Jurassic Park III Park Builder is one of those obscure games which is on shop shelves for a week and then descends into the supermarket bargain bins for eternity. Why did I buy it? It looked like Theme Park with dinosaurs. Who wouldn’t?

Remember that theme park in Jurassic Park: The Lost World (the bit in the city where the T-Rex manages to break out and roam the streets, eating various cars, dogs and people in the process)? Well your job is to construct, manage and make a profit out of one of those. No easy task, especially considering the amount of extra insurance you’ll have to take out against canine and automobile related accidents.

On loading Theme Park…I mean Jurassic Park…you’re given a bare landscape onto which you can build roads, tracks, shops, animal enclosures and more. Once visitors have paid the extortionate entrance fee and have been sunburnt waiting in the criminally long queues, they’re driven around your park in tour buses. They follow the roads around in a sometimes continuous circle, zooming past your enclosures and back to the souvenir shops where they’ll hopefully shed any remaining money into your already bulging bank account.

As in Theme Park, micro-management is the key to success. Park Builder allows you to adjust the entry fee, buy and sell tour coaches, advertise in the local and national media, view visitor numbers and opinions, check expenditures and opinions, alter hotel prices, price goods in your shops and restaurants and check on your dinosaurs. Ah yes, those dinosaurs. Park Builder allows you to obtain them by sending off expeditions which return with DNA strands. Once you have all five strands of a dinosaur, you can make an egg for one. This then hatches and there you go, your very own Barney.

There are 140 dinos to collect and you can even trade them with a friend using a link cable. That is, of course, if you ever manage to find anyone who’s heard of this game, let alone owns it. Anyway, back to those harmless, loveable creatures. Dinosaurs as you all know can be either meat eaters (the scary variety which eat people who sit stranded on toilets) or plant eaters (the boring ones that no one ever played with plastic models of). Putting a carnivore (meat eater) and herbivore (plant muncher) in the same area will no doubt lead to a lot of mess, so be careful. Dinosaurs also have a tendency to get annoyed when you place them somewhere where the terrain doesn’t suit them, so they’ll be no T-Rexes in lakes. Overcrowding, age and other factors also affect them, so you’ll need to remember that when planning your park.

Once you’ve got it all up and running, you’ll need to keep your eye on the dinosaurs and keep the punters happy while making sure that your park makes a suitably healthy turnover. Expeditions need to be sent out, but don’t skimp on the number of buses or visitors will get angry. Keep them blissfully unaware of the enormous amount you’re making on Dino Burgers and you’ll be swimming in cash before the year’s out. You see, Park Builder is all about balance, keeping your bank manager happy and expanding gradually. The gameplay is therefore multilayered, with a huge amount of freedom and depth.

Controlling all this complexity comes via an intuitive menu system. Tapping L brings up the mode menu, showing you all of the office research and excavation options. Tapping R brings up the park menu, giving you access to all of the construction and facility options. The d-pad pans the camera around the park while the A and B buttons act as basic ’select’ and ‘cancel’ commands. It’s always easy to find what you’re looking for, from entrance fees to expenditures, advertising to area management.

You can see your park in all its glory through an isometric 2D camera view, much like the one used in every other real-time strategy game on the planet. People, buses and dinosaurs are all active, zooming around the map under your all-seeing eye. The terrain is fairly bland, animations and character models are limited, but to be honest, you won’t notice it much as they’ll be far more important things on your hands. Park Builder’s visuals aren’t amazing, nor are they bad, they’re just adequate.

Park Builder has its fair share of problems though. The music is appalling and the sound effects are plain annoying even by GBA standards, forcing you to turn the volume right down. It would have been nice to see the dinosaurs break out sometimes, eating the odd tourist and mangling the occasional tour bus, but it was not to be. You can also only have 1 save game at a time, so if you want to try out a new strategy, you’ll lose your old park.

The gameplay is solid enough to keep you playing for a while, but because it only allows you to have one park at a time, the replay value is just above average. The dino trading feature adds slightly to the lifespan, but you probably won’t find anyone else with Park Builder anyway.

Although it has its flaws, Jurassic Park III Park Builder is an enjoyable game that will sadly remain undiscovered by many. If you ever see it on shop shelves, let your curiosity win over and purchase it; you’ll find a solid game underneath the licence. It’s true that’s it’s just Theme Park with dinosaurs, but that doesn’t take away anything from the overall experience. What a shame that such an obscure title is actually quite good. Playing with dinosaurs has never been so much fun.