Jurassic Park and its two movie sequels, The Lost World and Jurassic Park III, raised the bar for movie special effects. Now, the 3-D action sim Jurassic Park: Operation Genesis, from developer Blue Tongue and publisher Vivendi Universal, redefines the park sim genre for Xbox gamers. Take control of your own theme park filled with dozens of different species of dinosaurs. Will your dinos bring you fortune and glory, or a tourism disaster of Isla Nublar proportions?
The Dinosaur Show INGEN, the company behind the original Jurassic Park, has hired you to design, build, and supervise their latest island theme park. You’re responsible for constructing secure enclosures, hiring staff to maintain your park’s appearance, taking care of your “living biological attractions,” and making sure your visitors stay entertained, while keeping them safe from dinosaur break outs or other emergencies.
Spinosaurus requires high-security fences.
While the heart of the game is the open-ended Operation Genesis mode—which lets you create every aspect of your park from beginning to end—you should start with the series of deep tutorial exercises. These exercises will quickly show you the basics and have you up to your arms in tourists and dino-DNA in no time. Learn how to create an authentic attraction, by building an award-winning safari. Recreate the original Jurassic Park to gain experience in managing diverse species and multiple enclosures. Or, become an expert dino-ranger by rebuilding the wrecked and raptor-infested Site B (the “Lost World” on Isla Sorna). Once you’ve successfully conquered a few exercises, you can start with your from-scratch park, or you can stick with pre-established goals and maps by moving up to the more difficult Mission games.
Jurassic Park: Operation Genesis boasts a deceptively simple control scheme, based on a series of branching radial menus. With just a few button clicks and thumbstick flicks, you can zip back and forth between the control screens for research, building, visitor moods, dinosaur management, fossil hunts, objectives, reports on every aspect of your park, and more. Structures, dinosaurs, and visitors all have their own menus that will help you manipulate staff size, prices for every attraction, dinosaur care, and whether your guests as entertained and comfortable.
The I in Team Running a park full of extinct cloned reptiles (that might want to eat you) is no easy task. From time to time, the game puts the “action” in “3-D action sim” by letting you take a direct hand in emergencies. Fly the ranger helicopter to subdue a particularly dangerous predator, or rescue a group of tourists stranded in the Rex paddock. Drive the safari land cruiser out into a vast herbivore enclosure to pad your park budget with money-making photos (the ranger chopper and the safari ride also run automatically, if you’re busy).
The park staff sweats the details and will frequently contact you through the game’s e-mail message system. You can use the message screen to prioritize your tasks (urgent messages are tinted red). Dr. Alan Grant supervises your fossil dig teams, which provide raw materials that Dr. Wu’s genetics team can extract for cloning. Dr. Wu runs the Jurassic Park research facility—you’ll hear from him when his team finishes researching upgrades like High-Security Fences, Security Turrets, and Vaccines. Dr. Wu also tracks your genetic collections. (You need 50 percent of a dino’s DNA to create one in your hatchery.)
New arrivals fly over a busy park.
Tooth and Claw All message alerts are important, but no message (other than a termination letter) is more urgent than a message from Dr. Sattler. She oversees the health of the park’s dinosaurs and the safety of the plant life. When a dinosaur is sick, stressed, comatose, or dead, Ellie will call you to action. Jurassic Park: Operation Genesis includes all your favorite dinosaurs from the movies—diminutive and poisonous dilophosaurus, the armored stegosaurus, and the fierce spinosaur, to name a few—which you must keep in good health with proper feeding, watering, and vaccination.
A successful park requires steady income, beyond what you can make from photos and fossil sales—you need a healthy mix of happy patrons. Track which creatures appeal to different visitor types using the Entertainment menu. Giant meat-eaters like T. Rex or the shocking antics of a velociraptor pack bring joy to the Thrill Seekers. Dino Nerds want to see authenticity and will be miffed if you put a Cretaceous triceratops in the same enclosure as a Jurassic brachiosaur or if you put too many cheap, modern trees in the park. Certain dinosaurs have “friend” species that will cavort and play. These reptiles appeal to the Fun Lovers. Mainstream visitors affect the overall rating of your park and simply want to see a healthy mix of all of the above.
Jurassic Park seeks a creator with a steady hand and an active imagination for an endlessly fascinating and addictive experience, unlike anything else currently on the Xbox. Are you up to the challenge?
