YMMV / Jurassic Park: Operation Genesis

• Awesome Music: The score is pretty nice and incorporates the original Jurassic Park theme into many pieces.
  • The piece that places during a tornado is appropriately urgent and harrowing as you can watch a tornado destroy your park, visitors, and dinosaurs.
  • The piece that plays when you breed your first Tyrannosaurus is appropriately dark and epic to fit the queen of the dinosaurs.
  • The piece that plays whenever you pilot the helicopter.
  • Along with other pieces that are recycled from the films, such as the theme of The Lost World whenever you drive the safari jeep, or the arrangement by Don Davis during Jurassic Park III that plays at the title screen.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome: Due to the unmodded game limiting the number of Dig sites, choosing both Judith River, both Hell Creek and the Flaming Cliffs (in the PC and Xbox versions); or both Morrison formation and Tendanguru Beds in the PS2 version, will net the player a good variety of dinosaurs, enough to please the spectations of all kinds of visitors.
• Cult Classic: Despite being hard to find nowadays, Operation Genesis enjoys a devoted modding community, and is also a personal favorite of several notable Let's Players. It's notable for being the only Jurassic Park building sim out there (and one of the few dinosaur park-building sims ever made) for the longest time until Jurassic World: Evolution.
• Demonic Spiders: Velociraptors, obviously. Normally, small predators aren't much of a problem, and won't try to attack big herbivores unless desperate and hungry enough. Raptors, on the other hand, are quick to get hungry and angry, will attack absolutely anything that isn't them (including T. Rexes), and have the nasty habit of checking for weak points in the fence.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: The game has a strong following in Latin and South America, particularly in regards to the large modding group "JP Brasil".
• Heartwarming Moments:
  • The intro with John Hammond introducing you to your task, insisting that you can pull it off where he couldn’t. Now at last, the chance is yours for the taking.
  • The film’s cast, Muldoon, Grant, Sattler, Arnold, and Wu whenever they praise your work. The fact that in this (loose) continuity they were all convinced to stay with the park, and in fact, join it per Grant and Sattler, is heartwarming. Even Ludlow, hardass that he is, will give praise to you when deserved in his quarterly reports.
  • Whenever the park announcer introduces a dinosaur, it’s so earnest you can feel the joy people will feel meeting them. Especially the utter joy for the Brachiosaurus!
  • When you finally manage to hit five stars, the game stops to deliver a message from Hammond addressed to the entire world praising your hard work.
  • The credits. After all the trouble you’ve had producing your park, you get a montage of the dinosaurs in the game while an optimistic, peaceful theme plays. It can fill you with the same peaceful, nostalgic joy that the ending of the first movie did, as you also figuratively sail away from your island of dinosaurs.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • The entire game is about making a dinosaur park that's open to the public. Jurassic World finally makes a movie out of it.
  • The main park-building mode takes place on Isla Nublar, while the sandbox "Site B" mode takes place on Isla Sorna. Jurassic World: Evolution would take a similar approach, but with the islands switched around: the Five Deaths are the site of the main park-building mode, while Isla Nublar is the site of the sandbox mode.
• Low-Tier Letdown: The Homalocephale is usually disliked by fans due to it being lame and redundant compared to Pachycephalosaurus.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • Small dinosaurs (as well as goats and people!) being swallowed whole by the large carnivores. Adding to the creep factor, you can keep the prey selected while they're in the carnivore's mouth, and then the game forces you to de-select them when they've finally been swallowed. Luckily (?) for them, they've been shaken around a lot by the time they're swallowed, so they're probably already dead.
  • The destructive tornadoes that can utterly level your park.
  • The introductions of the major dinosaur antagonists from the films, Velociraptor, T. rex, and Spinosaurus are all accompanied by nightmarish, dramatic music.
  • The various chaotic scenarios that can play out due to poor managing or timing can be this. And even not completely on the player's fault. Sometimes depending on the game's mood, you can have various hurricanes hit you more than once at any given time. One of the worst things to happen to visitors in a park is to be in an attraction (i.e The park's hot air balloon rides) during severe storms, be right over a carnivore enclosure and actually have them crash in it. So not only are they lost, they're surrounded by killer dinosaurs in the area. And if you don't get security to airlift them out in time...
  • Jane Powers will ask visitors to visit physicians before seeing some of the large carnivores like Spinosaurus.
  • The bad ending in which Ludlow fires you for not resolving your debts, and you get to see your park closed and destroyed. Some really haunting music plays as well to underscore your failure. The line you see on the screen with the battered gates behind it really hammers it home.
    Ludlow: You were warned that this would happen. Your failure to manage your finances has left us no other choice. Jurassic Park is now closed and your contract is terminated.
• No Problem with Licensed Games: Widely considered to be one of the best Jurassic Park games and has a devoted fanbase and modding community even more than fifteen years after its release (which is probably how it managed a sequel in everything but name with Jurassic World: Evolution, which directly rips many gameplay aspects from Operation Genesis).
• Porting Disaster: Gloriously Averted with the PS2 and Xbox ports, which were about as well-received as the PC version when the game was released. Impressive, considering this is an example of a genre that wouldn't normally translate well to consoles. That being said, the PS2 port only lets you have a measly three dig sites, whereas the Xbox and PC versions let you have five (and of course, with the PC version, you can mod the game to let you have all of them). This makes the PS2 version the least desirable port of the three, although aside from the dig site limitation, it's still a good port.
• Sacred Cow: Among Jurassic Park fans. As mentioned above, in its day it was the only game out there that gave kids the wish-fulfillment of being able to actually make a Jurassic Park of their own. This only intensified into the following decade as the game became older and harder to find.
• Scrappy Mechanic: You can only unlock a total of five fossil sites (three in the PS2 version) in any given save file. Once you reach this cap on a save file, all the remaining fossil sites and their respective dinosaurs become permanently locked and unobtainable for that particular playthrough, making it impossible to have all of the game's dinosaurs in one save file.^note You can easily bypass this restriction in the PC version by editing the game's code, but then you wonder why even have the restriction at all?
• Visual Effects of Awesome: The graphics on the PC version were beautiful for its time. It hasn't aged well, assuming you can even get the game to work anymore, and the lack of plant, structure, and terrain variety makes the environments bland after a while. The dinosaurs themselves don't have very many animations and spend most of their time running or walking around aimlessly. On the bright side, many of the dinosaurs are more colorful than they are in the films that inspired the game.