Did you know there was a sequel toThe Lost World: Jurassic Park starring Minnie Driver and Richard Attenborough reprising his role as John Hammond? If you didn't play a PC game called Trespasser, probably not. Developed by DreamWorks Interactive—a joint venture between Microsoft and Steven Spielberg's production company—this infamously ambitious first-person game was marketed as a direct follow-up to Jurassic Park 2.

In the run up to its release in 1998, pages of enthusiastic press coverage had generated a huge swell of pre-release hype. But when the game finally launched after a year-long delay, it was slammed by critics and players alike. It barely ran on the most powerful PCs, it was a mess of half-baked ideas, and its weird arm-based control system was laughably awkward. It wasn't all bad, but its flaws became the story, and that's what most people remember it for.

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Trespasser is set on Isla Sorna, where Jurassic Park's dinosaurs were created in a secret lab before being shipped over to Isla Nublar. Following the events of The Lost World, the island is now overrun with dinosaurs and has become a prehistoric nature reserve. Not a great place to crash a plane, but that's exactly what happens to our protagonist, Anne. She crawls from the flaming wreckage and is stranded, alone, and surrounded by hungry carnivores.

Jurassic Park

To survive this nightmare, it's not just starvation, injury, or velociraptors you have to deal with. You also have to wrestle with the game's physics-driven control system, which is hilariously bad. Anne has been cursed with a ridiculously long, bendy arm that is so twitchy, unpredictable, and sluggish to control that even the simplest task becomes a gruelling chore. It looks preposterous, the way it sways about, but it feels worse.

You move her arm with the mouse, left click to reach out, and right click to grab. Sounds simple enough, but in practice it's like trying to hammer a nail with a live fish. It's just about tolerable when you're doing something simple: opening a gate, say. But under any kind of pressure, like when a dinosaur is running at you, simply picking up a gun and firing it is maddeningly difficult. In most cases you'll panic, fumble, drop your shotgun, and get mauled to death.

The game is also filled with crate-stacking physics puzzles—which, to its credit, this game was doing six years before Half-Life 2. A nice idea in theory, but with that unruly arm wildly flailing around, it's far too easy to knock over your precariously stacked tower of boxes and have to start all over again. I admire the developer for trying something new, and it certainly has an offbeat charm. But it's so poorly implemented, it basically ruins the entire game.

Jurassic Park

Here's the thing, though: I like Trespasser. I'm not saying it's a good game—far from it—but it's an interesting one. This was an early attempt at creating a simulated, physics-driven world in a first-person game, and while it didn't quite pay off, it's a fascinating slice of gaming history. DreamWorks Interactive really tried to do something new here, and I admire the team for it. Not many studios would take a risk like this with such a blockbuster IP.

One thing the game nails is feeling like an authentic part of the Jurassic Park universe. Richard Attenborough turns in a superb performance, reading excerpts from John Hammond's journal as you find them scattered around the island. They're well written, and Attenborough brings an appropriate touch of melancholy to his performance. This is a man whose dreams are crumbling around him, and you can really hear that in his voice.

Jurassic Park

Minnie Driver does her best as Anne, even though she isn't much of a character at all. But there are some nice touches, like how she'll say out loud how many bullets are left in a gun after firing it, or tell you if she's injured. Trespasser goes all-in on the minimal HUD idea, including a health meter in the form of a heart tattooed on her left boob, which you can check by looking down at her chest. If all the colour drains from the tattoo, you die. Yeah, really.

Trespasser is a faithful Jurassic Park game filled with imaginative ideas, some of which were way ahead of its time. It also reveals some interesting backstory about Hammond that fans of the series will eat up. It's just a shame it's so frustrating, difficult to play, and fundamentally flawed. But even at its worst, it's a completely original game, the likes of which we'll probably never see again. That alone makes it worthy of archaeological analysis.

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