Grave Gamer News & Views — jurassic life
Behold Jurassic Life, A Half-Life Mod 65 Million Years in the...
Behold Jurassic Life, A Half-Life Mod 65 Million Years in the Making
This is already getting ample coverage outside the hallowed walls of the Herb, but I’m going to share this news with you anyway for two reasons:
- I love Jurassic Park more than climaxing.
- Holy flopping shit-balls is this awesome.
Having been slowly crafted and coded over the last several years by a mere community of dino-fans, this Source powered Half-Life mod hopes to transport you to the man-made slice of prehistory depicted on screen in 1993’s uber-blockbuster, Jurassic Park. Dubbed Jurassic Life by the modders building the first-person adventurer from the ground up (in their spare time, no less), the developers are crafting the mod in the hopes of capturing the essence of the film in a way no other game has been able to muster yet.
Players will be given free reign to explore the remote Isle Numblar during the chaotic outbreak that both the film and novel center on while defending yourself from predatory dinosaurs that come equipped with A.I. as brutally sharp as the claws they intend on slashing across your belly – by the final build, some dinos, like the iconic (yet inaccurately over-sized) Velociraptor will actually hide under the cover of flora until they sense when you’re at your most vulnerable.
Jurassic Park, a beloved, formative factor in my tiny-tike days, is one of those potential ridden properties that just hasn’t found a successful way to marry itself into video games. Over two decades, developers definitely have tried, but results always land somewhere in between “mildly amusing” and “One Big Pile of Shit,” the most recent example hitting closest to the browner end of the spectrum with Telltale Games’ serialized take on the franchise (despite similar gameplay, The Walking Dead it certainly is not).
Jurassic Life speaks – no, fucking roars – to my inner fanboy, though. No, dropping the property into the FPS genre isn’t a reinvention of the wheel (the overly ambitious Jurassic Park: Trespasser already tread that jungle back in ‘98). But allowing me to traverse the landscape of Isla Nublar in crisp, Source rendered detail, brought to me by the hands of the faithful fans that love this series as strongly as I do, has me more excited than any other game adaptation before it. Plus, it’s going to be released for goddamn free, sparing me of expense.
The downside of the whole fan-made thing is that it’s harder to peg down a release than to, say, reconstruct hulking prehistoric beasts from tree sap and amphibian DNA (spoiler: science says it can’t be done; thanks for nothing, science). But the Jurassic Life community is looking for help to finish their baby. So if you, unlike me, can use a computer for more than the daily streaming of static-y porn, hop to the recruitment forum and do some good.