SDA logo

Released in August of 1993, Jurassic Park was hailed for its realistic graphics. Unfortunately the gameplay suffered from stiff controls. You can choose Dr. Grant and try to get the dinosaur situation under control, or choose the Raptor and fight to escape from the island.

 

Return to the Game List, the FAQ, or the Home Page.

Raptor 0:03:33 by Adrian Feiertag.

Quality note: Run has a "shaky cam" feel to it, due to poor source tape.

Author's comments:

Thanks to Radix and Nate for everything SDA has become. I would also like to thank Austin Douglas for his service, as he reset my Sega Genesis every time I failed an attempt for a considerable time. Seriously, if it weren't for obedient slaves like him, our shoes would never get polished! Just kidding. The poor shmuck is my best friend, and it was such a relief not to have to reach for the button after every error. Thanks dude.

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 blistered fingers.

My only goal for the run was not to die. Succeeded. I am thoroughly pleased with the time I have achieved, and I hope it has made for an entertaining demo.

In the jungle, I don't believe I made a single mistake. If you notice, I canceled 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, alike, are still confused as to why Spielberg depicted them that way).

The power plant goes smoothly, as well, except for when I approached 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.

Continuing into the sewers, I believe I make my most impressive action segment. Trust me; you have absolutely no idea, whatsoever, how difficult those six jumps are. No ideaƖ trust me. BTW, I lose those precious style points for failing to remember to kick Grant.

Next we face the volcano level, which 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 and saved a couple of seconds.

In the visitor's center, 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 damages me. 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. I don't know why, but it works.

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. The final soldier who waits in the ceiling is one, sick, son-of-a-bitch. He is able to electrocute the Raptor BEFORE I even make a jump; it's absolutely insane. Grappling and climbing 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 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""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!!

European version hard difficulty single-segment as Grant 0:12:04 by Daniel Wikell.

Get Flash to see this player.

Author's comments:

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:

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

Return to the Game List, the FAQ, or the Home Page.