The Lost World: Jurassic Park (Game Gear)

The Lost World: Jurassic Park is a video game developed by Aspect and published by Sega in 1997 for the Game Gear. It was released as a tie-in game with The Lost World: Jurassic Park movie by Steven Spielberg, which was released in the same year.

Plot
Six years after the first Jurassic Park incident, a neighboring island to Isla Nublar, called Isla Sorna, is discovered by a British yacht cruise. Unlike Isla Nublar, which hosted a dinosaur theme park, Isla Sorna consist of Ingen Site B, a place where dinosaurs were let roam freely in a natural environment.

The discovery causes many organizations to start dinosaurs hunting operation in order to sell them in the United States, thus leading to an investigation of the recently found Ingen Site B. Once on the island, it becomes clear to the investigator that the dinosaur population is out of control and that the first priority is to escape the island with his life. Part of his journey is represented by the point of view of a Compsognathus the investigator found on the island shortly after he arrived.

Why It Rocks

 * 1) A thrilling Storyline about the need of escaping the island and its out-of-control dinosaur population.
 * 2) Accessible difficulty. The protagonist can receive five hits before dying and a game over always allows the player to restart from the beginning of the level he lost in.
 * 3) Fair and clever use of power-ups. The game represents the hitpoints of the protagonist using different colors of his body armour, with the green colored armor giving the most amount of hitpoints available (five) and the red one providing three hitpoints as well as other colors. Green and red armors are scattered through the levels as collectible power-ups, and picking up a red armor while wearing a better armor doesn't reduce the character's hitpoints.
 * 4) Simple and colorful graphics. The depictions of the dinosaurs are nicely detailed, especially the sauropods' heads.
 * 5) The sound effects for the dinosaurs' growls are convincing.
 * 6) Fluid controls that allows the player to quickly jump when needed, to smoothly start climbing vines even while in mid-air and to shoot at an upward-diagonally angle by simply pressing the "up" key while facing the desired direction when shooting.
 * 7) Many dinosaurs, both well-known ones and more obscure ones, are used in the game and all of them are represented with good grasp of their real-life behaviour. There are Baryonyxes dwelling in the water, a Pachycephalosaur attacking with its reinforced head and Therizinosaurs digging in the ground with their huge claws and unexpectedly coming out of it to surprise the player.
 * 8) It features the unique idea of a playable Compsognathus in two levels of the game, a standard one and a boss battle against a Dilophosaurus.
 * 9) Clever captions for the levels intros, like "The Pachycephalosaurus may be a big headache for you".
 * 10) Evocative locations like jungles and the eerie Ingen Site B. Each zone is named after a different dinosaur that is encountered several times in the level.
 * 11) Varied gameplay, consisting of levels that the player needs to navigate which feature different gimmick based hazards/attacks designed after the titular dinosaur of the zone. Other types of gameplay include two different kinds of advancing boss (a rather standard one and a modified one), a special wall-climbing gameplay for the aforementioned Compsognathus and a car level.

Trivia

 * Dinosaurs species included in the video game are: Baryonyx, Therizinosaur, Pachycephalosaur, Mamenchisaur, Oviraptor, Brachiosaur, Ankylosaur, Carnotaurus, Triceratops, Stegosaur, Velociraptor, Compsognathus, Ceratosaur, Dilophosaur and Tyrannosaur. In addition to these, Pteranodons and Rhamphorhynchus are also featured in a level.