Considering the tremendous expense involved – the flights to the remote island, the stratospherically expensive group ticket, all those stegosaurus backpacks for the kids – a family of four might reasonably feel put out when, on arrival at Jurassic Park, they’re greeted with the sight of a dead dino sailing through the sky. Yet as every zookeeper knows, the business of running a tourist attraction built around living exhibits involves just as much death and ruin as it does life and birth. Squeezed into the hiking boots of Jurassic Park’s new manager, a dispiriting amount of your time in this movie franchise spin-off is spent ensuring that your irritable dinosaurs do not gore one another to death. And when they do, it’s your job to hoist the carcass on to a helicopter and have it medevacked away, over the cringing heads of your patrons.
Only in a video game would the focus of Michael Crichton’s evergreen novels shift from the incalculable wonder of resurrecting dinosaurs to the wearying business of running an attraction in the live entertainments sector. Dinosaurs may be the product, but this game principally simulates the stress familiar to any hopeful entrepreneur who has had to please the whingeing public while keeping a keen eye on the teetering books. It’s testament to the talent of Cambridge-based developer Frontier Developments (founded by David Braben, co-inventor of the Raspberry Pi mini-computer) that the gruelling 60-hour week of the tourism startup manages to be quite so engaging.
You begin with a plot of empty, verdant land. Lay a fence and you have your first enclosure, next to which you can incubate eggs, release hatchlings and begin the arduous work of building an attraction. You must ensure your dinosaurs are adequately fed (for the carnivores, this means installing a delicious goat dispenser) and watered, that they have other dinosaurs in proximity with whom they get along (isolation leads to dino-depression) and adequate space. Dinosaurs can contract infectious diseases and must be quarantined while you research the cure, before administering it with a dart to the neck.
Your awful guests take up as much of your time as the attractions. They require at least seven different species of dinosaurs to be present in the park in order to feel they’ve got their money’s worth. Their legs get tired, so they prefer a monorail to deposit them from pen to pen. Installing shops and restaurants at regular intervals will not only scratch their consumerist itch, but also generate much-needed funds to spend on sending your R&D teams off to archaeological digs in search of new dinosaur DNA, notoriously found in the bellies of amber-frozen Mesozoic mosquitos.
Park expansion must be matched by the appropriate safety precautions. Ranger teams can be hired to repair security fences, and you’ll need emergency shelters to house visitors when a carnivore does break loose, along with snipers armed with tranq-darts; litigation from the families of gobbled patrons makes a major hole in your profits. All the time, your three nagging managers implore you to invest more money in their area of interest: security, science or entertainment.
In time, and with care, the startup becomes an empire as you establish new parks on new islands, or take over the failing efforts of others. As with all capitalistic enterprises, what starts out as a thrilling adventure can soon settle into a kind of hollow monotony as you idly bat away minor disasters and maintain your profit margins. Finally, when you have the time and space to zoom in and marvel at the creatures you’ve raised from the microscopic, you may find that, in learning to see dinosaurs as assets rather than miracles, you have entirely lost your capacity for wonder. A perfectly described capitalist adventure, then.
Also out this month
Lumines Remastered
(Switch, PS4, Xbox One)
One of the most thrilling moments at the recent E3 video game conference in Los Angeles was the news that Tetsuya Mizuguchi is working on a Tetris-themed music game called Tetris Effect. It’s not the first time the Japanese maestro has made a music-driven game involving sorting blocks. Lumines (2004) similarly asks players to organise and disappear shapes, in order to prevent the pile reaching the top of the screen. The game has lost none of its lustre in the past 14 years, and it’s testament to Mizuguchi’s taste that the beats sound as fresh as ever.
The Crew 2
(PS4, Xbox One, PC)
Its predecessor boasted that players could drive from America’s east coast to its west. For this sequel the map is similarly massive, but the Fast and the Furious storyline is gone, and in its place the laws of physics have been turned up to create a preposterous playground around which supercars, motorbikes, planes and boats ping and bounce with joyous abandon. Skip the risible dialogue and the endless exhortations to attract more “followers” by performing outrageous stunts in each of these vehicles, and what remains is a taut, largely unbloated trip that renders America utterly inviting for the petrolhead (if not the immigrant).
