Video Game / Jurassic Park (Arcade)

A few months later...
We return to the island.
Again.
SHOOT AT THE HEAD!

A foursome of arcade games based on the Jurassic Park movies. The first two were made by Sega, the third by Konami, and the fourth by Raw Thrills.

Jurassic Park (1994)

A motion ride Rail Shooter that supposedly takes place after Jurassic Park (1993). For some odd reason, you head back to the island and brave the dangers of the rampant dinosaurs in the search for... something. They never really tell you. The game controls with two joysticks to move the crosshairs around to shoot the dinosaurs while the seat moves with the action on screen, similar to Sega's previous rail shooter, Rail Chase. The game was, and still is, noticeable for being seen in many a Chuck E Cheese's.

This game has been riffed on by Retsupurae, mainly because of its large amount of deviations from the movie.

The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997)

A more traditional light gun game, the game seems to take place in a alternate form of the main movie as you play two park rangers trying to help Ian and Sarah escape the island. Was made into a full theater booth (though not a motion ride) and standard arcade size. Like House of the Dead, it gleans a bit of the system from Virtua Cop in that bosses and certain encounters have colored circles you must shoot to avoid taking damage.

For the DreamWorks Interactive game created for the PlayStation and Sega Saturn, see The Lost World: Jurassic Park.

Jurassic Park III (2001)

This time you play as two rangers who are under the command of Alan Grant to rescue survivors who have crashed on the island. With the change in developers came a more slower paced version of the game. The main gimmick was that it used a "Escape" button during boss battles to move you to another section of the area to avoid boss attacks. There was also an extremely rare version that used motion sensors ala Konami's previous shooter, Police 911.

Jurassic Park (2015)

Not surprisingly with the coming of the fourth Jurassic Park film, a new arcade was commissioned to be released alongside with it. This game was developed by Raw Thrills, making it the first Jurassic Park arcade game made by American developer instead of Japanese one. It was a mounted gun game and much more faster paced than its predecessors. The plot revolves around you and an InGen security team trying to return order to the park by catching the three most dangerous dinosaurs — a Triceratops, a T-Rex, and a Spinosaurus — but first braving the dangers of various other dinosaurs and non-dinosaurian wildlife before you can get the chance.

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See also Dino Strike Wii for the Wii, a Spiritual Successor to the series.

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The games have the following tropes:

• Action Girl: Player 2 of the The Lost World: Jurassic Park arcade, who resembles Ellie Sattler.
  • Female mercenaries appear in the fourth Jurassic Park arcade game.
• Alternate Continuity: All four games exist in their own separate continuities, both from the novels/movies and from each other.
• Attack Its Weakpoint: Done in the second and fourth games via circle highlights which you must shoot to avoid taking damage.
  • The T-Rexes in the first game can only be dealt damage by shooting at the head. There will even be words indicating this at the very first encounter.
• Big Bad: The first one has the first T-Rex, which acts as the first & Final Boss.
• Big Creepy-Crawlies: In the fourth game, on top of the dinosaurs, InGen seems to have also cloned loads of prehistoric arthropods.
• Bloodless Carnage: In The Lost World, if you fail to save an InGen employee from a raptor, it tears into his chest and kills him onscreen, but there's no blood at all.
  • Depending on the machine's settings, alongside not showing any blood, the 2015 game either makes friendly fire harmless, places an X over friendlies, or places an X over them and takes a chunk out of your life bar.
• Carnivore Confusion: The fourth game inexplicably has brachiosaurs, which should be herbivores, bite at you and some of the human NPCs, with one grabbing one of the latter and apparently eating him after it goes off-screen.
• The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard: The first game especially. It's virtually impossible to get through it without taking a hit. It's impossible even on a TAS!
  • The second game's end boss, the male T-rex, would eat a human and regain some of its health about 3/4's of the way through to defeating it. Shooting it beforehand could not avert this from happening.
• Dual Boss:
  • The two T-Rexes at the end of the first game.
  • Played with in the second game- the female T-rex summons her mate after going down.
  • The fourth arcade does it for a bit in the finale of the T-Rex chapter. A second T-Rex joins in chasing you while chasing another jeep and your forced to fight both of them. It gets knocked into a gorge when the first T-Rex accidentally slams into it while jumping from a cliff trying to get at you.
• Dung Fu: In the first half of The Lost World game's 2nd stage, you will come across a Mamenchisaurus that is about to take a dump, and you must shoot it literally in the ass to avoid getting hit; failing to do so causes you to lose control of your vehicle and land into a patch of sticky mud (or wet dung), forcing you to fend off a pack of raptors before you can leave.
• Elite Mooks: In the second game, green-colored raptors will appear at certain points, typically in pairs, and are both significantly faster than normal raptors and take multiple hits to die.
• Enemy Summoner: In the second game, an "Alpha Raptor" will appear near the end of the first part of Stages 1 and 3. It will summon a horde of raptors to converge on you unless you kill it... and you can only harm it by attacking the highlighted target.
• Excuse Plot: Basically you're on the island for a reason and dinosaurs are getting in your way. The games all give variations but that pretty much the usual gist of them.
• Fake Difficulty: The first game, in keeping with the design philosophies of many early 90's arcade games, has instances where you will take damage no matter how well you play. It's often cleverly hidden under the fast and hectic pace of the game in general or by having dozens of enemies on screen (such as the hit you WILL take after the triceratops herd bursts through the trees), but it becomes obvious in the T-Rex fights, where you will be shooting at the head and it will blatantly NOT take damage as it gets free hits on you.
• Feathered Fiend: The fourth game has Archaeopteryxes as small, flying mooks.
• Final Boss: The final fight with the T. rex in the original. The male T. rex in the second game, and the Spinosaurus in the third game. The player can go after the dinosaurus in any order in the fourth game but the set up encourages going after the Spinosaurus last. Between that and its difficulty it is the closest thing the game has to a final boss.
• Friendly Fireproof: The 2015 game makes other human characters immune to friendly fire in all cases, though depending on the setting, you may take damage.
• Good Colors, Evil Colors: In the 2015 game the Tyrannosaurus rex that you save is an intimidating but natural red and brown with yellow eyes. The other one is a near bone white and blue color with piercing red eyes so you don't have to feel bad about not saving it.
• Herbivores Are Friendly: Averted. In the original game after bumping into a Triceratops, the entire herd relentlessly pursues you. The Brachiosaurus enemies on the other hand don't actually attack you so much as they just get in the way. The second game has Mamenchisaurus and Pachycephalosaurus attacking you, and an Ankylosaurus is a boss in the third game. The fourth game oddly has the Brachiosaurus trying to eat you, despite being a herbivore. The Triceratops returns and acts as a boss, and is just as relentless in attacking the player as the Tyrannosaurus rex and Savage Spinosaurs.
• Hostage Spirit-Link: In the latter two games.
• Indy Escape: In the third stage of the first game, there's a segment where your vehicle falls into a ditch and gets pursued by a giant Boulder. You must shoot at it to stop a collision until it eventually turns into smaller pieces.
• It's Quiet… Too Quiet: Uttered after a lengthy dinosaur chase in The Lost World. Cue the T-Rex crashing right through the wall in front of you (just before delivering the final shot)!
• The Juggernaut: The boss dinosaurs the player is tasked with catching in the 2015 game. Unlike in previous games, shooting them doesn't defeat them, it just stuns them long enough to stop their attack on the player. Levels where they attack the player consist mostly of running away from as they relentlessly pursue you, and they only beaten in the levels where you take them down by luring them into traps.
• Light Gun Game: Again, the latter two games.
• Lightning Bruiser: The Tyrannosaurus rex that chases the player in the original game can run fast enough to keep up with their vehicle and takes a massive amount of damage before going down.
  • All three of the boss dinosaurs the player is targeted with capturing in the 2015 game. They are fast, and can't actually be brought down by shooting them. At best, shooting their weak points just stuns them. Some of the sequences where you capture them don't even have the player win by shooting the dinosaur, and instead you win by shooting points to trigger a mechanism to trap them.
• Mix-and-Match Critters: The Carnotaurus in The Lost World is a Chameleon-saur, an ability it had in the novel. It even has chameleon-like eyes!
• Mooks: Raptors serve as regular mooks, Dilophosaurs serve as ranged mooks, Compies serve as Zerg Rush mooks, and various Pterosaurs serve as Airborne Mooks.
• More Dakka: The default turret gun of the fourth game that utilized unlimited ammo.
• Mythology Gag: The fourth game has a nearly identical scene to one in Jurassic Park: The Game where a T. rex smashes out of the Visitors Center through the main entrance.
  • A Carnotaurus with camouflaging abilities is a boss in the second game, fought in a dome-like structure near the InGen worker village; carnotaurs like this appeared in the novel that the movie was based on, but were omitted from the film itself, and they prowled the worker village, too.
• Never Smile at a Crocodile: A giant crocodile, the Deinosuchus is encountered in the lake in Stage 2.
• Non-Lethal K.O.: The attract sequence of 2015 insists all of the weapons are non-lethal. Plausible for all the weapons except Frostbite, which freezes dinosaurs who then shatter into pieces shortly after...
• No One Could Survive That!: The in the 2015 game, the T. rex throws the Spinosaurus off a cliff. The Spinosaurus returns for its segment without a scratch on it.
• One-Hit-Point Wonder: Most of the Mook-type enemies only need a single shot to die, regardless of where you hit them. Exceptions include the Pachycephalosaurus from the second game, whose hardened heads make them very resilient to head shots; and Elite Mooks like the green raptors (also from the second game), who take multiple hits to die no matter where the shot lands (and to make it worse, they're annoyingly fast enough to be hard to hit).
• Rail Shooter: Literally with the first game.
• Recurring Boss: The T. rex in the original game is fought multiple times, acting as the only enemy that can be considered a boss. The female T. rex is fought twice in the second. The Spinosaurus takes this role in the third game.
• Red Shirt Army: The Lost World and the 2015 game feature several human NPCs that often get unceremoniously murdered by carnivores.
• Reptiles Are Abhorrent: Naturally, since dinosaurs and other archosaurs are reptiles.
• Savage Spinosaurs: The third game naturally has a Spinosaurus as Recurring Boss. The 2015 game also has it as one of the three boss dinosaurs the player is charged with capturing. Even though the T. rex section have the T. rex beat the Spinosaurus, the Spinosaurus section is actually the most difficult.
• Scratch Damage: Shooting bosses while there aren't weak spots exposed will do this. It tends to be insignificant, but it's visibly noticeable.
• Spiritual Successor
  • The first game is one to Rail Chase as the style of the game is played from a moving vehicle as you shoot down dinosaurs that get in your way.
  • The fourth arcade could be considered one to the first two games as it uses many of their styles. Such as fighting from vehicles, using different power-ups and shooting highlighted spots during the boss fights.
• Stern Chase: The T. rexes in the first and second games.
• Stock Scream: Done A LOT in The Lost World, from people being attacked to even the player characters themselves when hit.
• Swallowed Whole: At the end of The Lost World, the male T. rex does this to a hunter to regain some of its health bar.
• Take That!: In the T. rex section of the 2015 game, It begins with the T. rex fighting the Spinosaurus like in Jurassic Park III. The T. rex promptly grabs it by its neck and throws it off a cliff.
• Temper-Ceratops: The Triceratops enemies are herbivores, but they will be just as persistent in trying to kill you as the predatory dinosaurs.
• Took a Level in Badass: The Triceratops in the 2015 game. In the original arcade game, the Triceratops were generic enemies. In the 2015 game, it's a boss that can only be defeated by trapping it and can't be beaten by shooting it.
• Video Game Cruelty Potential: In the first game, you can shoot the harmless Ichthyosaurus as they leap out of the water.
• The Worf Effect:
  • Every boss in The Lost World makes its threat clear by worfing something. The first Tyrannosaurus kills a hunter that just helped stave off a Velociraptor attack. The Deinosuchus eats a Velociraptor, and the Carnataurus is introduced making Ian and Sarah flee from it. The final boss Rex goes through an entire squad of hunters before the fight fully begins.
  • The 2015 games T. rex section sees the T. rex throwing the Spinosaurus off a cliff to demonstrate how dangerous it is. Oddly enough the set up for the levels seems to intend for the Spinosaurus to be taken last and its section is the most difficult one out of all the levels.
• You Don't Look Like You: All of the characters who appeared in the movies look nothing like their respective actors.

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