You're gonna love building your own Jurassic Park!

I don’t know a person who hasn’t seen Jurassic Park or one of its sequels. The movies have become a part of pop culture. In addition to the 3 films, there have been a slue of games based after the Jurassic Park theme. One such title is Jurassic Park Operation Genesis, which allows you to take the place of John Hammond (the founder) and build your own Jurassic Park.

Well, the premise is simple. Using your standard enterprise building sim techniques, you must construct, expand, and maintain a Jurassic Park. To do this, you will be given all the same tools (and some new ones) that Hammond had available in the books. As you build your Park, you will be rated on customer satisfaction. The more satisfied the customers, the higher your score. For every full star you are awarded (assuming you haven’t lost any), you can unlock new Dig locations which allows new dinosaurs to be unlocked. You can unlock a total of 7 dig locations, but you are limited to using a max of 5. As such, you must select your locations based on the dinosaurs you wish to add to your park. For instance, digging in Asia may unlock Velociraptors, but you loose a chance to uncover the T-Rex. As you build your park, you must research new attractions as well as collect DNA for new dinosaurs. DNA is collected from fossils in the previously mentioned dig sites. Just like Sim Theme Park or other amusement park simulations, you need to research all the equipment used to run the park. This ranges from park benches (which, I’m not sure why a park bench needs to be researched) to high voltage fences. It takes a while, but if you play your park, you will eventually unlock everything.

Unlike other park building sims, Operation Genesis requires a consideration of safety. Remember the JP movies? If you’re not careful, you can have a repeat of these. Here’s how it works. You use the finite amount of fencing you can build to house your dinosaurs. Just like the visitors, the dinosaurs have needs that must be attended to. If their needs go untended too long, the dinosaur becomes stressed. Once stressed they begin to act erratically. Aggressive dinosaurs (mostly large carnivores) will go into a rampage mode if stressed too long. During a rampage, they will attack the fences among other things. Should they break loose, their first order of business will be to devour visitors. To prevent stress, you must make sure their enclosure is the right size, population, and contains all the necessary resources. Since your island is limited in size and your resources in number, you also have to manage the cage layouts and plan ahead when constructing new enclosures.

What makes Operation Genesis fun is that it’s Jurassic Park. You can watch the dinosaurs living their daily lives. Occasionally, I find myself doing this because it is quite amusing. I’m not sure how accurate the AI is on the dinosaurs, but the game is packed with quite a bit of data on each species for the paleontologist in you. What I find most interesting about watching the dinosaurs is that they seem to be very life-like. There are so many animations built into the game that the dinos almost seem to be living through your PC. Considering that every dinosaur that’s ever appeared in a Jurassic Park movie is present, that’s quite a bit of animation to program in. Because of this, I honestly haven’t paid enough attention to count the total number of actions dinos can perform, but they threw in quite a bit, especially when you mix certain species. Some species will “play” together, while other species will hunt each other. Knowing how to mix dinosaurs for the best experience will build your park rating.

Like any theme park sim, you can actually ride the rides. What this means is that you can sit in the stationary viewing portals and watch the dinosaurs. The purpose of this is to get a visitor’s eye view. This is mostly used to manage the foliage and ensure that your attractions are visible for the visitor. You can also drive the tram jeeps. Although driving is a somewhat cumbersome task, it’s necessary when the jeeps occasionally get stuck while out on safari. While simply riding (not driving) the jeep or hot air balloon rides, you can take pictures of the dinosaurs. The pictures really don’t do anything for your park. Finally, you can ride in the ranger’s helicopter and help rescue people from the park or shoot dinosaurs for with tranquilizer darts or retirement rounds. Although most of these tasks are automated (which saves a huge headache), you can elect to play mini-games based around each. These range from a safari adventure where you must take pictures for score, to a retirement rampage where you must kill all rampaging carnivores before they kill too many visitors. During the mini-games, you are removed from your park management responsibilities. This makes it easier to focus on the task at hand without having to worry about incessant emails regarding problems in the park. Despite the mini-games removal of your park management, Operation Genesis makes life easier by not requiring you to micromanage every little aspect of your park. Since almost everything is fairly automated, you can stroll around a bit more than in other theme park sims I’ve played, even without having to play the mini-games.


Although Operation Genesis does so many wonderful things for the theme park building sim, it also has the same drawbacks. Considering that there are no other themed islands to unlock, you get 1 shot at your Jurassic Park and that’s it. After you’ve unlocked 5 of the 7 dig sites, it becomes all about keeping your park growing. With the non-stop messages about what’s going wrong or what’s going on (in general), you spend more time checking email than enjoying what you’ve built. This can get tedious at times. I honestly wish I could apply a spam filter to my account after the 100th notice from Dr. Saddler that a dinosaur is in a coma. To make matters worse, you have random storms that seem to be more frequent when your park reaches 4 stars. This hurts you quite a bit because storms destroy park facilities and security. During frequent storms, you may find it a chore to keep rebuilding.

Well, time to be quite superficial. When I say that, I mean this is where I discuss the graphics and sound on the game. The visuals actually look good. The graphics are a little chunky. When I say this, I mean that the dinosaurs have more square ridges to their design than smooth edges. Because of the age and genre of the game, I can’t say that that’s a bad thing, since the game does look better than most park building sims of its time. The environments are very limited in design. Because Jurassic Park is set on a tropical island, all the textures are jungle. This works well with the theme, but doesn’t offer a lot in variety. As such, you see more green than anything. At least the dinosaurs look just like they did in the movies. It’s because of the movies that they all have excellent design (minus the aforementioned slight blocky nature).

The audio is taken straight out of the films’ sound booth. All the dinosaurs sound Just as they did in the movies. This works great because the movies did an excellent job with voicing these cretaceous creatures. Although they didn’t employ the original actors, they did get fairly good facsimiles to replace them. This helped keep the authenticity of the franchise (if you ignore the fact that Grant and Saddler are now working for the park, yet refused to endorse it in the films). Either way, this game sounds just like Jurassic Park should.

I generally don’t enjoy many empire/enterprise building sims. It seems that you normally spend hours on getting your park up to a certain rating, and then the game maliciously does everything to just tear you down. It can be quite tedious in nature and even far less rewarding. Despite all this, I actually enjoy Operation Genesis. Perhaps it’s just the Jurassic Park franchise that makes it a good game or perhaps it’s the fact that you can say “Screw it” and let the dinosaurs eat the tourists. The oddest thing that I’ve seen happen was a tourist die of dehydration on a path with 3 refreshment stands, so I can’t say the programming is 100% sound, but it’s good enough to keep you playing.

All things considered, I HIGHLY RECOMMEND Jurassic Park: Operation Genesis. The game does what every other theme park building sim does, but makes it interesting by adding dinosaurs rather than your typical animals or rides. I can’t say the mini-games are going to get much use, but they are nice if you want a mission based chance to ride the rides. This is a game that you’ll play for a while, then probably put down, but find yourself coming back to every now and again.

PLEASE NOTE: This game was reviewed using the following setups. Deviations from these may alter your play experience.

Setup #1:
Build: Custom Built PC
Operating System: WinXP Home
Processor: 2.2 Ghz
System RAM: 1 GB
Video: GeForce 6600 (256MB)

Setup #2:
Build: Custom Built PC
Operating System: Win2000 Pro
Processor: 1.6 Ghz
System RAM: 384MB
Video: Radeon 9600 (128MB)

Setup #3:
Build: Toshiba Satalite 1905-S277
Operating System: WinXP Home
Processor: 1.6 Ghz
System RAM: 256MB
Video: ATI Mobile (16MB)

Setup #4:
Build: Custom Built PC
Operating System: Win98
Processor: 1.6 Ghz
System RAM: 384MB
Video: Radeon 7000 (64MB)