Jurassic Park: Operation Genesis is a theme park building and management sim
that lets you create your own version of the most famous dinosaur park that
never existed. The game is John Hammond's vision of reality in that it is
possible to engineer dinosaurs and expect them to act as reasonably behaved
tourist attractions. The issues and concerns raised by the book and movie
are a non-factor here and in fact Dr. Alan Grant is a regular park
employee in the game. Working these themes into the game would have made
for some interesting play, but instead the developers decided to go the safe
route and as a result the game is nothing more than an average theme park sim.
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| Park rangers use helicopters to manage the dinosaurs. |
Like most theme park sims, Jurassic Park requires you to perform research in
order to make new structures and attractions available for use in your park.
In addition to this Jurassic Park has another research-like component in that
you need to build the DNA structure for each dinosaur appearing in your park.
To do so you must first obtain dinosaur fossils or samples of amber. These
can be found by assigning teams of paleontologists to dig sites or by visiting the
fossil market. You can get the exact fossil you're looking for from the
market, but good specimens are pretty expensive so you'll have to primarily rely
on the random fossils found by your teams in the field. Once you have a
fossil you can send it to your DNA lab for extraction. Each fossil will
yield a portion of a particular dinosaur species' DNA, and once you've extracted
50% of the total DNA code you can start creating that type of dinosaur in your
park. You'll need to keep working until you get 100% of a species' DNA,
though, as dinosaurs created from incomplete DNA have very short life spans.
Unfortunately this is not a very interactive process and it can take some time
to find new fossils. This leads to a lot of waiting when you are trying to
add a particular species to your park as there isn't any way to speed the game's
clock. This is an even bigger issue when playing one of the game's
missions as the victory conditions will often require you to add certain
dinosaurs to your park. You can spend quite a bit of time waiting to find
the right fossil or hoping that it will eventually show up on the fossil market.
Once you've got enough DNA to start making dinosaurs you're ready to open your
park. There are two aspects to park management as you'll have to provide
for both your dinosaurs and park visitors. Dinosaurs have basic needs for
food and water which they can get for themselves from the environment. You
can also build feeders to ensure that they have enough to eat, as they sometimes
have a tendency to let themselves starve. Dinosaurs can also pick up a
variety of fatal diseases that you'll need to research cures for. Should
they fall ill you'll need to send your rangers in to vaccinate them or else the
disease will spread and you will end up with a lot of dead dinosaurs.
The other aspect of dinosaur management is security. With herbivores a
little fencing is all that is needed to keep them in check. If you add
carnivores to your park (visitors love to see carnivores), then security becomes
a bigger concern. You'll not only need stronger fences, but also automated
gun turrets, security cameras, and safety bunkers for your visitors.
Carnivores also have a tendency to rampage and you may be faced with carnivores
on the loose. To take care of them you can take control of your ranger
chopper and use a sniper rifle to pick them off from the air. It sounds
more fun than it actually is, though, and after you've done it once you won't
really be too anxious to do it again. The helicopter is flown in third
person mode and is confined to a single elevation, and it feels like you're
driving an inertia-free car. You can switch to a first-person shooting
mode in which the only real challenge is steadying the gun due to the bob of the
helicopter.
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