I’ve been on a Jurassic Park kick lately, re-watching the four films I’d seen and moving on to the latest two. (I haven’t watched the most recent one yet.) It put me in the mood to play some of the old games; I picked up Jurassic Park for Game Gear, which I played on my Analogue Pocket.

It’s not terribly long or very difficult, but I enjoyed it. I think the Game Gear has a weaker library than the Game Boy or Lynx and never gave them much love. This one surprised me! You can choose to play the levels in any order, but in order to access the final level and get the good ending, you can’t use any continues. It doesn’t tell you this, so I found out the hard way and had to play through it twice.

Each level starts with driving portion in which you must shoot the dinosaurs chasing your jeep. Losing this part doesn’t matter, but doing well can earn you more life.

After the driving part, the majority of the game consists of platforming and shooting dinosaurs with your three weapons.

The graphics are pretty incredible for Game Gear, and I think the darkness in some of them, especially scenes with carnivores, really highlights the horror aspect of the Jurassic Park series.

If you get the bad ending, the opening of the park is delayed indefinitely, and you get the credits with dinosaurs instead of people!

But if you get to the end without using continues, you help Dr. Grant save the day! In the good ending, the park opens… which probably isn’t a good thing!