WolfenDoom: The Original Missions: E1

Well, its been about a month since my last Wolfenstein-related entry, and seeing as my current choice of next FPS game, Terminator, is too short to do anything but one entry on and too long to complete in one afternoon. Time for WolfenDoom: The Original Missions. Not to be confused with WolfenDoom (for Wolfenstein) or anything else. Originally released sometime in the '90s. I say sometime, because, well, I don't know exactly when this particular WAD was released. Whole bunch of these Wolfenstein for Doom games were released on a particular day in 1997, at least on IDgames archives. However, because I am a lazy human being, or more precisely, one with someone who prefers not to waste his time setting up another Doom port when I still haven't gotten a working Mac emulator, I will be doing NightFright's ZDoom port. Which in of itself is an update of C.J. Mullen's version. Like all good projects with a mixture of internet handles and real names, I'm sure this will go smoothly.

As I start up the game, I am greeted by a strange version of the Wolfenstein theme. Curious. Is it the fault of the midis? Or is it a choice of soundfont that greatly clashes with what the game was intended to sound like? I don't know, but this is the first time I've had a game suffer in this department.

E1M1:
Well, it goes into the game proper. Someone forgot to turn on the lights. What's with this ceiling? The control scheme feels...wrong. The sounds...wrong. The weapons...wrong. The sound effects feel like they've been taken from Jedi Knight. One was from Quake. There's also enemy stepping sounds now. I imagine most of this stuff was taken from the Mac version. I can imagine both a professional or a non-professional looking at the pistol sprite they have and okaying that. That looks very wrong. Armor instead shows you how much treasure you have on that level. Clever. Other than that, its the first level of Wolfenstein. Nothing to complain about yet.

E1M10:
Get this, instead of a strange purple wall, there's just a brown/grey one. Now, I don't know if its Doom or if I just know my way around now, but I didn't think this was so bad this time around. Its still the strange, self-entangled, weirdly placed door level. I also noticed I was an efficent killing machine. That's Doom, in Wolfenstein every encounter could mean my death. Still couldn't get all the treasure and enemies, apparently I missed some of them. Despite there being nowhere for me left to go.

E1M2:
There's a weird bell in the music for this one. Actually the whole track is weird. This level tries to be some kind of chateau instead of the dungeon I presume the original was. Some kind of outside area that wasn't there. Not a bad attempt. When moved to Doom, Wolfenstein maps feel a lot more emptier and bigger. Despite being a fast boy, Doomguy feels slower than BJ.

E1M3:
Adding elevators to the original Wolfenstein levels. Not just elevators, but an elevator in front of a long secret corridor. Now, having an outside can be a bit ambiguous, but elevators? In-level elevators? I mean, if you want to do that for an original level, that's fine, but Wolfenstein is supposed to be a series of floors! I'm also starting to question if I should use turbo or not.

E1M4:
Didn't notice it before, but there are a lot of cross hallways in this level. If this were a video LP this level would consist of five minutes of backtracking compared to 3 minutes of action. I've got a lot of health but I'm struggling to keep above 20 in ammo, I think this is due to the way the games calculate damage. In Wolfenstein, anyone can be killed at any time and enemies are quick on the draw. In Doom, its much less extreme in terms of damage output. Also, most secrets, after being activated, don't cleanly disappear into the ceiling.

E1M5:
While in general the first three episodes are better than the later ones in terms of design, I can't help but feel there are still issues. Several rooms basically exist for there to be enemies in for no apparent reason. Almost every room feels like a torture chamber, an office, or a storage room. Maybe a few dog kennels or prison cells. Given my opinion on how every level feels the same, is it any wonder I don't like replaying this?

E1M6:
Just a bunch of jewels in a barracks for some reason. Another level with an outdoor view. Doesn't seem any higher. That about sums up this mod, doesn't it? Another frelling elevator too. I realize I bring this up in some way almost every level, but Wolfenstein always feels weird in the level design department. Too abstracted to be realistic but not abstracted enough to fill in information yourself. Space is folding in on itself in this mod and I don't like that at all. Going by the last level, this area should be the last level. I just...hugh.

E1M7:
So...its a garden on the upper level. That works. Not the strangest thing I've seen. This is a mess of wooden hallways I checked out of mentally pretty quickly. Probably was a mistake to do this so soon after the proceeding game. There's an interesting gauntlet in the center of the map where you're trapped between two groups of guards behind walls and pillars, but only if you really wanted to do that.

E1M8:
11 secrets, but more than half the treasure is in a single unsecret room. Most of those secrets are in the form of a series of rooms. I don't remember how I felt at the time, but now they feel lame. That's what happens when it just looks like you're pushing walls up, I guess. Another fountain outside. Getting less workable now with this stuff.

E1M9:
What, no windows outside? You know, its weird seeing this level without a massive ceiling. Hans is...surprisingly, just as lethal as in Wolfenstein. Maybe less lethal. And somehow my time is only an hour. What. The boss theme sounds really...screwy.

And the outro music sounds like complete garbage now. Apparently a minor change in how the horn sections sound is enough to make an okay soundtrack sound terrible. That's not going to be annoying at all.

Pandora's Box

Pandora's Box is a puzzle game published in 1999 by Microsoft, designed by Alexey Pajitnov, the creator of Tetris. At first, you'd think this would be amazing. After all, the front proclaims 350 puzzles from Alexey. Since I felt compelled to play it through to the end, I'm going to just give my entire opinion on the game. Alexey is capable of doing some intriguing puzzles, but without someone to reign him in, or perhaps someone forcing* him to make 350 puzzles, he is just as competent as any other puzzle designer. There's also another possibility, Vladimir Pokhilko, credited in some places as a co-author on Tetris, could have had the skill needed to reign in Alexey's crazier tendancies. There's not just one possibility there, since Vladimir killed his family and then himself in '98, and either went crazy or saw the devil. If one of your collegues went crazy you'd have a few bad days. Bad days that eat into productivity.

The story is, Pandora's Box is opened and seven Tricksters escape and wreck havoc on the world. And you have to put them back in by getting pieces of the box. How do you do that? Solve puzzles. Pandora's Box is divided into seven levels, each centered around a trickster. Each level involves going through five cities and completing at least one of ten puzzles in each city. One of the puzzles has the piece to the box. After every five pieces, you can capture the trickster, through a special puzzle. The special puzzles are an excuse to blow through free puzzles tokens. The later ones, anyway. They have multiple stages, which means you usually do a Overlap followed by something else. The last one deserves special consideration, being three stages and involving an Overlap, followed by a Rotascope followed by a Focus Point. Meaning for the Rotascope, a puzzle I already don't like, I wouldn't be able to see what I'm actually supposed to do, just another approximation of it.
Some puzzles already started with some pieces laid down, but I didn't really feel like this is worth mentioning in any specifically.

Find and Fill:
The outlines of figures or objects from a painting or photo are thrown into a jumbled mess and you have to unjumble them, by filling them with a particular color. This isn't a bad idea, at first. There are minor problems with aiming the cursor in tiny areas. There are some areas the game lets you ignore, but not all of them. Unfortunately, as this puzzle gets harder, instead of just making it denser, they throw in rotating the puzzle. I'm not ordinarily going to complain about this, but really? I never felt sick, but I did feel discomfort, discomfort I don't feel in shooters. There were also some where you could only see part of the puzzle as it scrolled along a cylinder. Most of the later ones aren't fun puzzles, they're just tedious.

Focus Point:
An image is scrambled up, and by swapping the pieces with each other the image gradually reshapes. The trick is that each location is of a different size. I feel like this one was the best (not the most fun, that would be Outer Layer) designed puzzle, and the amount of them agrees with me.

Image Hole:
Match the moving holes to the image underneath. Basically, the moving holes correspond to a section of the painting/photo, and you have to figure out where. Only problem is, you can't see the image. If that sounds terrible, that's because it is. I didn't play this one too much, I just used a puzzle win token whenever I had to go through one. Later ones get pretty tiny.

Interlock:
The manual says "Fill the shape without letting the seven pieces overlap." Which is a useless piece of advice, since if they overlap, you aren't going to be winning anyway. You have to fit the seven pieces into a particular arrangement, or shape, if you will. This one felt out of place. Unlike the others, the image is entirely pointless. The pieces don't have any images on them, because if they did there wouldn't be any puzzle. This one appeared fairly late in the game. It wasn't good, it wasn't bad, it just made the later sections less crap.

Jesse's Strips:
You rebuild an image from strips. After the first couple of levels, there was always one of these in each city. Some were good, some were bad, but the puzzle never wore out its welcome, despite a few zingers.

Lens Bender:
A puzzle where you put a piece in various lenses to rotate it to the correct orientation. They range in size from, reasonable large, to, screw you, I'm tiny. It doesn't actually matter if you know where the piece goes as long it can connect to the pieces on the board. Which means you can just spam the buttons until you complete the puzzle. Which I did, because this was boring.

Outer Layer:
You need to redo the surface of an object. Its hard to explain, but when you look at it, it isn't confusing at all. You need to have the object return to its normal look, because some of the "pieces" of the surface have fallen off. You need to put the pieces back onto the sections they fell off of. There were times when visibility was compromised, both in the too dark sense and in just not being able to see a particular area. That wasn't too bad until the last one. I never really felt like I was being treated unfairly.

Overlap:
You rebuild an image by a series of pieces. These pieces are corner pieces, and you can rotate them. Some pieces had a piece of the background and not the image, which was a clever idea. Overlaps were by far the most common puzzle, although I could be wrong.

Rotascope:
Its like one of those sliding puzzles, except its in a series of rings. I don't like sliding puzzles. I really, really, really, really, don't like sliding puzzles. Some of the early ones are okay, when it was only two rings of four or six, but when it came to three rings, I just tapped out.

Slices:
I find the description actually fits here "Rebuild an object by rotating, flipping, and stacking the slices." I feel like there was a drastic change in difficulty between the easier and the harder puzzles.

I guess I would recommend this game, despite getting extremely tedious in later stages. Just don't feel compelled to finish it. There was also just a puzzle mode, but as I didn't check that out before I finished the game I don't know if that lets you play without completing them first.

*Make your jokes about communists and capitalists here.

Game 21: Berzerk

Name:Berzerk
Number:21
Year:1980*
Publisher:Stern
Developer:Stern
Genre:Top-Down Shooter
Difficulty:2/5
Time:Under an hour

Ah, Stern, a company I have heard so much about, yet played so little. From my perspective they are pinball making gods, and I am not good at pinball. Their cabinets have some of the most amazing art I've seen. You can probably tell that I have that opinion if you've ever seen my art. The cabinet for this game was probably similarly amazing, but we're not here to talk about cabinet art. I knew basically nothing about this game going in, except it inspired Night Stalker in some way, and that it is believed to be the first game to cause someone's death. A fact, Wikipedia, curiously, does not mention anywhere. Enough of that, how does it hold up today?

At first, this seems like any shooter it helped inspire, freedom of movement, one shot at a time (both player and enemy, because of memory limitations) and a lot of enemies to kill. This differs from its descendants because enemies are really, really dumb. You see, the walls in this game are insta-kill traps, and what kills you kills the enemy. Enemies at first stand still, but sometimes they decide to walk in one direction. They don't stop until they see you.

The game doesn't really seem to have much of a difficulty curve, I've noticed. Its pure luck if you get thrown into a situation you can get out of at your current skill level at any moment. Enemies are laid down randomly too, and you need to make a mad dash to kill the ones closest to you before they get you. That's about it for the core gameplay.

Weapons:
While the blaster is satisfying to use, it does have some odd angles vertically. 1/10

Enemies:
They're there and they're dumb as rocks. 0/10

Non-Enemies:
None. 0/10

Levels:
A handful of simple mazes. 0/10

Player Agency:
The player moves horizontally faster than he does vertically. Its really annoying. You can also do diagonal shots. If you're mad. 2/10

Interactivity:
None. 0/10

Atmosphere:
I can't say that it does. 0/10

Graphics:
The robots are nice, but there's something off about the human character. 1/10

Story:
It doesn't matter. 0/10

Sound/Music:
No music, simple Atari blips/bloops. Not stellar, but what do you expect? Its Atari, it has a charm all its own. 1/10

That's 5. Ultimately, its not really fair to compare a simple game known as an arcade classic on a scale primarily built for something like Doom or Duke Nukem 3D. But I must, and it shall be so poorly rated.

*1982 was the Atari version I played, but I'm dumping this under 1981 because I like to put the earliest year and I don't think I'll have many other 1980 games. This will quietly disappear if that proves untrue.

Game 18: Jurassic Park 3: Dino Defender

Name:Jurassic Park III: Dino Defender
Number:18
Year:2001
Publisher:Knowledge Adventure
Developer:Funnybone Interactive
Genre:"Survival Horror"
Difficulty:4/5
Time:8 Hours

I don't really know what the audience for this game is. Children are unlikely to play this for long. Fans of cinematic platformers aren't going to like how stiff and unfluid the controls feel. Fans of survival horror, which is what I've been playing this as, aren't going to enjoy how lame the puzzles and fighting are. Someone eager to learn (or make someone else learn) will be disappointed by the lack of education. I guess there's always the three Jurassic Park fans...you know, the oldschool kind, not the new kind that just buy anything with their favorite brand on it. Given that Knowledge Adventure was passed around by many companies I can see that this was really just a cheap cash-in for kids...for some reason.

When starting the game it frequently took minutes to load. I don't know if this is a hardware (my dvd drive) or software. (the game is badly coded) I checked the other reviews (my opinion was set in stone by the first boss battle) and several others mentioned this issue. I think they were just bad at compressing their images, and the backgrounds take an unreasonable amount of space on the disc. This was made in Macromedia Director. An engine you might be familiar with if you enjoy adventure games from the '90s. The Journeyman Project, Cosmology of Kyoto, not Myst though. Director was the bootleg Myst engine*. Director contributes, I think, to most of my liked adventure games. Not my favorites, just the ones I like. Judging by this game, however, it is not a good tool for anything actiony. Hmm, probably could've told you that without having played this again**.

The game feels curiously small. Probably some fifty or so dinosaurs and two levels that are basically a series of boss battles. I don't know, I just don't think what is effectively a giant island zoo is going to have that little in the way of animals. A few reasons the game is so short, low development costs, relatively high level costs and a strict timetable. Knowledge Adventure wasn't exactly flush with cash and Funnybone wasn't exactly a group with the best graphical talent. Add in a movie you have to be released before and you have a recipe for eh.

Weapons:
Because this is a children's game, we can't really use effective weapons against our targets. Instead we get nets, sleeping gas, call boxes and flares. Effectively nets and sleeping gas. At no point, despite knowing that programming it would be to much work, do I ever feel like I have actually trapped the dinosaurs. 1/10

Enemies:
Every dino has a unique way of dealing, and while I wasn't always happy to deal with them, this was the best designed aspect of the game. I can see someone really into dinosaurs liking this aspect. 5/10

Non-Enemies:
...I don't know if there is or isn't any non-enemies. Eh, might as well assume not. 0/10

Levels:
Somehow I find myself disliking most of what is there and wishing there was more of it. I don't mind sections of each level, but each level also has sections that are just annoying. 3/10

Player Agency:
To recap, this controls like a cinematic platformer. Ledges are a key element. You climb up them, you climb down them, you sometimes grab unto them at the end of a jump. I find the controls lack the fluidity of a typical cinematic platformer, they're just wrong. I also dislike how your environment prevents you from performing some actions. 3/10

Interactivity:
It exists. You don't really do much. You push maybe one boulder, flip some switches. There's some lame puzzles too, I guess. 1/10

Atmosphere:
There's definitely that good educational children's game feel here, but once you get past the tutorial level things feel...disconnected. The combination of the way the backgrounds and the characters in the foreground clash. Not graphically per say, but in the sense that they don't belong together. I don't associate this in a good way. It feels not unlike like an alien world. I guess, for a dinosaur game that isn't a bad option. 4/10

Graphics:
The graphics in Dino Defender are two layers, foreground and background. Each are prerendered, and a few times they interact. It is not always easy to see what can be climbed or pushed. That's one problem. Another is, well, let's compare this to the most famous example, Myst. Myst is basically a topography map with some 3D models thrown on top. Water was carefully done so it wouldn't reveal the limitations of 3D at the time. There was a waterfall, but I don't think it was too bad. Now, Dino Defender, in comparison, looks worse in most respects. Certainly, the dinosaurs look good, as do the death cutscenes, but the rest feels really bland. Lifeless. Lower quality than the absolute best 1993 had to offer. There are several glaring graphical issues, that as soon as I spot them, make me cringe. I don't cringe often, even at old 3D. 3/10

Story:
A raging typhoon destroyed the electric fences around Jurassic Park. Isn't that just the plot to every Jurassic film? There's nothing outside of a guy who tries to sound very important person in the opening menu. I guess you could say the protagonist's journey resembles a plot, but its not a very good one. According to places I read after the fact, the protagonist's suit is supposed to be some kind of bio-mechanical thing. Nothing mentioned this, but I could have missed it. 0/10

Sound/Music:
While on the surface we have everything we need for an ideal sound system, all elements are bad in some way. Dinosaur sounds all feel off. The footsteps always sound like grass. The music is generic movie background music, in midi form. Slightly more...disconcerting however. 2/10

That's...20 out of 100. You might say this is because it should have never been placed in a shooter environment. I say bull. Give me a tranq rifle, competent level design, an engine that isn't Macromedia and a good music composer and this game shoots up to the forties.
Contemporary reviews seem to have been mostly positive. One positive from KidZone, apparently written by someone with less grasp on the English language than myself, refering to it as a 2D Tomb Raider. He's generally positive, calling the death scenes "just plane cool", but taking issue with the game's apparent massive sound requirements, saying he has "all-knew hardware" and that this isn't Max Payne. He refers to the game repeatedly as an arcade action game. Hints that maybe his high praise isn't entirely legitimate peaks through in places, as he refers to later levels as irritating. This review seems to have been taken from somewhere else, making Max Payne a reasonable reference.
I couldn't access the other positive review on Mobygames, so I only have the blurb. Which sounds like it was also written as a promotional aid. "Testers would play again, but not for several months."
There were two Russian reviews I couldn't read. I suspect they're probably more even-handed.
Meanwhile, Wikipedia had a few more.
USA Today, for some reason, had a review of it. The reviewer didn't seem to understand how video games work, referring to six levels of difficulty. My sentiments regarding the game's age range and the difficulty are echoed here. "It works well because it requires an agile mind in addition to good hand-eye coordination." Which, when you get down to it, that's a lot of video games from this era.
Elecplay, some website I've never heard of, probably because of a severe lack of quality control. The publisher is referred to as Sierra and the game is compared to Oddworld. No real opinion on it one way or another from the author, however.
We have contemporary reviews for this one. First up, Kotaku, in a curiously not bad article, states nothing much about the quality but calls the game very weird, and mentions that without dinosaurs on-screen this feels nothing like Jurassic Park.
Meanwhile, The Gaming Beaver, some LPer I've never heard of before, seems to like this. I can't really tell, he's the kind of LPer that annoys me so I can't stomach him.
There's also a very quick speed run for this, meaning someone must have liked this enough to get their time down to just under 17 minutes. Meaning, if I cared, I could probably get my time under an hour. Would that be like Resident Evil and grant me invisible enemies or special weapons? Nah, probably not. And I didn't even care enough to do that with Resident Evil, I'm going to do that with a children's game.
Before I finish, I have one point I'd like to bring up. Non-violence. Several reviews mention the game as being non-violent. Now, I'm not terribly into that sort of thing, as can be evidenced by my fondness of games involving violence. However, if I was a proponent of non-violence, I don't think I'd like a game where I have to use dinosaur bones to knock out a living dinosaur. So, for some reason, if you're looking this game up and want to know about that, its untrue. Come to think of it, even the Myst series, something supposedly non-violent, frequently has violence in its endings, or the story would end much quicker if you were able to resort to violence.

There were no Mobygames user ratings/reviews, but we do have some from GameFAQs. a 3.5/5 about twelve hours and let's say a 3.5 difficulty. Probably fair.
As an aside, almost everyone seems to have finished the game, or gotten somewhere around level 5. That's actually really surprising.

As to the companies...
Funnybone Interactive almost exclusively did educational games. Children's games are a better choice, as if this game was any indication, they're not very educational. Only the other Jurassic Park game they did, Danger Zone, is of any remote interest in this project, and I have no desire to play a computerized board game here.
Knowledge Adventure...well, we're certainly going to see them at least one more time. Maybe two if I decide to break like I broke for this.

As to myself, well, I need something easier. Something that doesn't make me question the game's base design. I'll get one of those things.

*Myst, meanwhile used HyperCard, an engine known for being used by Myst and the rest of Cyan's output. Also some JRPG.
**Now, while there are not any other action game examples I can label off the top of my head, I can tell you about Mortalus, an adventure game with action sequences thrown in. Completely unplayable action sequences.

Jurassic Park: Dino Defender: King Tyrant

Last time, I just managed to escape being eaten by a bunch of...Pteranodons...before finding a T-Rex at the end of the level. I can't remember where I left off precisely...

Ah, well, there we go. Guess we had to have that, I've never seen the movie and I know that's a scene from it. It'd be pretty sweet if this wasn't a platformer coded in Macromedia. I guess its time to run.

I have several questions. As you can surmise, there was a bridge at the bottom of the screen the T-Rex tried to cross. A wooden, rope bridge. With a good chunk of the rungs missing. These questions have nothing to do with the T-Rex himself, he is just as smart as any other dinosaur, and anyway, there's no predator on Earth that size. I know how this game works and not how T-Rexes work. Why does this bridge exist? Why is it broken? Why the vines? Interesting, the game still says there's a T-Rex roaming around. And a pteranodon.

Why does this bridge lead to nothing? Unless this had a bridge too and that's out. Does anything in this park actually function? I'm surprised this suit isn't choking me to death at this point. I guess I can go up across the vines? Maybe I can climb down the bridge...

Oh, that's why he's still roaming around. Just a little bit. You can't see him too well, but trust me, he's there. Because its a fall of about 30 feet. With T-Rexes, you don't really capture them, you just use a flare on them. To distract them. Back up on the plateau of nothing. I climb up across the vines...I can't go across the vines. Am I supposed to jump across the trees? Yes.

Why is it that every game that has dinosaurs and platforming involve climbing on these guys? This game, Bugs Bunny: Lost in Time, Joe & Mac...probably others I don't know the name of.

I find it a good sign when on every screen there's something off about it for me to complain about. For instance, these vines. Why are they here, what are they connected to. Up, the pteranodon. Down? A hole in the ground and...

No. Come on. Must we? Must I do this dance? Ugh...Another power box at least.

You know, if this was good as an adventure* game the puzzles wouldn't be "figure out which background element you can walk on". After that there's a group of velociraptors a few screens off. Thanks to the raptor supply box in-between the tree-eaters, I get two of them. That's all the supplies they had. For two of them. Another trip back and all three here are gone.

What was the intended reaction to this? "Gee, golly, I sure hope I can get past this enemy!" I think most children would be annoyed by this guy. So far these guys have only been obnoxious. There is no reason for them to exist except as a completely obvious reflex test. Is this supposed to be their mating call? Maybe someone should have imparted this knowledge to me. An educational game about dinosaurs. Maybe a title licensed from a major movie. I'm sure somebody will figure that out.

Wow, a sound more annoying than the menu music. What a loud and annoying waterfall. Sounds like a stream someone screwed around with the volume on. Also, Myst's waterfalls look better than this. Myst had waterfalls, right? Been a while. Anyway, another power box, one guarded by a raptor for some reason. Thanks to a slick move I did on purpose, not accidentally at all, he is defeated with a minimum of fuss. Maybe the water's taken from a running faucet...

This puzzle again? Seriously? Oh, man. Fortunately, I don't have to do it twice, all the power boxes are done. Hang, on, the level isn't over?

Well, goodbye strange dinosaur that will probably eat me. Who is in an awkward position. I leave him with another question, what's the deal with this elevator?

Oh, you're kidding me. I have to run away from him? On the trees?

What a necessary sequence. This whole thing could have been done in cutscene. It was three screens of the easiest stuff I've done this entire decade.

If I was excited by dinosaurs fighting, I would've watched Jurassic World. T-Rex wins anyway. Another level escaping the T-Rex...

...A boss level? Please tell me this is one of the six levels. I guess I just hit this lever and...

Oh, good. That's good. Why is this power box different anyway? I ponder this question as the timer counts down. The T-Rex stays. I wait...and wait...and wait. I guess I have to die. That starts me back at the timer. So I reload an earlier save, doing the tree chase over again.

A single flare, a single call box. Must be big flares and call boxes. Beating this level involves a drawn-out series of jumps and tosses that are really quite trial and error but too complex to repeat here. Suffice to say when I actually did make it, I didn't believe it at first.

What is this suit good for if it isn't going to protect against steam? This "puzzle" involves taking the longest possible route across all these steam pipes at least three times, five if you want to leave with some capture pods. This is quickly getting into the unnecessarily tedious categories. Hey, at least we have a new kill screen for getting touched by the raptors.

Sigh...that's like seven. Five if you hit the first two at the same time. Six if you count this level's mess of a pipe system. That pipe of the middle left is tricky to get past. You have to climb up slightly before. Top left? Nah, that's easy, climb up, then across.

Oh...forget me, not this Sierra again. This is what amounts to two screens of some serious bull. I enjoy a challenge. This game doesn't really offer it as I like it. The challenge here is figuring out if I really am supposed to wrestle the controls to do what I want, or if I should try an alternate route. Inevitably, it turns out to be an alternate route. I only noticed the first safety cage. Not the second one. After that, its just a simple matter of doing running and jumping, even when it seems foolish.

Cue level end cutscene. I run out, door closes on dinosaur. It lifts it up and continues to chase me.

I run into the "InGen complex", which I believe is code for museum. InGen complex is what it says on the jewel case in back of a picture here. A picture that has a far too big PC. There's also a picture of the PC in front of a T-Rex on some vines, about to die. With two flares. The third is one with a...Pteranodon on the falling rock bridge. Which might actually happen if you're really lucky.

I climb up, hit the switch and a pteranodon hits the big dino as it falls to the ground. I would stop here, but I foresee the end is nigh. I would show you that happening, but I happen to miss that particular action shot and its too late now.

Another screen that involves the same thing as last time. Joy. Or, no, its supposed to be a series of jumping in front of a switch, Steosaurus (that's the dino) popping out, bones falling down. I assume they're plaster copies. I actually hope they're real.

A final blow, and the game is over. Non-violent my ass.

The end screen shot shows the dinosaurs being airlifted out. To where? I don't know, and I don't think anyone else did either. That would imply thought went into this ending. Afterwards, I get cards I can print out for all the dinosaurs I've captured all of. Not read, print out. It can only be read after printing out said items. Using a physical printer. Man, educational games were obsessed with printing things out. Amazing. Now to deal with all these screenshots. Oh, man.

*Knowledge Adventure, we're not actually either of those things.