, it seems, looking at cabinets from the nineties that I mostly remember as fighters or maybe NBA Jam and the larger cabinets, racers and lightgun shooters.
Now, I'm not saying I didn't have fun back in the day, especially with Daytona USA and Sega Rally or Time Crisis and Point Blank, but there might be a temptation to cheap out once you lured in your players with large advertising and there might not necessarily follow a lot of creativity, just like within every other established genre. So that plus a The Lost World: Jurassic Park license could make you suspicious.
I kind of needed that as an introduction to look a bit deeper into why I didn't feel The Lost World: Jurassic Park wasn't very convincing, at least played today. It's still a somewhat decent railshooter, please get me right, in my opinion still better than the 2008 Rambo arcade game or Transformers: Human Alliance, the latter looking much better, but playing like shit and having been outsourced by Sega to chinese developers rather than making it a prestige inhouse project illustrates quite well how the arcades had to compete with games you could play at home but just like cinemas still have a hard time when there's no substance.
The Lost World might not have created the same excitement like the original Jurassic Park at the cinemas. I fondly remember the queue being so massive back in 1993, the theater owners brought out extra foldable chairs and after a screening you had to use the emergency exit, because the lobby was packed. But I can imagine as a kid, who wasn't as disappointed those CGIs just didn't look as familiar as the awesome practical effects we were used to before, it might have been great to do anything related to a huge dinosaur parade like that and every cinema or shopping center that could wheel out this cabinet might have made more than their money back.
I trust others though The Lost World: Jurassic Park doesn't stay exactly true to the movie, because I've read up a little on the history of this arcade cabinet developed by Sega's AM3 division who in early 1997 started into a quite promising project given the above mentioned liaison between the japanese video game producer and movie mogul Steven Spielberg. It didn't turn out all that well.
First off, the ambitious AM3 team was the first to use the Model 3 board, allowing for 60 frames and 100k polygons a second, on a lightgun shooter and having a tight schedule didn't exactly help solving the difficulties they had to overcome in programming and researching. Announced in the first quarter of 1997 The Lost World: Jurassic Park was already unveiled at E3 in June of the same year. For that, AM3 had to start from just the script to compile action scenes for the game.
It was only three months before completion they received additional materials, but with little to none communication with the movie creators they had to go from what the promotional team provided. Developers sent to the US to visit the sets had been ghosted by ILM and as a fan of Stan Winston it was nice to read that his dinosaur creations had instead been available. Still, the procedure sounds very familiar to what I've heard from other Spielberg related video game projects and it makes you wonder less about the quality of licensed games back then, when they've been seen as nothing more than additional merchandise.
So if you wondered why I'm beating around the bush so much, it's because I don't want to be too harsh on a game that might actually have been supposed to be better. Usually you don't see these circumstances as a customer, especially at the time of release and having received quite generous contemporary reviews might speak for some of The Lost World's shine wore off over time, because polygons had been still wearing baby shoes compared to what beauty classic 2D graphics were capable of and I'd argue developers still have the tendency to overdo 3D objects for state of the art instead of making them look good.
However, with all that aside, in The Lost World: Jurassic Park, you're on a mission to save Dr. Ian Malcolm and Dr. Sarah Harding with your trusty lightgun. Having to reload by shooting off screen is a standard and to be honest, as nice as the hordes of mostly small raptors and fewer big ones are, they could as well be any kind of alien creatures. The game just keeps you occupied enough that you don't have much time to think about.
Of course you wouldn't finish off a T-Rex for example with just one shot, as lucky as it might be, so the big birds are sort of divided into sections to hit within a time limit and that repeated over and over. Might as well be a calibration thing, but it turned out I'm a lot more precise shooting from the hip than aiming like a cop, which might correlate with me spending more time with water pistols than on a firing range, despite I've actually performed a Robin Hood with a crossbow at the age of twelve.
So it felt a bit random not having that much control over the aim and having numerous enemies thrown at you in waves without any dodging option, but I somehow got used to the situation, so that I kept clearing screens also to help my girlfriend who joined me halfway through. I was happy she got into it for a while, but neither having a relation to gaming history other than through me nor being interested in dinosaurs, you could sense increasing boredom and that she'd have enjoyed butchering me at Mario Kart again a lot more.
I found it a welcome variety that you can save people in The Lost World: Jurassic Park in trade for refreshes and upgrades. That you've actually also have to rescue your teammate was a surprising function that we had to comprehend at first and I'm not sure we knew exactly what we've been doing though it seems to have been enough to finish the game on a couple of credits anyway.
It ain't over till the fat dinosaur stops roaring and with not much more clearly established in the heat of battle within a humble hulk of a story rolling, the short runtime of The Lost World: Jurassic Park is rather exhausting. With the shaker massaging the back quite nicely and the volume natively cranked to eleven it's probably the loudest and most stressful kissing booth I've ever been to.
I could conclude that it might have been a rather nice looking performance in its day and that I won't probably play The Lost World: Jurassic Park again although it was a still decent ride while it lasted considering how rushed development was, which actually showed in being rather average. It seems though AM3 wouldn't let that sit on them and so by January 1998 came out with a special edition I just did not have the honor to find in the wild, so please tell me if it's worth it.
With rotating and rocking seats, an 80" screen and an air blower they sure were after a fresh breeze and being rewritten to follow the film's plot more accurately and the inclusion of ideas left out from the original sounds like they might have really been wanting to make up for the original flaws with The Lost World Special. Now the problem is, it was only released in Japan where it might actually be hard to find these days, so all we're left with in the west is what AM3 could finish until the original release only a few months prior. I wish updates would have been easier back then.
You're welcome to read more of my backloggd arcade reviews for games like:
Teki Paki
Gunforce
Superman
Aliens
Stagger I
Fast forward to 2023, I'm at the arcades again, looking for the machines I haven't played yet and on a six hour gaming spree having a cabinet to sit down is always nice for a change. I'm just too old to stand at western cabinets like Gyruss forever, so I even started liking the Candy Cab section more recently. Anyway, I skipped The Lost World: Jurassic Park before, because it's been ages since I watched the movies and coming from a time when licenses had been almost a guarantee for a turd, my prejudice held me back as well.
On display was the original theater cabinet with two lightguns, a 50" rear projection screen, four speaker surround sound and a shaker. That might seem like a downgrade from the hydraulic Ford Explorer seat on Sega's 1994 Jurassic Park arcade game, though I didn't mind much as we've been playing plenty of racers like Midnight Maximum Tune 6R that day already and I prefer a lightgun over the then used joysticks. I sure wouldn't have played The Lost World: Jurassic Park in its standard upright version though, which has the same stereo sound cabinet as The House of the Dead.
That's actually a thing with the arcades, you know, having to draw from something to catch your interest. And even trying to spot hidden gems, I've got a little snob inside me, looking for something special. Producing a good game in that context could mean hoping for a sleeper hit, it seems, looking at cabinets from the nineties that I mostly remember as fighters or maybe NBA Jam and the larger cabinets, racers and lightgun shooters.
Now, I'm not saying I didn't have fun back in the day, especially with Daytona USA and Sega Rally or Time Crisis and Point Blank, but there might be a temptation to cheap out once you lured in your players with large advertising and there might not necessarily follow a lot of creativity, just like within every other established genre. So that plus a The Lost World: Jurassic Park license could make you suspicious.
I kind of needed that as an introduction to look a bit deeper into why I didn't feel The Lost World: Jurassic Park wasn't very convincing, at least played today. It's still a somewhat decent railshooter, please get me right, in my opinion still better than the 2008 Rambo arcade game or Transformers: Human Alliance, the latter looking much better, but playing like shit and having been outsourced by Sega to chinese developers rather than making it a prestige inhouse project illustrates quite well how the arcades had to compete with games you could play at home but just like cinemas still have a hard time when there's no substance.
The Lost World might not have created the same excitement like the original Jurassic Park at the cinemas. I fondly remember the queue being so massive back in 1993, the theater owners brought out extra foldable chairs and after a screening you had to use the emergency exit, because the lobby was packed. But I can imagine as a kid, who wasn't as disappointed those CGIs just didn't look as familiar as the awesome practical effects we were used to before, it might have been great to do anything related to a huge dinosaur parade like that and every cinema or shopping center that could wheel out this cabinet might have made more than their money back.
I trust others though The Lost World: Jurassic Park doesn't stay exactly true to the movie, because I've read up a little on the history of this arcade cabinet developed by Sega's AM3 division who in early 1997 started into a quite promising project given the above mentioned liaison between the japanese video game producer and movie mogul Steven Spielberg. It didn't turn out all that well.
First off, the ambitious AM3 team was the first to use the Model 3 board, allowing for 60 frames and 100k polygons a second, on a lightgun shooter and having a tight schedule didn't exactly help solving the difficulties they had to overcome in programming and researching. Announced in the first quarter of 1997 The Lost World: Jurassic Park was already unveiled at E3 in June of the same year. For that, AM3 had to start from just the script to compile action scenes for the game.
It was only three months before completion they received additional materials, but with little to none communication with the movie creators they had to go from what the promotional team provided. Developers sent to the US to visit the sets had been ghosted by ILM and as a fan of Stan Winston it was nice to read that his dinosaur creations had instead been available. Still, the procedure sounds very familiar to what I've heard from other Spielberg related video game projects and it makes you wonder less about the quality of licensed games back then, when they've been seen as nothing more than additional merchandise.
So if you wondered why I'm beating around the bush so much, it's because I don't want to be too harsh on a game that might actually have been supposed to be better. Usually you don't see these circumstances as a customer, especially at the time of release and having received quite generous contemporary reviews might speak for some of The Lost World's shine wore off over time, because polygons had been still wearing baby shoes compared to what beauty classic 2D graphics were capable of and I'd argue developers still have the tendency to overdo 3D objects for state of the art instead of making them look good.
However, with all that aside, in The Lost World: Jurassic Park, you're on a mission to save Dr. Ian Malcolm and Dr. Sarah Harding with your trusty lightgun. Having to reload by shooting off screen is a standard and to be honest, as nice as the hordes of mostly small raptors and fewer big ones are, they could as well be any kind of alien creatures. The game just keeps you occupied enough that you don't have much time to think about.
Of course you wouldn't finish off a T-Rex for example with just one shot, as lucky as it might be, so the big birds are sort of divided into sections to hit within a time limit and that repeated over and over. Might as well be a calibration thing, but it turned out I'm a lot more precise shooting from the hip than aiming like a cop, which might correlate with me spending more time with water pistols than on a firing range, despite I've actually performed a Robin Hood with a crossbow at the age of twelve.
So it felt a bit random not having that much control over the aim and having numerous enemies thrown at you in waves without any dodging option, but I somehow got used to the situation, so that I kept clearing screens also to help my girlfriend who joined me halfway through. I was happy she got into it for a while, but neither having a relation to gaming history other than through me nor being interested in dinosaurs, you could sense increasing boredom and that she'd have enjoyed butchering me at Mario Kart again a lot more.
I found it a welcome variety that you can save people in The Lost World: Jurassic Park in trade for refreshes and upgrades. That you've actually also have to rescue your teammate was a surprising function that we had to comprehend at first and I'm not sure we knew exactly what we've been doing though it seems to have been enough to finish the game on a couple of credits anyway.
It ain't over till the fat dinosaur stops roaring and with not much more clearly established in the heat of battle within a humble hulk of a story rolling, the short runtime of The Lost World: Jurassic Park is rather exhausting. With the shaker massaging the back quite nicely and the volume natively cranked to eleven it's probably the loudest and most stressful kissing booth I've ever been to.
I could conclude that it might have been a rather nice looking performance in its day and that I won't probably play The Lost World: Jurassic Park again although it was a still decent ride while it lasted considering how rushed development was, which actually showed in being rather average. It seems though AM3 wouldn't let that sit on them and so by January 1998 came out with a special edition I just did not have the honor to find in the wild, so please tell me if it's worth it.
With rotating and rocking seats, an 80" screen and an air blower they sure were after a fresh breeze and being rewritten to follow the film's plot more accurately and the inclusion of ideas left out from the original sounds like they might have really been wanting to make up for the original flaws with The Lost World Special. Now the problem is, it was only released in Japan where it might actually be hard to find these days, so all we're left with in the west is what AM3 could finish until the original release only a few months prior. I wish updates would have been easier back then.
You're welcome to read more of my backloggd arcade reviews for games like:
Teki Paki
Gunforce
Superman
Aliens
Stagger I