Jurassic Park II: The Chaos Continues

Review by James "Quasar" Haley


"Jurassic Park II: The Chaos Continues" was evidently meant to be Ocean's answer
to the Genesis version of Jurassic Park, which was a side-scrolling game where
you played as either Dr. Alan Grant, or as a Velociraptor. That game received
very good reviews at the time, whereas the original SNES game was largely
derided and ignored despite its innovative technology and gameplay.

Gone are the first-person sequences, collection, and exploration aspects of the
first game. Instead, this game tries to replicate the gameplay of run-and-gun
shooters such as Contra. In this it fails miserably, but let's discuss the game
starting from the very beginning.

A lush tropical forest greets you as the game boots up, displaying Ocean's logo
in ancient fossil rock. A haunting melody plays as sunlight filtered through the
high canopy passes through the letters from behind, panning from one side of the
screen to the other. This is impressive, but it only gets better. The
introduction sequence of the game immediately starts. Featuring Mode 7 effects,
full-screen American-style cartoon animation, and full high-quality voice-over,
we see the CEO of Biosyn Corporation, InGen's chief competitor, ordering one of
his scientists to get ready to join the illegal paramilitary wing of his company
on Isla Nublar - better known as Jurassic Park. 

Wait, though. When did Biosyn mutate from a little-known bioresearch company
into an international terrorist organization operating outside all legal and
moral constraints? This is just the first of many bizarre plot twists which will
plague this game.

We go on to see Biosyn soldiers equipped with ultra-high-tech gear that would
make any modern soldier drool with envy flying toward Isla Nublar in an armada
of helicopters. More superb graphics and sound show them preparing for drop into
the deadly jungle below. Then the game fades to the title screen, where a 
convincing roar accompanies the swipe of a Velociraptor's claw, which scratches
a bloody "II" below the title of the game, making it fully complete.

Upon starting a game, one- or two-player, you are confronted with a view of a 
PDA from which you can select one of six missions, each giving you a briefing 
before you accept. You can play those missions in any order, but there is very 
little difference in difficulty between them. Also, between each mission is an
emergency mission, which always occur in the same order and cannot be skipped.
These missions are timed, which is a major annoyance and makes them at least
twenty times harder than they would be otherwise. In fact, the entire game's 
difficulty is borderline insane, and this is the biggest quandry with this game:

Despite its impressive production values, this game plays like it was designed
by DigiPen undergraduates.

You play as a character who is nominally Dr. Grant, or in 2-player mode, as his
bodyguard Michael Wolfskin (who I suppose is Native American with a name like
that). However, Grant has traded in his characteristic hat for some inadequate-
looking body armor, and he left behind his archaeology tools in order to arm
himself to the teeth like some kind of Hyper-Rambo. This is so incredibly out
of character that it's almost hard to believe.

You start with full ammo for a broad collection of weapons, including a rifle,
machine gun, shotgun, taser, tranquilizer dart gun, and tranquilizer bazooka.
Tranquilizer BAZOOKA? Yeah, whatever. Get accustomed to a lack of logic here.
Though your ammo is refilled at the beginning of each mission, you will find
it to be in extremely short supply, mainly due to the ridiculously low amount
of it that you can carry - for example, you are limited to only 20 shotgun
shells. Pickups are few and far between. Far worse, however, is how your
weapons are divided into two types - lethal and non-lethal.

As long as Grant is fighting dinosaurs, there is no appreciable difference
between weapons - all weapons "kill" dinosaurs. This leads to two different
complaints, however. First, although all of the dinosaurs are extremely lethal
to you, the only ones you are allowed to hurt are the Velociraptors and the
T-Rex. Using lethal weapons on any other dinosaur, even the deadly Dilophosaurs
who were fair game in the previous installment, will reduce your "stock level" 
by 1. The "stock level" starts at 100 and represents the health of the breeding
populations on the island, which you have been given the somewhat contradictory
mission of maintaining while simultaneously blowing the shit out of everything
that gets in your path. Your stock level will slowly recover as you play, but 
indiscriminately shooting dinos will earn you a Game Over. Note that non-lethal
weapons make dinos use the same death animation as lethal ones, which makes the 
distinction between these weapons feel completely arbitrary.

Second, very soon into the game you must confront Biosyn's soldiers, techs,
workers, scientists, and psychotics. They are armed with everything from
wrenches to flamethrowers, have dead-perfect aim, and take a billion shots to
go down - the strongest Biosyn units have more hitpoints than any of the
dinos, despite a total lack of any visible protection. You can shoot an
unarmored man in the head three times and he is still coming at you. But worst
of all, the "non-lethal" weapons in your inventory, even the almighty 
tranquilizer bazooka, have NO effect on your human enemies. You can pump a man
full of your whole supply of tranquilizer darts and he will shrug it off. A
weapon that can kill a Velociraptor in one hit has no effect on a mere human.
What kind of logic is this?!

This causes you, in some levels, to have to constantly switch back and forth
between lethal and non-lethal weapons, which in the heat of battle is extremely
confusing and frustrating. You take hits because you are using the wrong
weapon, or because it takes you too long to switch to the one you need. This
piles up damage on top of the already almost impossible-to-avoid attacks of
all your enemies. This ruins any Contra contention this game might have had
immediately, but it also doesn't help that your character aims like an ape.

When you try to shoot up, he turns to the side, causing your shots to go off-
center and miss. When you aim in any direction other than straight ahead,
your bullets basically do not go where you expect, and this makes the lack of
ammo even more painful when you start wasting shots. So while you must work
to hit anything, the perfect-aim Biosyn soldiers can hit you anywhere on the
screen. What's really unbelievable is the fact that if you are too close to
an enemy - that is, if the flare from your gun fire is past the enemy's mid-
point - your shots cannot hit it. So you can literally shoot a man at point
blank and miss!

The dinos aren't any more fair. Velociraptors come in three flavors, and the
strongest of these takes three shots of your strongest weapon, the tranq
bazooka, to go down. Velociraptors attack by leaping at you unexpectedly 
from off-screen, giving you almost zero time to react. You can jump over or
duck under them, but they immediately turn around and come back at you. You
can get hit several times by the same raptor, and if more than one attacks
you at once, you are almost certain to die. Though you have 40 hit points,
most attacks take off many at a time, and there are even fewer medikits in
this game than there are ammo pickups.

Stage design. Though the stages are absolutely stunning to look at and 
would actually be fun to run about in if you were alone, there are many 
irritating qualities to them as well. Enemies are placed in unavoidable
locations, such as at the top of ladders, behind walls through which they
can shoot but you cannot, and in areas where they can attack while your
own ability to react is non-existent. This gets particularly stupid with
the Biosyn flamethrower enemies, who can torch you at any angle from a 
deceptively long distance. Though you are safe from them if you can stand 
directly on top of them, you also cannot shoot them from that position, and
attempting to move only makes you take more damage.

Dinosaurs also totally ignore the Biosyn soldiers who are harassing them, 
preferring instead to dine only upon you. This isn't the Jurassic Park I 
remember from the movies, where the most gung-ho and tough guys were the 
first to get eaten, where technology and guns were useless.

And that brings me to the scenario of the game as a whole. As if it weren't
ridiculous enough that John Hammond would send Grant to be Rambo against a
biotech corporation that would make al Qaeda reevaluate the way it does
things, the missions you have to carry out as a part of this mad mission
get progressively dumber. 

Chasing a stereotypical spy through the jungle until he just suddenly 
decides to stop running for no reason; running through a wide-open field full
of murderous thugs to get supplies, going into a volcano to find a radio 
locator you put on a raptor and then blowing the hell out of the volcano, 
only to return immediately thereafter to an apparently undamaged volcano where
Biosyn is now trying to somehow blow up the ENTIRE island; scaling a mountain to
find some lost guy who is somehow the only one who knows where Biosyn has set up
their HQ on this relatively tiny island. 

None of this is at any point believable, and by the end you will literally be 
laughing at it, if you aren't totally disgusted. None of the things Biosyn does 
makes any sense. At one point they shut down the power to the incubators, which 
will cause all of the dinosaurs to stop their apparently magically automated 
hatching process. They indiscriminately kill Gallimimus rather than trying to 
capture them. And then at the end, they just arbitrarily decide to try to blow 
up the entire park. Yeah. They're definitely not doing the job they were sent to 
do, which was to control the park and take living specimens and genetic samples.

You will definitely be disgusted by this game, because unless you enter a very
long secret code at the title screen, this game gives you limited continues. 
You have three or four lives, one life per continue. Once you use them all, 
you must start the entire game over, including all of the basic missions and 
the emergency missions that pop up between them. This would be bad enough in a
game of reasonable challenge, but that the designers of this game had the 
audacity to even suggest that it should be possible in ANY finite number of 
lives boggles the imagination. 

In case that isn't enough, the game also has difficulty settings! Easy, Normal,
and Hard. The difference is minimal; you just die even faster if you increase 
the difficulty. If you somehow beat the game on Normal mode, you face one extra
mission where you kill the T-Rex, who was just minding his own business until 
you went looking for him. If you play on Hard, after this you face yet an 
additional mission where you are flying in a helicopter and are attacked by a 
plane full of Biosyn morons (this part of the game has a completely different 
and confusing control scheme, you are limited to your weakest weapon, and you 
are still hindered by horrible aiming versus your enemies' perfect shots - in 
short, it's a cheap tacked-on shooter sequence that will make you vomit with
rage).

Yet, no matter what difficulty you beat the game on, it adds the final insult
to injury by giving you what amounts to NO ENDING!

You see the helicopter flying you away from the island, which I suppose has
exploded due to the Biosyn retard-bombs, and then the credits scroll. Not even
a congratulatory message like in the previous game, or even the words "The End."
After the overly long credits are finished, the game cycles back to the title
screen, as if to suggest you might want to play again! Oh, that's rich.

All of this is SO unfortunate because this game has some amazingly detailed
and rich graphics, as well as incredible-sounding, well-composed music that
drips "Jurassic Park." The use of the franchise was well done, as scenes that
recall the movie are at every turn, from the dark jungles to the dank bunkers
to the wide-open fields where the Gallimimus were seen. Electric fences spark,
and incubators line the walls. This is Isla Nublar for certain. It's just a
damn shame that all of this art is wasted on a game that plays like garbage.

Ratings:

Graphics: 10.0 - One of the most visually stunning games on the SNES.

Sound:    10.0 - Effects are dead on, music is awesome.

Control:   5.0 - Aiming is clumsy, the need to switch weapons is annoying,
                 dodging is near useless.

Gameplay:  0.0 - Sucks hardcore. Insane difficulty, unbalanced design, and
                 a general feeling that no real thought or care was given to
                 making the game playable.

Story:     1.0 - Initially intriguing, and then falls flat on its face with
                 unrealistic scenarios, a final mission that negates everything
                 you've been trying to accomplish, and a non-existent ending.
                 Utterly unsatisfying.

Replay:    1.0 - If you beat it once, you're probably done, except maybe to
                 just load it up to look at/listen to it. That is, if you
                 ever beat it at all.

Overall:   3.0 - Get it because it is Jurassic Park, and then check out its
                 artwork and music. Don't get it because you want an enjoyable
                 gaming experience. However. with some proper PAR cheats, this
                 game CAN become a mindless jaunt where you shoot everything in
                 sight. Playing it that way is the only way I get any fun out 
                 of it.