This one came out a bit longer than intended, but I still like it :)

Completion Time: 7h:32m:00s
Rating: 7/10

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A Grand Adventure

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So, I recently went on a little theme park adventure. No, not a real one with physical rides and souvenirs and overpriced food. Rather, a virtual theme park, with weird camera angles and picking up litter and less-than-gratifying rewards. Universal Studios Theme Park Adventure is a weird selling tactic to try and get kids to bother their parents to take them to the real thing I'm assuming? By half-simulation of the at-the-time popular attractions of the park, it creates a strange atmosphere of being in a theme park that not only can't possibly live up the the actual thing, but tries so hard to engage with the kids that their virtual facsimiles are hollow representations of what they're meant to represent. Except for the Waterworld show, I suppose that's about as realistic as they could make it...

Whoa, 5 whole view points?! The possibilities are NOT endless!

There are a handful of rides and games present here, each one rewarding you a stamp on it’s completion, so I plan on segmenting this one with a short description on each ride and then going into “completion” criteria. Some of these certainly have more to offer than others, though in this case that statement carries very little weight with it.

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Jaws

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Very easy is the Jaws game, wherein the titular shark (I guess it's titular, is the shark named Jaws?) takes bites out of your ship to get it to sink. Just defeat the shark before he sinks your boat and you're home scot-free. Just like in the famous Spielberg movie, your way of stopping the shark is to constantly slam boxes and barrels into his head until he swims away, surviving the encounter with a new humility. Yeah, I guess exploding the shark was a bit much for this game, but given the various explosions going off later in the Backdraft section, I think they could've exploded one virtual shark.

Jaws grabbing a bite

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E.T.

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It took me a bit to long to realize that this is essentially Excitebike. Not just the view as you're biking across the landscape of Elliot's hometown, but even the mechanics of the bike itself. Launching off of ramps is one thing, but you also have to position your bike so that you don't wipe out and waste time. That's a bit more forethought than I though this game would have for... anything, so kudos where kudos is due. Aside from that, this one is fairly one note. The most difficult aspect is, once you're in the forest, discerning where you can and can't go. There are lakes and bogs that have a color scheme strikingly similar to everything else around it, which can lead to disaster in a multitude of ways. I don't think I ever had a problem getting to the end of the stage itself, meaning I never ran out of time. But if you're trying for red stamps, then you've gotta do this run flawlessly. What's a red stamp? Well, I'll get to that soon...

A test for you, see if you can determine where the ground ends and the pond begins

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Backdraft

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Entirely convoluted is the Backdraft minigame, which sees you running through a collapsing... I wanna say factory... as fire brings it to the ground. There are a ton of other park guests assumedly trapped inside, and you have to collect them while avoiding exploding panels, shattering glass, and fireballs that target your position. You can pick up fire extinguishers, which are usable items more powerful than whatever water pistol you're carrying, and using one can basically clear out an entire room. To get the best score here, you have to make it out without taking damage, without using fire extinguishers, and collecting every park guest in the building, which is a pain since this is a twisty-turny mess of a location with no map to guide you. Also you're timed. So yeah, a lot to consider when trying to get a red stamp (I'll touch on it in a bit, I swear).

The effects of superheated gases rushing into an enclosed space with a fiery explosion more colloquially known as backdraft is right behind me, isn't it?

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Back to the Future

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I don't have much to say on this one as I found the probably the easiest and the most fun of the minigames. Fly through three biomes and smash up Biff Tannen's stolen DeLorean before he can pull off an escape. The drifting around turns is surprisingly competent and I never really felt cheated, I could always tell when I was about to lose due to the time limit so I could restart the match without wasting anymore effort. If only this much planning was lent to the other projects on this disc.

Honestly, perhaps the most fun I had in this miserable game

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Jurassic Park

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The most difficult and time-consuming attraction of the bunch, and therefore my least favorite. This minigame has absolutely no respect for the users time, as it's about 10 minutes of an on-rail shooter with difficult controls and no checkpoints. I can't count the number of times I had to go all the way back because even though my reticle was directly on a charging raptor, my weapon had no effect. That's due to the simple fact that the game is a liar. The reticle is off depending on how off-center the model is on the screen. So if the enemy is off to the left or the right, then you're going to have a real hard time landing good hits relying on that cursor, you need to improvise.

Shoot her! Shoot her! I mean, if you can manage to.

Racking up points is difficult too, as if any large swaths of Pteranodons get away, for example, you're going to be low on points for the final evaluation and you may need to start over anyways. Heck, you're definitely gonna be low on points if you don't shoot the harmless meandering stegosaurus and triceratops as they wander in the background of various shots. That's a good way to farm points, firing on the harmless leaf-eaters doing nothing in the background while you're being assaulted by all manner of who-knows-what. I mean, you've gotta get that red stamp (almost there!). This one is awful, I mean horrendously so.

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The Wild Wild West

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Apparently based on a stage show at the parks rather than some form of property, this game pits you against a sheriff in 3 rounds of blasting targets. And this one is pretty hard to get a decent score on. Moving the reticle around the screen with the analog stick didn’t always feel right, so I could hardly manage to highlight targets as they cropped up. Exacerbated by the fact that it took far too long for me to figure out that I could shoot the green cowboy cutouts as well as the red ones. Naturally I had assumed that would lead to a point deduction, thought that doesn’t appear to be the case. I eventually succeeded in this one due to the failure of the AI. His aim can be worse than mine, and when that virtual cowboy focuses on a target and can’t hit, he just kept blasting away until he finally got a bullseye, giving me ample time to take care of literally all the other targets on the stage. Thankfully very easy to manipulate.

Note the AI cursor being gone, as he's still hunting for errant balloons to pop

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The Quiz

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Eventually you will stumble across Winnie Woodpecker, the Minnie to Woody's Mickey, standing alone on a sidewalk. Talking to her will cause her to launch into a quiz on Universal Studios movie trivia. Ok, this should be easy, I know movies! Well, that's what I thought. But instead of general actor or plot questions, occasionally she'll ask some hyper specific nonsense like "how many nose-hairs did Patch Adams have" and I would be left completely bewildered. I doesn't help that after 3 strikes she says verbatim "You need to watch more movies" as if that's the problem here. Me watching Twister again isn't going to inform me of who found Universal Studios in 1915 (which is NOT a movie question, Winnie). I eventually lucked out with a string of Jurassic Park and Back to the Future trivia, topped off with a question about Meet Joe Black, which I had coincidentally watched two nights prior to playing this.

Winnie berating me for not having watched 1992's Sneakers 8 times

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Spelling Universal Studios

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This is less of a minigame and more of an ongoing frustration. For the final stamp, you need to collect all of the letters hidden around the park to spell “Universal Studios” out. These can be pretty difficult to spot due to how small they are. Overall though, they weren’t too difficult to find outside of the fact that 3 of them are locked behind the day-night cycle, which of course is in this theme park game. So I was running around avoiding grinding for points to access the ride games and wondering where these last few letters were, and when I couldn't locate them I broke and started completing ride games. After 3, suddenly the park is dark. And wouldn't you know it, there was a letter nearby the ride I had exited that I stumbled into. The ultimate frustration is the tiny letters being coupled with the abhorrent camera shots, as documented in the image below. For reader friendliness, I've encircled the player character and the letter to be collected:

Pictured above: A horrible strain on my eyes

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Completing the Game

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So as alluded to before, the completion criteria for this game is to get stamps on all of the above 8 items. You can get a blue stamp for beating, or a red stamp for beating with an especially good score. Does this affect anything? Unfortunately no, it doesn’t, which means I had a LOT of wasted time trying to perfect that Jurassic Park minigame. Plus, at some point you may realize Woody is denying you entry to any rides because it seems Walter Lantz’s seminal creation can just pull rank whenever he wants. Well, if you want to get into these rides, you’ve gotta buy ride-specific hats from Woody at the park entrance using points. How do you get these points? Well, finishing rides is the main way, but also doing Winnie’s quiz and unlockable minigames, picking up and throwing away trash around the park (though this has a very low ROI), and attending the Waterworld show. This is the best method, as it’s very short and you can go in and out over and over again. Be sure to do it before nightfall though, because the attraction closes then. Once you have the hats (including pointless T-Rex Shoes and Hoverboard if you’re so inclined), then you can get all the stamps, HOWEVER, be warned...

Once you have all of your stamps, talking to Woody at the entrance ends the game with a light show. Normally this would be fine, except for the fact that this… erases your save file? Now I guess that isn’t entirely true, as once booted to the main menu you’ll see an unlocked attraction mode where you can play everything directly, and this stays unlocked so something is getting saved. But if you go to continue, it just starts you over as if you selected New Game. No more stamps, no more unlockables purchased, no more patience from me. I was not gonna do this all again, so the unlocked Attraction Mode will have to suffice.

Wow, dreams really DO come true!

This is a bad game, I didn’t really like anything about it other than some of the goofy choices and even then, that was a novelty that wore out its welcome unbelievably quickly. I’ve certainly played worse games overall, but on the GameCube? I’m not so sure…

This is another entry in a series where I go through and complete every GameCube game, as it is the largest part of my video game collection. GameCube Games: 2/652