Pluseseseses: BE-A-Utiful game, dinosaurs almost seem to breathe (through their mouth) as they hunt, sleep, call to each other or just wander. When trying to shoot them they will hide behind trees.
Lots of neat little touches, you can hop into your land rover ride and drive around taking pictures, which someone might offer to buy. Same with the balloon. You can hop into attractions and see what the visitors would see (which is recommended, I had a viewing vent that was making no money whatsoever, I got mad and hopped in to take a look and discovered the whole things was blocked by a bush; removing the bush made the popularity go up to normal).
Also the ability to take control of a helicopter to hunt down a rogue dino or vaccinate a sick one.
A few different visitor types to try to please; fun lovers, thrill seekers, and dino nerds.
Great sound, introducing a carnivore into a pack of herbivores will cause a chain reaction of warning calls, and the warning calls sound noticeably different from the normal ‘Hello’ call.
Minuseseseseses: I will DESTROY the next cicada I see, a constant buzz in the summer months.
It will rain for months straight and storms can be devastating.
Mouse control too floaty, you’ll click on the wrong thing more than once.
Very limited, 25 different dinos, but not many upgrades or attractions for visitors.
Vague goals, I have no idea how to make a ride more ‘authentic.’
Interface is kinda bad, the onscreen controls are too small, you’ll give up and hunt and peck the keyboard controls. Also it takes awhile to figure out which controls are in which subsection.
Pain in the ass factor: whenever you’re on the aforementioned photosafari, the messages from park advisors will NOT stop, and you can hop out for a sec to answr, but the cars can’t return on their own at that point, meaning you will HAVE to go back.But important messages are announced as such, so if you want you can ignore them until then.
Overall I like the game, it does feel a bit like they rushed it out a bit, like they spent too much time on the graphics and picture taking part. It’s no ‘Rollercoaster Tycoon’, but it’s not ‘Zoo Tycoon’. I’m gonna keep it and hope for some good expansions. But keep in mind I haven’t got a BA from the ‘College Of Game Reviewing’ so I’m not a professional reviewer. I just hope they don’t send their high-water wearing thugs to beat me for being a scab.
Cookiepants and I agree on something. Oh the shame of it all. :oops:
Guess morons, think alike, eh cookieboy? :D
btw if you’re having trouble with the “authenticity” score here are two tips
Fill the enclosure with paleo trees
Make sure all the dinosaurs in an enclosure are all from the same time period. Don’t mix Cretaceous with Jurassic, etc. You can find all this obscure info in the dinopedia.
Right, I have a bad habit of not reading the manual, but thanks. And hey, I full-on admit I’m a moron.
You got any tips for beating that first helicopter mission with the rampaging carnivores? The raptors are hard little suckers to hit! Eventually I just get motion sickness and quit.
Right, I have a bad habit of not reading the manual, but thanks. And hey, I full-on admit I’m a moron.
You got any tips for beating that first helicopter mission with the rampaging carnivores? The raptors are hard little suckers to hit! Eventually I just get motion sickness and quit.[/quote]
It actually is hard to figure out what the hell authenticity means. I was getting frustrated with the first non tutorial exercise also until I somehow figured it out.
As for the missions…I dunno I found them pretty easy. I them all on my first try. One tip for hitting the raptors - make sure you right click after going into shoot mode to zoom in your crosshair. They tend to run, and then stop for a sec before changing directions. That’s the point you wanna nail them. It’s just like AWPing in Counter-Strike. :) For the big carnivores you can take them down in one shot if you drill them in the head. Saves time.
This sounds like a great concept. The Jurassic Park movies are played out, but I think it’s only because they’ve gotten away from the original idea, which was a theme park with dinosaurs. Who cares about a bunch of dinosaurs let loose on some random island? Anyway, this game sounds cool beacuse you get to run Jurassic Park. I like the fact that the game makes you dig up fossilized dinosaur DNA to create your dinos. I wonder if you also have to hatch and raise them? They should include as many aspects from the first book as they can, like the electric fences, the motion sensors, and the river ride.
You use the hatchery to hatch/raise the dinos instantaneously (the structure looks like the raptor pen from the first movie, complete with cow-lowering device), and the more complete the DNA you have, the longer the dino lives. The electric fences are intact, but they also added sentry turrets and avoidance beacons. And there’re “we didn’t get the full likenesses” renders of Ray Arnold (Samuel L. Jackson), John Hammond (Richard Attenborough), Dr. Satler (Laura Dern), Harry Wu (BD Wong), and Dr. Grant (Sam Neil).
I thought the mouse control was floaty at first, but then I turned off AA, and I stopped mis-selecting things from then on.
The game is better than I’d thought it be.
EDIT: Deleted the question about getting a five-star park, as I finally got one. Wheeeee.
No river ride, but there’s a safari tour with a drivable land cruiser, and a hot air balloon ride where you can snap photos of the dinos from the air. The computer scores how good your photos are, based on some unknown algorithm (composition, # of dinos, # of distinct species in frame, etc). If you get a high score, your park director eventually sells the photo to a magazine for a big money bonus. It’s a neat extra revenue stream.
Late to the party here - I won this game at a lanparty, and it had me hooked for about 3 days, and now I probably won’t pick it up again. A lot of the dinosaur actions will wow you until you realize that it is all scripting, and no AI. The first time you introduce a raptor into a stegosaurus pen, it’s impressive to see the raptor leap on it’s back, biting and clawing, and then having the stego shake it off and pound it to death with its spiked tail. Then, when you realize it will happen the exact same way if you introduce 10 raptors to 10 stegos, it loses its appeal. It just appears to be far to script driven than AI driven.
After I got my park to 5 stars, for the hell of it I saved my game and deleted all the walls of my raptor pen (which used low security fences because I wanted to invite trouble, though the raptors never tried to get out). I sat back and waited, cackling softly to myself as I envisioned my unsuspecting guests soon filling raptor bellies. Well, much to my disappointment, the raptors never once tried to leave the area that they had originally been confined to. I waited for 5 game-months, at which point the raptors all died of ‘old age.’ At that point I turned the game off in disgust. Is it too much to ask for raptors that constantly challenge your security systems, trying to escape and cause havoc in the park? I gave the fuckers free run of the park and an all-you-can-eat human buffet and I couldn’t muster a single fatality.
At that point I felt like I was raising cattle, not vicious carnivores, so all of the ‘magic’ of the game was gone. Any one else have similar disappointments or different experiences with this game?
