It's just a brilliant, brilliant idea for a game. Jurassic Park: the management sim. Most attempts at bringing Spielberg's dino fantasy into interactivity concentrated on the action: the running, the jumping, the shooting and even on the being-a-Velociraptor thing. They had their moments, but they were so staggeringly ignorant of what the Jurassic Park concept really was. Hindsight is 20/20, of course, so it's far too easy to slam all those developers for not stumbling across the total sense that a tycoon game made for the license. After all, I can remember desperately wanting to shoot digital dinosaurs around the time of the films too. I wasn't a subtle child.

Operation Genesis flickered somewhere in my peripheral vision back when I was reviews editor on a magazine. At that time, its two core attributes were things to be scorned: Jurassic Park 3, two years previous, didn't lend much dignity to the movie series, and if I threw a rock in the air I'd hit at least five cheap, lousy tycoon games that we couldn't/wouldn't find the space to review. A Jurassic Park tycoon game? Gotta be awful. Gotta be. What a fool I was.

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