OPERATION
GENESIS mode: This is where the fun begins. Following some
pretty basic business sense is what is needed to accomplish
the highest ratings possible. But again, that may not be as
simple as it sounds.
Before
opening the park, you have to hire the diggers, do the excavating,
extract the DNA, build the enclosures, the paths, the park
entrance, and only after you have your very first dinosaur
can you open the park for business. Like a lot of these
games, it sounds tedious. If you do it right, however, and
chop a lot of unnecessary stuff to build or wait until later
to build (call it the California Adventure plan), it pays
off after some time.
How?
Money. One of the downfalls of this game is the money issue.
You need money to do anything and everything, and as all
SIM games go, you have to do A-B-C-D-E to get to F(un),
and JP proves slow going to F. Earning money takes
time, and it's a while before you can get your T-Rex, which,
really, is the main reason you'd want to play.
There
is a lot to do in this game. Once you have gone through
it a few times, you realize it can be really fun but creativity
isn't as much an issue as logic is. You just need patience
and the ability to learn from previous mistakes. Such as
this important safety tip: don't offer the open jeep rides
when a T-Rex is stomping around. ("Sorry about that one,
folks - they're only dangerous if their ears wiggle…") If
a visitor is killed your ratings drop, making it hard to
stay afloat with the investors.
There
are lots of little issues one could have with the game.
Choosing which plants to decorate the park with is interesting,
but sometimes the specifics get too specific, hindering
the experience when all you really want to do is move on.
Staff
communication is annoying at times, because it's via e-mail.
You can get 10 "You've got mail" messages playing in and
out as you are doing something else, and it can totally
distract you. (Hmmm…just like a real job.)
Time
Lapsing is hard to keep up with, and any time you need to
use the chopper, keep in mind you have to give yourself
time for the takeoff sequence to start up before you can
actually get to the needed location. This game also heavily
relies on shortcut keys that you need to remember. To some
that's a cool extra feature and to others it's a curse.
Needless
to say the graphics are really nice, and the creatures all
seem to have a life of their own. Your attractions will
be randomly doing truly dinosaurish deeds. Suddenly a little
dino will attack something, or the big carnivores start
banging their head on the walls.
The
soundtrack meshes so well with the game that it sucks you
right in, until you hear "Message from . . ." and it's back
to work as usual.
If
you get a chance after you build a peep hole for one of
the big bad T-Rexs, go check it out. Feed that bad boy,
and turn up the volume. You may be lucky and scare your
roomie half to death. It's the little things that make this
game entertaining.
Let's
face it. The guys at Vivendi Universal took a done-to-death
genre of game and tried to give it new life with a big name
and some pretty big stars. With all the flaws this game
may have, it still has some pretty cool stuff to experience
and play. However, before you go off and have an instant
adventure, you should definitely go through the tutorial.
With
all the game play possible, I found this game entertaining
enough to keep me hooked for six hours straight at one time.
Bless the SAVE, and use it wisely.
Rating:
out
of 
Jurassic Park: Operation Genesis (Windows 98/Me/2000/XP)
Jurassic Park: Operation Genesis (Playstation 2)
Jurassic Park: Operation Genesis (Xbox)
