Jurassic Park Video Games - The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997)

The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997)

To coincide with The Lost World: Jurassic Park, the second film in the movie series, studio DreamWorks utilized its internal software company, DreamWorks Interactive to create their own game.

They released The Lost World: Jurassic Park, a side scrolling platformer, but portrayed in a totally 3D rendered environment for the PlayStation and Sega Saturn by Electronic Arts. The game featured five playable characters through many linear paths facing over 20 different dinosaurs. A sprite based version was ported to the Game Boy Color by Torus Games. Due to the large amount of animation each dinosaur possessed, controls were imprecise and made jumping and attacking difficult. Players also complained that not enough levels featured the Tyrannosaurus rex. These factors made EA go back and release a budget-priced special edition of The Lost World for the PlayStation that better balanced, but did not completely eliminate, the previous flaws.

Another version was developed by Appaloosa Interactive and published by Sega for the Mega Drive/Genesis. Played from an overhead view, the game contained levels brought together by four hub areas on Isla Sorna and also contained four unique boss levels. It also had driveable vehicles, a large number of dinosaurs, excellent graphics for the age of the console, and a GPS system used for mission objectives and a map.

There was also a Japanese Sega video game developed for the Sega Game Gear handheld console, only released in North America.

A version developed by Tiger Electronics was released on their short lived handheld game console, Game.com. Also released was Jurassic Park: Chaos Island, a Command & Conquer style strategy game for the PC. It is noted that some scenes portrayed in the game do not parallel the movie. InGen is attempting to cover up the incidents by killing anything with scales on the island, with those that are supposed to be dead taking precedence over those that are still alive. The cast remains much the same as in the movie in terms of characters; for example, Ian, Sarah, and Eddie. However, their missions are now laid out by Hammond. Another discrepancy is that the usual assortment of dinosaurs are not the only enemies you face; in the game you encounter InGen's mercenaries and guards on several occasions, and late in the movie there is a mutual alliance based on the fact that neither group wants to die. In game, however, there is no truce and the mercenaries clearly have more equipment than they did in the movie. In addition to the wandering batches of mercenaries on foot, they also make use of 20-30+ Jeeps and even tanks.

An arcade game titled The Lost World: Jurassic Park was also released by Sega, and made use of the then-powerful Model 3 arcade hardware.

In 1998 a PC first person shooter game named Jurassic Park: Trespasser was released, billed as a digital sequel to the movie The Lost World. The game was highly ambitious and featured one of the first large scale physics engines in an action game. The developer was pushed by the publisher to ship it to coincide with the VHS release of The Lost World whether it was ready or not. This meant many elements of the planned game design were shelved and many bugs, some major, still remained in the game. As a consequence many players felt the game was clunky and awkward to play, and the game did not fare well critically. The forced early release also caused the game to receive poor marks for requiring incredibly powerful PC hardware in order to achieve playable frame rates; the physics system of the game also does not handle achieving higher frame rates well, behaving at its best between 20-30 frame/s and becoming increasingly erratic above and below. Players installing the game on a modern system have often found it unusable, as the combination of too-powerful hardware (the game lacks programming to properly limit its behavior in high-framerate situations) and graphical anomalies (due to the heavy use of now-deprecated DirectX 5 and 6 programming routines) make for an extremely unsatisfactory gameplay experience. But after a few years the game received a large modding community called Trescom, which released many patches and graphical updates for download on their forums.

In 1999, another PlayStation title, Warpath: Jurassic Park, a console fighting game in the style of Tekken and Primal Rage, was released by DreamWorks Interactive as a sort of follow-up in similar style to the original platformer. The game featured 14 different fighting dinosaurs, although around half of those were re-meshes (a new model animated over a duplicate frame) with mixed results. Different scenes from both previous films provided the arenas, considered decently detailed and destructible for the era. The game received mixed reviews, applauding the dinosaurs but criticizing the slow controls and (for the system) overly-complex graphics, which caused considerable strain and polygon-tearing by the PS1 processors. The dinosaur's realism is also extremely exaggerated; many of the dinosaurs can leap straight into the air with no problems.