YMMV / Jurassic Park: Trespasser

• Anticlimax Boss: The Alpha raptor is only slightly tougher than the other raptors, while it is easier to hit. It's also just as likely to walk off a cliff as the other raptors.
• Best Known for the Fanservice: For some, this was the game known only for where you check your health by looking at a tattoo on the character's breasts.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment:
  • The Mayan temple in level six, a short obstacle with virtually no dinosaurs that consists of a few physics traps. It shows up and is never commented upon.
  • Anne's narration sometimes goes completely off-topic for no apparent reason. At one point when seeing a waterfall she starts reminiscing about sleeping at a bus stop and eating snacks from a vending machine.
• Cult Classic: The game was a huge critical and commercial bomb due to releasing as an Obvious Beta, but it retained a small, devoted fanbase for many years afterwards, many of whom created mods and bug fixes that have helped make the game far more playable and ensured its legacy despite its initial failure.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Hammond and his haunting narration are often considered the sole redeeming quality of this disaster with good reason.
• Good Bad Bugs:
  • Be grateful that the AI wasn't finished. The game is hard enough with the dinos being stupid and unable to enter buildings. If they could do all they were supposed to do, this game would be Nintendo Hard.
  • The physics engine and collision system can result in some... interesting... dino poses. Completely at random, you can get the front half of any dino's body to literally squish into the back half.
  • It's possible for melee weapons (empty guns, sticks and rocks) to get stuck inside a raptor, dealing massive amounts of damage. It's not reliable, but it is possible to kill raptors with a humble stick with this.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: The ragdoll physics that would later appear in Half-Life 2 would be notable in of itself, but then the idea of Anne audibly counting the bullets in the magazine of whatever weapon she was holding would appear in Half-Life: Alyx, although in that game, it would only be occasional in order to remind the player of their ammo count (it helped that the game has a traditional ammo counter to mitigate the need for audible reminders).
• Misaimed "Realism": Because this was one of the first games to include a proper physics system, it hadn't worked out all the kinks, most infamously in that friction is not accounted for. This makes it all but impossible for any physics interactions or puzzles more extensive than knocking something down by throwing something else at it or stacking a box next to something to climb on top of it, because trying to do anything more than that would inevitably end with all the involved objects sliding off of each other.
• Narm:
  • While it serves a vital purpose to the player, Anne's loudly Counting Bullets with ludicrous precision as they're fired is really hard to take seriously, especially if we're to assume she doesn't have any prior firearms experience yet is able to tell just by picking up a gun exactly how many bullets its magazine holds.
  • Similarly, to adhere to the no HUD design philosophy, there's no health bar; instead, your remaining life is marked by a heart-shaped tattoo on the character's left breast which bleeds out as you take damage. However, having to constantly look down at your character's breasts (which are also quite large to hide the fact her model has no torso or legs underneath) to check her health is totally ridiculous (Word of God states the tattoo was supposed to be on her arm, but ended up on her chest due to time restraints, which is marginally better).
  • The extremely innovative (at the time) real-time movements and animations of the dinosaurs, which made use of a cutting-edge physics engine and complex NPC AI nigh-unheard of at the time. Unfortunately, the fact the AI doesn't actually function in-game, and that the animals are basically just ragdolls being pulled along by invisible marionette strings like an amateur Garry's Mod machinima makes them look completely ridiculous, even when they're just walking.
• Nightmare Retardant: The movements of the dinosaurs combined with poor AI don't make them all that scary.
• Obvious Beta: Rather infamously, the game had an extremely Troubled Production due to numerous factors, running hugely over-budget, missing deadlines, inexperienced developers, and being massively overambitious with the final product, which wasn't helped by advertising hyping the game up as a milestone in 3-D gaming. The game finally shipped blatantly unfinished, with non-functional enemy AI, frequent graphical errors, abysmal frame-rates, lack of enemy variety, and often crashing just from walking around. The player character only has one arm because they did not even have the time to properly code two arms.
• Older Than They Think:
  • This was the first game with ragdoll physics and outdoor draw distances. The type of engine it uses would be reproduced, without nearly as many bugs, for Far Cry. Not bad for 1998, though it took a very heavy toll on even top-of-the-line computers at the time.
  • The overall physics-based mechanics was something not attempted again by any game in any serious capacity for nearly twenty years... Until VR came along, along with potential for significantly more natural implementation of such mechanics via motion controls and more mature physics engines, with the most prominent example being Boneworks, which is in many ways a spiritual successor to Trespasser in terms of mechanics. One VR dev focusing on physics-based mechanics even recreated part of the starting area of Trespasser to demonstrate how far such tech has come since then.
• The Problem with Licensed Games: The game is infamous for being nigh-unplayable on account of poor optimization, numerous bugs and a very high difficulty. The sad thing is that it could have been a spectacular aversion if it had been given more time to develop. It nevertheless has a cult following dedicated to modding the game into a playable shape.
• Scrappy Mechanic: The physics engine, while pretty cool (for its time at least), ends up being this way most of the time due to copious amounts of Misaimed "Realism". To name one especially annoying example: instead of picking up items by walking over them or even by looking at them and pressing a "pick up item" button, you have to push a button to extend your arm, walk up to the thing, and then press another button to grab it. Infuriatingly, small items on the ground tend to move whenever you bump into them, meaning you will often keep bumping into an item you mean to pick up and push it around while moving your arm around attempting to grab it. Really, this is one of those game mechanics that just should have remained abstract.
• Spiritual Successor: King Kong (2005)'s video game could be seen as this to Trespasser. While the levels are more linear and there's less emphasis on Wreaking Havok, both are survival-horror First-Person Shooters about an ordinary character being stranded on an island filled with dinosaurs, dealing with Raptors and Tyrannosaurs and scavenging weaponry from scarce supplies. Both also have a particular emphasis on the lack of a HUD and instead relying on the character to state how much ammo they have left.
• Tear Jerker:
  • Some of Hammond's lines, in particular his heartbreaking speech when Anne activates the computer. It starts off so full of hope...
  • The alternate ending of the game, which can only be found by jumping onto an invisible ledge, gives Hammond one last speech. He recites Percy Shelley's Ozymandias. It's a bit of a meta-Tear Jerker because not only does it perfectly fit the rise and fall of Jurassic Park, it also works equally well with the construction of Trespasser. One wonders if perhaps the game designers perhaps left it in as a sort of memorial to What Could Have Been...
  I met a traveller from an antique land
  Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
  Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
  Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown
  And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
  Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
  Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things,
  The hand that mock'd them and the heart that fed.
  And on the pedestal these words appear:
  "My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
  Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
  Nothing beside remains: round the decay
  Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
  The lone and level sands stretch far away.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: John Hammond's narrations come from an in-universe autobiography as read by the man himself (through Richard Attenborough's fantastic voice over work) that provide many fascinating insights into the creation of Jurassic Park in the movie 'verse. There is also an awesomely heartbreaking Easter Egg from Hammond's personal diary. Most people will never get a chance to hear it, and those that did probably did not want to put up with the terribly buggy game it was attached to.
• Took the Bad Film Seriously:
  • Richard Attenborough. The audiobook segments of Hammond's biography which are spread throughout the game are considered a very good addition to the JP mythos that deserved a better game to be placed in. According to the executive producer Seamus Blackley he was very friendly and supporting behind the scenes as well. Attenborough did not for a moment act like working on a video game was beneath him.
  • Minnie Driver likewise does a good job, even if the writing in some of her lines is questionable. She especially shines whenever the voice acting requires her to sound like she's terrified for her life.
• Vindicated by History: Although the game was a critical and commercial flop due to be released severely unfinished, it became a Cult Classic with a devoted fanbase that continues to improve it even many years later. The gameplay and, at the time, highly ambitious mechanics and open-world environments went on to influence a slew of more successful game franchises, including Halo: Combat Evolved, Half-Life, Far Cry, Surgeon Simulator 2013, and Doom³.

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