It's a VIP ticket to theme park adventure!
Universal Studios Theme Park Adventure is a video game developed and published by Kemco and released exclusively for the Nintendo Gamecube in 2001. The game is based on the Universal Studios theme parks, and features elements from many of the park's rides and the feature films they were based on.
You take control of a kid visiting one of the Universal Studios theme parks for the day. Woody Woodpecker acts as your guide through the game, and challenges you to complete a stamp-collecting contest by visiting all of the park's attractions and clearing the games featured within. In order to locate each attraction, you have to explore the park, which is represented by a series of screens you can move between by exiting in specific directions. Throughout the park, you can talk to other parkgoers, or earn points by picking up trash and disposing of it in trash cans, or shaking hands with unique characters walking around. The points you earn can be cashed in for hats that will make it easier to access the attractions.
Upon gaining access to an attraction, you can take part in a minigame based on said attraction, and by extension, loosely based on the films being represented. By clearing each attraction, you can earn stamps, and collecting all the stamps is necessary to complete the game. The attractions cover a variety of gameplay styles and genres, whether it's shooting at dinosaurs on the back of a jeep, or racing through time to retrieve a stolen DeLorean.
The following rides and attractions are represented in the game:
- Backdraft
- Back to the Future: The Ride
- E.T. Adventure
- Jaws
- Jurassic Park
- Waterworld: A Live Sea War Spectacular
- The Wild Wild Wild West Stunt Show
Universal Studios Theme Park Adventure contains the following tropes:
- Absurdly Short Level: Despite having a dedicated park area and being marked on the map, Waterworld is not a full minigame, as all you do upon entering is choose one of five different seats where you can watch the finale of the show where the plane crashes into the water, which lasts roughly five seconds. You don't even get a stamp for doing it.
- Amusement Park: The game takes place in a representation of the real-life Universal Studios theme parks, with a variety of rides themed after different movies.
- Amusement Park of Doom: If this game is any indication, then Universal Studios has rides where you do things like get attacked by a shark and trapped on a sinking ship, get chased by packs of carnivorous dinosaurs, travel through time and fly a car through a volcanic hellscape, and risk your life to rescue people trapped inside a burning building.
- Boss-Only Level: The Jaws and Back to the Future rides are entirely dedicated to confrontations with a specific character you have to defeat in order to clear them. In Jaws, you have to defeat the shark by throwing stuff at him, while Back to the Future requires you to chase after Biff Tannen and beat him before he escapes with the DeLorean.
- Broken Bridge: You cannot enter an attraction if the line is too long, something that starts to happen more as you progress. You can circumvent this by earning enough points to buy each attraction's cap from Woody at the park entrance, which grants you unlimited access to that attraction as long as you are wearing it.
- Crossover: Just like the park the game is based on, many classic movies and animated characters appear together in one game.
- Driving Game: In Back to the Future, you drive a flying DeLorean down a track while chasing after Biff Tannen, who is escaping in a DeLorean of his own.
- Exposition Fairy: Woody explains the game's objective at the start, and he appears at the start of each attraction to explain how to play.
- "Get Back Here!" Boss: The Back to the Future ride requires you to chase after Biff Tannen, who has stolen a DeLorean and is fleeing through various time periods. You drive a DeLorean of your own and must crash into Biff until he runs out of health.
- Gotta Catch 'Em All: Throughout the park, you can find sixteen letters that spell out "UNIVERSAL STUDIOS". You need to collect them all in order to earn one of the stamps.
- Guide Dang It!: Winnie's trivia quiz asks questions about some very obscure and specific details about the movies represented, which can make the quiz nearly impossible to clear if you don't have a lot of familiarity with all of the movies in question, especially since the game doesn't provide a way to learn the answers.
- Hearts Are Health: Hearts are used to represent your health in Backdraft. You lose one anytime you get hit by fire, you can find hearts lying around to replenish your health, and running out causes a Game Over.
- Lethal Lava Land: The final portion of Back to the Future is located in some kind of volcanic hellscape. Biff leads you down a river of lava while you dodge flares that jump out.
- Marathon Level:
- Jurassic Park can easily take over ten minutes to clear, and since most of it is on-rails, there's not much that can be done to speed it up.
- Backdraft starts you with a time limit of 15 minutes, and with how many people you need to rescue and how possible it is to get lost in the building, you'll need most of that time.
- Metropolis Level: The first section of Back to the Future has you drive through the streets of Hill Valley.
- Minigame Game: The main objective of the game is to clear a series of minigames based on each attraction, though you have to explore the park in order to access them.
- Mouth Cam: The Jaws attraction opens with a shot from the inside of the shark's mouth as it approaches your boat.
- Named by the Adaptation: The Jaws ride claims that Jaws is the name of the shark, when it was unnamed in the movie.
- New Game Plus: Once you earn all the stamps, you can return to Woody at the park entrance to watch the game's ending. If you save and reload your file after this, the game will start over from the beginning with all your progress removed, but you will at least get to keep any leftover points you had.
- Plot Coupon: In order to complete the game, you need to collect eight stamps. Six of them are obtained by clearing each of the six main attractions, one is obtained by clearing Winnie's trivia minigame, and one is earned for collecting all of the "UNIVERSAL STUDIOS" letters.
- Pop Quiz: One of the stamp requires you to complete Winnie Woodpecker's trivia quiz, where she will ask multiple-choice questions about a wide variety of Universal Studios films. You have to correctly answer ten questions in order to win, but if you make three wrong guesses, you will have to start over.
- Rail Shooter: The Jurassic Park ride places you on the back of a jeep being driven by an unnamed woman. While she drives the jeep to safety, you have to fire lasers at dinosaurs chasing you before they can attack the jeep.
- Recycled Soundtrack: Much of the game's soundtrack is music taken directly from the movies that the rides are based on.
- Shooting Gallery: The Wild Wild Wild West places you in a shootout with a cowboy outlaw, and the objective is to score more points than him by shooting at targets within a short time limit. You move a cursor around the screen to aim your gun, and press a button to fire.
- Slippy-Slidey Ice World: The second part of Back to the Future sends you back in time to the ice age. You chase Biff down a river of freezing water while weaving between iceberg walls and navigating icy tunnels.
- Take That, Player!:
- Failing at Winnie's trivia minigame will cause her to say "You need to watch more movies!"
- Exiting certain minigames after failing them will cause Woody to scold you.
- Threatening Shark: One of the main attractions is based on Jaws. You're stranded on the Orca, which is under attack by the shark, and he tries to sink the boat by taking bites out of it.
- Throw a Barrel at It: Your main means of attacking Jaws is to pick up barrels on the deck of the Orca and tossing them at him whenever he gets close.
- Timed Mission:
- E.T. Adventure gives you five minutes to reach the spaceship before it leaves.
- Back to the Future requires you to defeat Biff before time runs out. The timer starts at 100 seconds, and while it regenerates after each segment, the third segment never ends, so the time you start that segment with is all the time you get.
- Backdraft gives you fifteen minutes to rescue all of the people trapped in the building.
- Villain: Exit, Stage Right: The Jaws ride ends with the shark simply swimming away after you've drained his life bar.
