Thanks to Radix and Nate for your indelible testament to videogames and gamers via SDA, and thanks also for your remarkable work developing the site and processing/hosting our demos. Finally, I would like to thank Austin Douglas for his extremely convenient subservience, as he obsequiously pressed the "reset" button on my Sega Genesis, every time I failed, for a considerable number of attempts. Seriously, if it weren't for prompt sycophants like him, our shoes would never get polished! Haha; jk!! The poor shmuck is my best friend, and it actually was such a relief not to have to reach for the button after every error.

I firmly believe that this is my most formidable run to date. While the Raptor's mission is laughably easier than Grant's, it still posed quite a tedious challenge. I chose the Raptor's quest for obvious reasons; Grant takes more damage, has to face dozens more dinosaurs with clunky and limited ammunitions, must survive more levels, and cannot move anywhere near the Raptor's velocity. It was really the repetition and countless, failed attempts that truly tried my patience with the Raptor run, though. As with any short but intense speedrun, it required numerous retries and blistered fingers. My only goal for the run was to eliminate deaths; this I accomplished. I am thoroughly pleased with the time I have achieved, and I hope it has made for an entertaining demo. The Raptor's vendetta is excruciatingly unexplained, btw, but I don't believe a compelling narrative is necessary for an adventure starring an extinct beast, anyway. Just deal.

In the jungle, I don't believe I make a single mistake. If you notice, I preemptively eliminated the Dilophosaurs by reaching their spawning points before they had generated (Btw, just so everyone frickin knows, those guys did NOT have frills and did NOT actually spit venom. Archaeologists and sages, everywhere, are still attempting to discover what the motivation behind this directive was). Anyway, this tactic seemed to work well in the run.

The power plant goes smoothly, as well, except for when I anticipated the last tesla-soldier and somehow missed my kick, which I can only attribute to insufficient hit-detection. Oh, and I receive style points for kicking Grant at the exit.

The Raptor's seemingly ceaseless lust for rampage continues into the sewers, from there, and I believe I make my most impressive action segment, there. Trust me; you have absolutely no idea, whatsoever, how difficult those six jumps are. No idea... trust me. BTW, I lose those precious style points for failing to remember to kick Grant, here.

Next we face the baseless VOLCANO level. Besides being utterly out of place, this vagabond level is eerily short and seems to defy the levels transitioning to and from it. This area also contains my only significant mistake; instead of mauling the last two guards, I should have leapt completely over them, as I meant to do, and saved a couple of seconds. However, this is a most forgivable error, especially since the high jump I actually pressed simply failed to register [Note: absolving myself of blame].

The final level reveals the latent, aggressive nature behind the guards. The third guard in the opening area somehow manages not only to survive my reckless charge, but he also musters TWO hits on me. Enraging. Not only that, but the next guy, two rooms later, also manages to damage me before meeting his own demise. Of course, this is to be followed by an accidental turn around on my part, wasting one or two seconds. At least, with that, the worst is over. On the next floor, the insidious green men begin to arrive. They have a quickdraw that would put John Wayne to shame, although it is not obvious from this run. The final man on this floor is a miniboss, for all I can figure, with an even snappier quickdraw. I'm sure it appears to be an accident, but I intentionally jump underneath him to fake him out. After I ascend the next room, I enter the uppermost level. Here I run along the floor until I reach [and kill] a seriously incongruous Dilophosaurus, and from here, I proceed to do the MOST DIFFICULT THING I'VE EVER DONE IN ANYTHING IN THE WORLD. The final soldier who waits in the ceiling is one, sick, son-of-an-incestuous-bitch. He is able to electrocute the Raptor BEFORE I even make a jump; it's absolutely insane. And no, utilizing the Raptor's absolutely absurd grappling technique to climb onto the platform does not work, either. I have one failed attempt where I redo this jump, which I SOMEHOW manage to nail in one attempt, here, a total of twenty-five poignantly painful times. I don't know; maybe I was trying too hard, but I'll be damned if I wouldn't have kept this run, even if the rest of it hadn't gone so well, just for the sake of preserving this emaculate jump. Anyway, after this I kick the dinosaur skeletons out from underneath Grant to "defeat" him. Now that he's running scared, the Raptor can execute his ingenious hide-in-the-open-box plan, I guess.

I hope you enjoy!!

This run was made on a trusty Mega Drive Model 1 (PAL). Thanks for still working so well after so many years

A big thanks to the SDA staff for maintaining and running this site!

This was one of those games which I found really hard back when I was a kid. Of course I'm not talking about the easy raptor missions which I was able to complete with no problems. No, the Grant missions with it's iffy physics and abundance of tricky jumps combined with some heavy slowdowns is what really made this game annoyingly hard. Replaying those games you used to consider hard several years later tend to lower your view of the overall difficulty though. I still consider it annoying however.

The most notable thing when playing on hard is that weapon pickups only give 5 ammo instead of the 10 you get on normal and 15 on easy. Damage taken is also alot higher and the dinosaurs also stay sedated for a shorter period of time but this doesn't affect the speedrun in any way since I never stay that long in an area. Also you seem to be getting less fuel from pickups in the river stage

There are several random events that affect the speed of the run. For most of these events if it didn't turn up favourable enough, I restarted. Some of the events outcomes I ignore and others I eliminate.

There was no previous work to be found for the Grant missions so I had to invent the tactics and skips myself.
Grant will take alot of fall damage as opposed to the raptor. The game also defines a maximum distance you are allowed to fall. When you breach that limit the game triggers what I call a fall-to-death animation (FTDA) which will kill you even though the fall itself would not have done enough damage to kill you. I abuse the fact that shooting in the air resets your fall distance which allows me to make certain long falls.
The game relies heavily on the same animation to instantly trigger when you go down certain pits the developers didn't want you to enter. This is also abused at some parts of the game.

Level comments:

• Jungle

  The very first tricera might screw you up with it's random moving pattern. The game really isn't made to support sloped surfaces so your movement might be completely stopped just because he moves his head. With some precise jumping I can slip into the hole between the bounce thingy and the spikes. I shoot once in the air in order to prevent a FTDA from triggering. The Dilo to the left right where I land can decide to spit at me twice, once or not at all where the twice pattern is the most common. I can't spare any ammo to shoot it so I'm going to have to hope for the once or zero pattern. Fortunately he does the zero pattern this time, allowing me to get through without getting slowed down by taking damage. I fall reset in order get by before the boulder. Unfortunately I land a little bit too far away so I have to wait and let the boulder pass after the crawling (touching the boulder yields instant death, regardless of your hp). The level is ended with a precision jump over the brachio. Too early and you die, too late and you'll grab the ledge costing you time.

• Power Station

  Ladders require you to be almost right below them in order to be able to climb them. When running up against a ladder it is so easy accidently stopping too early, or moving your hand to a more diagonal press which will make Grant keep running. I practiced timing the stopping to avoid having any ugly movement errors around the ladders in this run. I need to climb that extra height in order to jump off, otherwise Grant will just release the ladder and fall straight down.
  No power station without some loose electrical wires discharging at you. These big discharging bolts sometimes does not fire at all, sometimes fire a small spark and sometimes decide to go haywire and spout out several bolts in a row. Their behaviour is random and I can't afford to wait around them so I'm just going to go full speed through them and hope for the best. This next Dilo will try to spit me off the ceiling wires. Sometimes he will spit in arcs that will hit me, and sometimes the arc go just behind me. I prefer to eliminate this random event by taking him out. I get caught by a bolt here. Originally I said that I would restart if that happened, but it happened so frequently that I decided to let one hit slip if the rest of the level went perfect.

  Depending on the starting pattern of the moving bolts on the grid I sometimes can't jump off before the third bolt reaches and hits me. Another random event that caused many restarts. The bolt at the next grid will always be at that place so it's faster just taking damage from it. The second subscreen is really short. I make sure to land on the far edge of the power cell in order to reach the ledge without having to touch the cable. The raptor on the third subscreen will catch up to me when I reach the ladder so I need to take care of it. The upcoming dilo will spit me off the ladder so I also need to take care of him. I reach the first T-Rex of the game and his moving pattern is favourable

• River

  The river could be considered a pretty hard level for a normal player until you figure out the path to take. Most of the small waterfalls leads to instant death. I hold down to scroll the view when above the first T-Rex. This seems to help in getting the right movement pattern. If I get the wrong movement pattern he will cause too severe slowdown when I'm about to perform the boat jump. If the boat goes too slow I will just crash and die. I release the throttle for 3 seconds to conserve fuel. If I don't I will sometimes run out just before the boat jump, all depending on how much slowdown hits me on the way. The T-Rex does the right pattern and I make the boat jump, thus skipping a small part where I would have to switch to a new boat. Soon after the boat jump I release the throttle once again. This time I need to do it for 4.5 seconds because I need the fuel to be able to take the right path by the next wide waterfall. When riding above the second T-rex I actually hold full speed, but the slowdown is so severe that the boat makes a choppy movement (it still wastes fuel like there would be no slowdown!). I change boat and descend to the bottom of the level. I can't do anything to speed up these brachios so I just mess around with the lightning gun while waiting. The tricera guarding the exit will instantly charge and knock me into the water if I get up to his level so I have to take him out (Grant can't swim you know!) . I need to wait for the sleep animation to start or his charging animation will override it and ignore the sleep effect. I time it just right this time but I've had runs where I jumped half a second too early which got me killed.

• Sewer

  The sewer starts off with one tricky jump which has ended several of my runs. The game designers didn't intend for you to be able to make it, but if you wait for the exact second, you can jump on the brachio and still reach the other side. The edge is not climbable so I need to land inside the next tunnel which makes the window where the jump needs to occur very small. Usually I ended up not waiting long enough which made me either miss reaching him at all, or land on the nose from where I cannot make the second jump.
  Next up we have an area that clearly demonstrates that this game does not support sloped surfaces. All the other sloped surfaces escapes the problem since they start the sliding animation. For this surface you are actually supposed to walk over it, but the game is still performing collision detection like this was a straight surface. Fortunately I can skip most of the misfortune since I only need those two jumps and a small step in order to beat the Wheel of Death before it returns. One touch of this wheel when it is rolling yields instant death. Next up the game goes into a state of heavy slowdown. It always slows down at this area which makes it pretty annoying. I am careful not to pick up the weapon lying under the button because it contains flash bombs which would mess up the weapon switch order.
  This T-rex shows up with a slow pattern. I need to hit him while he is doing the biting animation, or the gas bomb won't hit him. I loose a few seconds having to wait for that. I pick up the pink explosives needed for the final battle in this stage since they are right in my path. Up ahead I pick up the blue ammo since I need 2 more for the rest of the game and I only have one left. This pickup is pretty much in the way anyways. I utilize another shortcut by shooting mid-air for a fall reset and then landing in the smoke which resets the fall once more. Jumping over this blue pickup will land me too close to the wheel where I won't be able to activate it so picking this one up is faster. Another demonstration of a fine sloped surface. You can't walk up it, you have to jump. The game is slowing down alot here so the second of my jumps fail to register which is why I just stand around for a second [As proved by the Raptor run, it is ok to absolve yourself of blame when running this game].
  I take the time to pick up this medkit because I need some refill for the upcoming fall damage of the next level and the floating crate will be on its way towards the far edge of the cannister anyways. The floating crate is lurking, I am sure of it. It possesses the dumbest physics in the game since someone decided they really wanted it to float. So now it floats, or rather jumps up and down which of course is not supported either by the game. When you stand on that crate you will go into falling animation every time it bobs up or down. It is not possible to jump or walk when in the falling animation and the crate bobs pretty fast to make sure not to let you off. This is exactly what is happening to me this time. I mash the jump button at this part but no, it just won't let me off. Usually you can manage to get off in reasonable time but I loose ~4 seconds to the crate this time around. I make sure to land on the small sloped edge of the cannister and jump out of sliding animation to regain some of the lost time.

• Canyon

  I like this level because it is the first one to have no luck elements at all. I stop for a second and wait for the dilo to jump forward so that I can jump over him. One hit by one of the falling rocks will kill me because they do damage equal to half my hp when on hard. Once you have the timing figured out it is easy to avoid them since they fall at the same places with a fixed interval. I have 4 red ammo left when entering this stage and I need to use 3 before the next pickup, so the weapons planning couldn't have been better. Next up comes a pit which is one of those that instantly triggers a FTDA. There is no way to reset the fall as the death animation already started, however there is a way to cancel it. I discovered that the weapon pickup animation will cancel a FTDA completely. In this pit, the FTDA ends just after passing a pillar. Normally there is a weapons pickup on that pillar when you pass it using the regular route, but the FTDA uses faster movement than regular falling so the weapon object is never loaded and you die (just as the game devs intended). However, the rocks that are constantly falling are causing huge slowdown. By triggering the animation just when the rocks fall, the game will slow down just enough for the weapon pickup to load and the FTDA will be cancelled. By performing a forward jump from the very edge of this pillar I can barely reach the brachio head which also skips a small portion. Unfortunately, you can't grab this vine when in a forward jump animation. I pick up this last red ammo because the ground in front of me has sloped surface physics so I really want to make a jump that reaches the ledge. You have to take this medkit or the ground below you just won't break.

• Volcano

  The volcano is normally a very short level but I make it even shorter by utilizing a double FTDA cancel. This trick is really hard to pull off and having such a thing so late in the run is not really sane. To even reach the volcano, almost all the random events would have to line up and I would have to succeed with all the previous skips and shortcuts and have almost no mistakes. Failing the skip kills me and although it would only cost me ~8 extra seconds to get back there and attempt a second try, I wanted this a death-less run, so failing meant a restart. Only about 2% of my attempts reached the volcano level so adding this trick and we're down to less than 1% chance of having this run reach this far and pull this trick off without deaths. The first pickup that is cancelling my fall is situated on a rock that is too small for the pickup animation, so Grant is pushed somewhat backwards and will keep falling. This positions me perfectly to catch the next pickup cancel which goes through a pit which instantly triggers the FTDA. Since the ledge is not grabbable and I'm already falling into the pit with forward motion, I can move to the right just enough to reach the second pickup. Due to the FTDA Grant is able to start the pickup animation further away from the weapon than normal. The game slows down alot during this fall because it hasn't loaded much of what's below me yet. I reset my fall to be able to land on the bottom and proceed to the end. I'm getting abit nervous at this time so I happen to accidently do a regular jump instead of a forward jump at the end which almost sends me into the lava.

• The Visitors Center

  This level is laughably easy compared to the rest. There is no hard jumps, no luck involved and pretty much only one place in the entire level where you could fall to death. I also praticed this level alot so that when I actually did get past the Volcano I would not have any problems finishing the run. I hit my head in a plank which slows me down too much for me to keep up with my shot, so I needed to fire one extra towards the wire. I accidently fired straight up instead of diagonally at this second raptor but fortunately I got him before he could hit me anyways. The rest of this and the next two subscreens mainly consists of me running and pre-fireing at the dinos. In the final scene with the skeletons you can pretty easily break the script. There are two black seams in the floor and you need to stand between them when an explosion goes off or the skeleton parts won't fall or sometimes falls but makes it impossible to trigger the ending. I align myself carefully to the right edge because I did have one almost perfect run fail because I accidently stepped over the seam and died trying to recover from the error. In this run I probably have enough health to be able to take damage from one of the falling parts which would speed things up. However, sometimes the same skeleton part bugs out and hits you several times. I could not risk that so I avoided them and used a third explosive instead. Grant goes into his winning pose and the run is over

Fun Facts

Runs ended by the randomness of the very first tricera in the jungle: 21
Big boat jumps failed: 15
Times eaten by a T-rex: 2
Deaths caused by the lurking sewer crate: 9
Hours of recording: 20+
Runs screwed up at the visitors center: 2
Runs screwed up approximately 4 seconds before the end: 1
Hours of recording if above mentioned screw-ups never would have taken place: 8
Times thrown into the water by the River tricera: 4