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12 hrs ago


juliusaurus reviewed Jurassic Park III: Park Builder
Pros: Welcome to Jurassic Park Builder, the charming handheld game that lets you design your own little prehistoric park ALA SimCity and Zoo Tycoon. Very limited in comparison to its big brother on the PC, but with that limitation also comes loads of charm, charm not unlike SimCity SNES where the graphics are colorful and chibi, and the music is absolutely delightful!

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 overworld dinosaurs that you can see roamin' about on the field, and each species fits into one of those different types of overworld dinosaurs... Every theropod looks the same, every sauropod looks the same, every pterosaur looks the same, etc... So when scrolling around the map, you can't really see the difference in dinosaurs as you'd want to, 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!

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