jurassic park has a very storied legacy when it comes to tie in games, you could even argue it's games are more interesting than many of the movies, from fighting games to platformers, lego games and wildly ambitious fps games, there's a lot to like here and i wanted to take a look at a few of them i'd played from the jurassic park collection. the collection itself is very solid, 7 games, some of which are varing ports or fully unique titles and they all run very well, also worth noting is that i am playing on ps5 with the physical release that i got from limited run games mid last year, now onto some of the games.

the first game i had played was the Gameboy game jurassic park 2, this is a run and gun platforner by ocean software, a british company mostly known for their pc games and ports and was worked on by fernando valez, of VD dev fame, the studio behind some of the most impressive games ever made, like driver 3 GBA and asterix GBA. it plays a lot like a metal slug style run and gun with 2 weapons (a machinegun and an arcing granade which both have their uses) with 12 levels where you need to find keycards, shoot dinos and get to the end of the level, it's simple and short but you have some boss fights, water levels where you get to use a speargun and dive underwater,two fun autoscroller stages where you get chased by the games final boss and you even have a cute little raft stage where you have to jump over dinosaurs, it's really good! it's simple sure and about 40 mins long but it has a cute look to it, though the gun animation is a little awkward, and it has a killer OST by johnathan dunn (who has worked on games like parasol stars, red heat and the adams family), a real standout for the system, a must play if you have a gameboy or this collection, it's cheap to find too!

the art direction is stellar though, they got in toshihiro kawamoto (of cowboy bebop, golden boy, gundam, ouran and escaflowne) to do much of it and it looks amazing, gackts character looks really cool and the rest of it fits the wuxia vibe perfectly, some of the enemies too look really good and you can take a closer look in the model viewer if you unlock them by finding the collectables scattered around, it's also worth noting that they did get in another anime creator with yosuke kuroda (of tenchi universe, trigun, gungrave and valkyrie drive) in here to do the screenwriting for things like the cutscenes, the story here isn't amazing and it doesn't really make much sense but it's also a dumb ps2 action game so i'm not bothered by that at all, all that matters is that cool things happen and cool things do happen here like a dragon fight in an etherial tower or a final boss fight taking place in space with a guy that can surf on his sword, that's really all you need for this kind of thing. the direction is super solid though, things like animations that look like they're using wire-fu and the (maybe intentionally) bad dub really add to the atmosphere, like you're watching a dumb, badly dubbed martial arts movie at 2am. the environments look amazing here too, they're varied as hell, with caves, the kowloon inspired city, a snowy mountain which can drain your health and rushes you to get to the end (it even has a cool temple at the end), there's even a bamboo forrest and an indoor area which both have lots of destructable objects, it's even used mechanically here with the destroyable doors and bamboo you need to cut in order to get points to open a door and there's also a cool desert temple too, the final level also shows off a very impressive sense of scale, with huge areas you need to platform across, they're bigger than most from this time period and levels can last up to an hour, though there aren't a ton and the game only lasts for 7 stages and about 5 hours, maybe more if you have trouble with it, but it's plenty replayable with 3 difficulties and some cool costumes.

the game was worked on by two main studios, taito and red entertainment, you should probably know taito well enough from things like their shmups, bubble bobble, densha de go, chaos break and space invaders) but red entertainment is much less well known bar an appearance in the hyperdimension neptunia series as a long re-occuring side character dating back to the first game but they've been around for a long time, making things like the bonk series, tengai makyo, the agarest series and personal favourites sakura wars so long my love and gungrave,they even did another ps2 action classic with the adaptation of dorororo, blood will tell. the game was directed by Hiroshi Aoki who has worked on tons of games from psychic force, space invaders extreme, darisburst and exit and most recently worked on rune factory 4 and 5. it wouldn't have much of a legacy though, sure red are still making games like birushana and gungrave gore, taito still publish smaller games here and there alongside compilations and gackt did some more games like crisis core and dirge of cerberus but this game was just a forgotton one off, it's a shame because this is one of my new favourite games, it's an all time great and some of the most fun i have ever had in a game, its a must play and i ask anyone who likes how it sounds to please give it a try, it's cheap and short and abslolutely worth it.