Ep 3 (S) - Jurassic World Evolution - Dinos! Boring Except for That Sweet 100%

 Warning: This episode contains mature language.  18+ strongly recommended. 

In this episode, I discuss 2018's hit sandbox simulator, Jurassic World Evolution!  I have... some pretty harsh things to say about it.  But that sweet, sweet 100%, though...

This episode is highly reliant on my own opinion - all opinions are respected!  Provided we can have mature discussions about said opinions and don't refute any as being "right" or "wrong."

Beginning and Ending links:
Beg: https://youtu.be/OJhqsUnKUWw - Humanity (NCS Release) - Max Brhon
End: https://youtu.be/KBtmHyfOMNU - Blue Eyed Demon (NCS Release) - ROY KNOX

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Twitter: https://twitter.com/VideoGameTirade
Email: videogametirade@gmail.com  

Transcript

Hello, y'all, and welcome to Video Game Tirade. This is the show where I yell for an hour or so about games I've been playing and whatever they remind me of. My name is AJ and let's just go ahead and get this rant rolling!

Last week, I discussed the September Nintendo Direct, a little bit of a departure from my normally-scheduled content but I was excited about a lot of things, and I wanted to share that and open up a discussion about what y'all are excited for. I know I already asked last week but feel free to let me know what you all are looking forward to out of that Nintendo Direct! I'm also recording this after the Smash fighter announcement, and man, I personally am excited to see Sora coming to the game. What I'm more interested in, though, was the language Sakurai was using seemed to indicate this was going to be the last Smash fighter announcement, ever. Which would mean Smash Ultimate is the last Smash game ever, no? What do y'all make of that? Let me know in the comments on Patreon or on Twitter, you all know the whole plug, anyways. Um. 

Enough about gaming news, this is more of a podcast about my personal gaming habits! So, speaking of that, what have I been playing since before the Direct, since I didn't get to talk about my gaming last week? I'm still playing Xenoblade Chronicles 2 since its a law of JRPGs that they last forever, but I'm not quite ready to continue talking about that - I've got two more ideas for episodes on that game, both of which are S-type, just an FYI, and I just need to finish doing research for those. I've also played and finished Kena: Bridge of Spirits since it came out but that one also still needs some time to digest - a bit of a spoiler for that episode, I love that game and its going to be an emotional episode for me to record, holy crap! Um. I'm very excited about that one, and you guys should be, too! Uh, there's one other game I've been playing that I, obviously, am going to be talking about today: Dinosaur Tycoon! Er, I mean, Jurassic World Evolution. Just a quick warning before we get into things, this episode is going to be an S episode subtype for "Spoilers," although you can be safe in the knowledge that there is nothing to actually spoil in this game. There is no story, as is typical for a lot of similar sandbox simulator-type games; another example is Harvest Moon/Story of Seasons, one of my favorite series of all time, which has extremely little in the way of story: usually just you inherit a farm somehow and then go to take care of it and that's all the story that there is. Usually. Um.

This game, Jurassic World Evolution, is derived from the Jurassic Park/World movies, as you could probably guess from the title, where your goal as the player is to build an amusement park where the main draw is dinosaurs, alive and in the flesh! Your ultimate goal is to build not one, not two, but five, arguably six, 5-star dinosaur parks across the five islands from the movies, Las "Cinco" - CINCA Muertes, the Five Deaths. Las, cinca. I'm not super good on Spanish, I'm sorry. Uh. Arguably six because there's an extra island for sandbox mode that you can still get stars on, but that one plays wildly different and is really weird, so I'm not gonna talk about it, shhh. Uh. 

The game was developed by Frontier Developments in England, who are also famous for similar simulators such as Roller Coaster Tycoon and Planets Coaster and Zoo. They - they pretty much have a niche, and Jurassic World is just a new extension of it. The game was released in 2018, 3 years after the release of the first same-title movie in 2015, but despite that it still feels like games in olden days that were developed alongside movie production to get kids invested into the franchises outside of physical merch or rewatching the movie a thousand times. You know, like Madagascar the Game, as an example, which featured all of the exact same plot beats as the movie but you get to play them???

Obviously, the main draw of both the movies and this game is seeing dinosaurs in the flesh in the modern era, interacting with our world and us interacting with them. The original Jurassic Park movies were limited technology-wise in what they could do with the dinos - they cloned the DNA from fossils and supplanted the gaps with only frog DNA (why not the DNA of an actual living dinosaur, like an alligator or crocodile??? Who knows!). The only draw of the original Jurassic Park before everything terrible happened was the real-life experience of living dinosaurs. However, later iterations, most notably in Jurassic World, point out that this is both limiting excitement, and thus visitors, and also limited utilization of the genetic technology available. That version of the Jurassic franchise's take on the animals - make them cool with new DNA upgrades, no matter if the creatures that DNA comes from makes sense to put in a lizard or not - is what we play with in Jurassic World Evolution.

You start on Isla Matanceros, which is obviously going to be Tutorial Land. (Fun fact: a "matanceros" is a person whose job is to slaughter animals and cut up their meat - in other words, a butcher. That's pretty grim for the island we start on, huh?) There's some stuff already built on the actual island and your hand is held through all of the absolute basics, 'cause its Tutorial Land. A brief list of those basics: how to make a dino, where to get fossils and how to process them into dino DNA, how to see what you need to make guests and dinos happy and make your park awesome, 5 stars, and how to appease the 3 departments assisting you running the park: Science, Entertainment, and Security. 

To go into all of those a little bit more - this is where the meat of the episode is gonna come from, the spoilers making this an S-type video. Uh - "video." Episode, audio podcast! To go into those a little bit, making a dinosaur involves clicking a specific building, ideally attached to a paddock, although you can definitely just let the dinosaurs free roam if you want! And clicking through a few menus as well as having the money to perform the genetic manipulation of making a dinosaur. Getting fossils involves clicking into a specific menu, to afford to send the expedition, and then waiting. Fossils automatically get brought in if you have a fossil center - oh, and you can only send expeditions if you have an expedition center, as well, by the way, so you need 2 different buildings in order to get fossils and actually process them into dino DNA. Once *gibberish* once the fossils are in the fossil center, you pay to have them processed into a certain amount of DNA percentage based on how many stars the fossil is worth, up to 4 stars and 5%. It takes around 30 seconds to a minute to process a single fossil, and you can queue up to 6 at once.

You have a main control center page, as well, which breaks down into your island rating and your reputation standings with the 3 departments - the island rating tells you how your dinos and guests are doing, respectively. In order to get a 5-star island, you need 5 stars in both categories; you need to make both your dinosaurs and your guests extremely happy. Getting 5 stars in dinosaur rating involves have different dinosaur species all at once, uh, and also well "rated" dinosaurs - as an example, 2 velociraptors will get you closer to 5 stars than 2 gallimimuses because velociraptors are rated higher automatically. Dinosaurs with their DNA altered also get better ratings, so a dino - uh, velociraptor with a bunch of attack adjustments will have a higher rating than a velociraptor just basic-ass standard, bog standard.

Guests have different requirements, to get into their side of the 5-star rating: they need to be able to see all the dinosaurs, they need to eat, drink, use the bathroom, they need good transportation around the park, uh, they need access to things that are fun other than just seeing the dinosaurs, and they also need to shop, and all of these across the entire island need to be at 90% rating or higher for 5 stars. So that's a lot of things that you need to juggle! Uh, every single type of guest requirement involves a different building, as well, and you need a large amount and variety of these buildings across the whole island to get that minimum 90%. You start losing percentages very quickly if you have, say, a bunch of shopping centers on the left side of the island and absolutely none on the right. You need to have shopping centers spread equally so that way your guests will never get a need for anything. Uh. Your dinos also need their own space in their paddocks to make sure they stay happy, have enough forest, grassland, and wetland space as well as space away from other dinos, as a happy dino with their own personal space that's well-fed and well-watered is a dino that doesn't bust down the walls and attack the guests. You also need power to run everything, so you need to build power stations, too. Lots of stuff to put on your islands with limited space to put them. And appeasing the departments, as a final note on all the basics, means completing contracts and missions, while making sure you don't favor one department too much to avoid your stuff getting sabotaged. That was fun, when I discovered exactly what that came from! Uh.

This all sounds a lot more complicated than it actually is in-game. For example, you can't make a dinosaur unless you have at least 50% of its DNA from fossils. Percent fossils also translates directly to viability when making the dinos, and you can't do significant modifications for that higher rating without complete genomes, and even then if you do a lot, REALLY large modifications, you run the risk of the dino never being - NEVER being viable without EXTREME luck. If you invest in a dino and it fails in the incubation stage because it had too low a viability chance, you are completely out all the money you invested, as well. If a multi-million-dollar T.rex fails, you're out every single dollar, no refunds unless YOU cancel the dino. To make the eggs more likely to succeed without taking the mods off, you can either research an incubation upgrade for the egg center or go get more fossils and crunch then into genome percentage up to a max of 100%. Either option takes a variable amount of time, as does actually making the dino, whether or not it succeeds. So while you're waiting on research or expeditions or dinos, you can switch your focus over to guests for a while, right? Well, each guest building can meet up to 3 of the requirements with varying amounts of success, and you can use your management views to figure out where you need each requirement most. So there's a little tab on the left side where you can build a bunch of stuff or just look at things in special ways; your management views will highlight, based on the various guest needs, if you need more in a certain area, going from very light blue to dark red, where dark red is obviously you need more of that thing in that area. Um. This game... I ju- urgh!

So you can use your management views to figure out where you need each requirement most. So slap down a few fast food stations and gift shops, and each building, guest or otherwise, takes some time to build, the more useful ones taking more time to finish building, obviously. Like I said earlier, they also need power, and they also need a path so guests can walk up to them, even if they're not a guest building. So while the buildings are actually building up, let's handle that power issue, assuming we have a power station already built to provide power. Distributing the power to buildings requires substations, which provide little circles of power provision and all buildings even touching that circle will get power, provided that the substation is connected by power poles to the power station. Okay, guest building is powered, pathed, and built, what can we do with it now? You can manage every guest building in 3 categories: staffing, item selection, and costs. Staffing determines how many people you can have at once in the store, item selection is more-or-less useless - more expensive items can bring in more people but also cost more, so there's, like, no net benefit - and cost of the items determines your end profit. You basically just set these, one-and-done, for every guest building and move on. You might come back later, if you start getting a lot of guests, to increase your staffing and adjust your cost a little bit so you can actually get a profit, but usually its one-and-done and its really sad.

So, Isla Matanceros starts with more room than you would expect, but this process of one-and-done min-maxing your space versus your guests' needs versus your dinosaurs' needs can rapidly fill each island. Not that you even would, though, because its very easy to cap guest needs for 5 stars and also dinosaur needs for 5 stars without filling up your island, even on Tutorial Island.

Can you hear what my issue is with this game yet? No? Let me explain a little better then: while you're waiting on the meat and potatoes of this game - the dinos and their DNA - you place guest buildings, wait for them to finish, set them up, and then never touch them again. And you really only need to build guest buildings where the dinosaur enclosures are, and you don't need very many even on later islands to properly get dinosaur 5 stars and thus full island 5 stars.

If you still haven't fully gathered my complaints on this game, I'll definitely explain them to you, but first, the finance team would like to share a few words about this project! Sike, I am still absent of sponsors, but good old Patreon is still around if you feel the need to support me doing what I do. If you just want to talk about today's topic or suggest future topics or games that I can play for future episodes, I have both a Twitter and business email for those purposes! Check out the description of this episode for those links and more! One last thing: today's hashtag will be #VGTDinos as in dinosaurs, if you want to talk to me specifically about this game. Now, let's unpause and get back into the action. Or, in this case, inaction.

So guests are easy to take care of, 4 clicks per building, maximum 20 buildings per island before you hit 5 stars. As long as you have the money to build those buildings, you're good. So where do you get the big money - there's another half to this game, right? Yes, dinosaurs! The higher your dino rating is, the more guests you get, and the real big bucks come from guest ticket sales rather than guest buildings. You make more money going into an actual park rather than paying $5 for a drink while you're there. The dinos are essentially the key to this game going smoothly, and a good thing, too, for a movie series based off of dinosaurs coming back to life as amusement park attractions! So how about those dinos, are they super cool and fun and actually make the game worth playing??? I can admit they look very cool - although not scientifically accurate - no feathers on velociraptor or any of the other theropods, for example. You can't really affect how they look, either, other than giving them specific skin pattern genes that are locked behind either research or department missions. These appearances are also locked in place once you press "incubate dinosaur" by the way, no changing whenever you like, not without printing a whole new dino and spending your moolah. And what do they do? Must do some cool things for an entire game built around making them! Well, they eat, they sleep, they drink water, sometimes they fight if you've got the wrong species together or too many in a paddock at once, and they get sick and occasionally die just because they're old, or if you're not taking care of them properly.

That's it.

Yes, that's it. They walk around sapping your resources, for medicine and food, and they just exist. Make 'em, replenish their feeders maybe once an hour, and heal them when they get sick. You can also sell them and take sellable pictures of them, but that is the absolute extent of how you can interact with them.

So guest buildings are one-and-done, and so are the dinos. What about those 3 departments? Do they offer anything cool to do? Short answer is no. They offer 2 types of tasks, contracts or missions, and the contracts are essentially things you're already doing, to build reputation with the department to get to those missions and later unlocks. They're super quick super easy things that you should already be doing: build this specific dinosaur, make x amount of y dinosaur, release z total dinosaurs, sell a specific dinosaur or set of dinosaurs, make a dino with f gene type or k base rating, etc. The missions are more of the same but take it a step further: make x dinosaur and then make it mad, and keep it mad AND in a pen for 3, 5, 10 minutes, as one of the frequent examples. They will try to get out when mad, as I referenced earlier, so most of these missions devolve into locking your guests away in their shelters for 10, 15, 20 minutes, however long it takes you to actually do the mission, repairing the fences once the dinosaurs break out because they're forced to be mad as part of the mission even if you're meeting all of their requirements, tranquilizing any escaped dinosaurs, putting them back in their pens, and then waiting for them to break the fence again, and just repeating the cycle until the mission's done. This is just a huge waste of your actual real time and your in-game money. In short, the departments reward you for already doing what you're doing and side-track you into locking down your island for upwards of half an hour at a time, and those rewards, aside from money , are more guest building varieties that are gonna take more time to put down and finish building and are a lot bigger so they're harder to wedge in and are a lot more expensive, so they're harder to get to once you start going to the different islands - there are also better genes which make your dinos better, or more dino types that you'll need to research to get the dig site to get the fossils to get up to 50% to be able to make 1 of that new dino type.

The actual dinos are cool enough to look at, with 49 types including free DLC and skin-changing DNA options, although you max out at 3 or 4 of those options per species. You can't really have free reign of what exactly your dinosaur looks like, which is, like, why? Its a game about dinosaurs, let me make 'em bright fucking red! But these dinos just don't do anything if you're running your park right, which isn't hard at all to do, except get hungry and sick. And if they get hungry or sick, its just a matter of yet more waiting for a ranger team to go out and resupply their food or medicate them.

Don't get me wrong here, I love simulator games - when they give me something to do. I said at the top that Harvest Moon, now Story of Seasons for the better ones, is one of my favorite game series of all time, and I wasn't lying then and I'm not lying now when I say that. Zoo Tycoon and the Sims also have a special place in my heart, too, and are always super engrossing and enjoyable - when they're done right by giving me something to do. This game is engrossing, as it really, really nails the gamification aspect, but I don't DO anything! There's the 49 dinosaur types to max out genome percentage at 100%, 2 different categories of star rating to get to 5 stars for the full 5 star island rating, 5 different quote-unquote "story" islands to complete, and each island also has a specific amount of department progress, reputation, whatever to fulfill for both the missions and the contractual rewards, plus when actually building a dino's DNA, number go up is good. Here's the problem, though: it took me 9 hours to finish the tutorial island, and honestly half of that was sat on my butt either waiting to afford something early game or waiting for research or expeditions to finish up late-game so I could fully 100% with everything that could be done on Matanceros before moving on to the next island. Isla Muerta, island 2, is more of the same but introduces periodic extreme storms, making it harder to get to and keep that 5 star guest rating, as guests will rate the resort very poorly if they're locked away from everything for their own safety. This also, predictably, interferes with funding, so the storms just add a new form of waiting into this game. Isla Tacaño - "Takaño?" "Tasaño"? There's an ñ, I know for a fact! Um, fun fact: this island, translates directly into "stingy island," starts you off in a deficit and you have to decide very carefully how to spend your money early-game. But once you sell off enough buildings to build a paddock and stick a few dinos in it, you can literally leave the game running for hours to get back up into the real money needed to play the game. Isla Pena is honestly the only island that can be pretty difficult to get to 5 stars, since its so small with a lot of narrow straightaways not good for building paddocks in, but even that is conquerable with roughly 5 to 10 hours of effort, less so if you spend your money properly so you can make money faster.

There's just so much waiting in this game. You wait for dinosaurs to print, you wait for expeditions to give you fossils, you wait for fossils to become DNA, you wait for money, you wait for research, you wait for buildings to build and become usable, you wait to get contracts to build up reputation with the departments in order to do their missions, you wait for storms and for missions to be over so you don't lose money to guest casualties, so - much - waiting! It feels like it was supposed to be a mobile game, the kind with speed-boost options to buy with real money. And honestly? There's something they could have done to make that not an issue at all, something very easy:

No pausing anywhere in the game except for the Escape menu, the one with the save and load and exit game options. Currently, as the game exists now, there's a database that tells you real-world info, about dig sites, actual paleontologicial artifacts, what we knew in 2016 to 2018 about these legendary animals, and a few gameplay details about them, too. This is all very exciting info that I, personally, really want to read about! But the game pauses whenever you access the database - get rid of that shit! Let the game go in the background while I'm reading information I actually do want to read but have no reason to right now, when I will still have to wait for fossils once I stop reading about the dinosaurs the fossils used to be.

Alternatively, let me do something cool while I wait - hell, involve the black market garbage from the second Jurassic World movie and let me sell dinosaurs for something other than money. Give me the option to earn a way to skip all the way - not speed it up, which exists in the game, but full-on skip all the waiting. At some point, money is no longer an issue: during my playthrough, I got to a point on every single island where I had multiple dozens of millions of dollars that I could not spend fast enough. Let me use it to buy fossils from collectors or museums, or buy fossil data from private research firms, so I can skip the expedition and fossil crunching and automatically get genome percentage without all the damn waiting!! The Science department is supposed to be testing DNA sequencing and making dinosaurs in the background, without me - maybe if I get high enough reputation with them, I can cash in that rep to buy dinos without waiting for them to incubate. Maybe I can use Security rep to tranq all dinos in an area automatically, so I don't have to lock down the guests while I wait for the fencing to be repaired. Maybe I can use Entertainment rep to place a building, fully-built, or to throw a sale to boost sales or something. Give me things I can do to skip the waiting!

And while I'm asking for things to do, let me do shit other than look at the dinosaurs and wipe up after their mess! Let me send them to living museums or to pharma companies or something, instead of just watching them exist and be big brown blobs. Also, why can't we do anything with the dead bodies other than cart them off? Those are un-extinct animals, valuable data on the cloning and genetic tampering processes! Donate them to science! Have me unlock special DNA upgrades that can only be collected from dead dinos, and make me need those corpses in volume. That would force me to get creative with dying dinos, forcing conflict or starvation or letting them die of disease - bonus creativity points if different unlocks come from different death methods. That can up the gamification a LOT! This would also complicate getting to and maintaining 5 dino stars, first of all, as well as increase the risk of the dinos breaking containment. The only times I had dinos escape in my playthrough was in the missions, where they were artificially made angry to specifically force them to break out, or when storms hit and broke the fencing. Both times I already knew the thing causing the danger was going to happen, so no guests ended up hurt because they'd already been locked up for whole minutes before the dinos got loose. There's no danger of dinos breaking out in the game as it stands, if you think for 2 seconds about what dinos you put in your enclosures and how they all play nice together and how the other elements of the game combine.

Honestly, the hardest parts of this game for me came from all the dumb min-maxing and specific building placement required to get all the way up to full island 5 stars. A restaurant, as an example, is better than fast food objectively on both food and drink, unless you need a lot of food in one area and don't have the space for 2 restaurants but DO have the space for 2 fast food joints. Making big enough paddocks to house all the different dinos for 5 stars, with some species needing x amount of themselves in order to be happy and all dinos having a hard limit on the total dinos they'd like to hang out with, and balancing all that space with how much space you need for the guest buildings - THAT was the hardest part for me, and once you figure it out for each island, that's it, you don't need to undo anything.

I'd like to go on a little aside real quick before I wrap things up today: I write scripts for my episodes except for reactions, and I wrote the majority of this one firstly, by hand, because it forces me to think about what I really want to say more, and secondly, after just finishing island 2, Isla Muerta. I have since beat all 5 story islands, obviously, and while I still stand by my claims of this game being very boring and good only at the gamification, I'd also like to add in a few extra complaints to further emphasize my opinions and some examples of why this game is - not great. For one, there's a Security mission where you loan out dinosaurs instead of selling them, despite using the exact same controls as selling - just one mission where you do this. Why the hell was that locked behind the quote-unquote "story?" That's literally what I was talking about a few minutes ago, but with no benefit other than completing a check mark on the missions list and getting a reward, and you don't get that ability again. I was literally just talking about that, let me have that! Another complaint - once you reach a certain amount of progress on the 5th and final "story" island, you unlock the ability to medicate AND tranq with both your helicopter AND ranger teams - up until that point, medicating was only for the rangers and tranquilizing only for the helicopters. Why in the name of John Hammond is that an ability unlocked only on the final island??? That makes the game SO much easier - it would ABSOLUTELY have helped on all the islands, particularly Tacaño and Pena, 3 and 4. The missions all being basically the same - get x dinos, piss them off and/or sell them, and then wait - was super frustrating. I couldn't get SOME variety? There was one Security mission where I had to let a mission dino kill another mission dino - and it specified "kill" in the instructions. Let me have some more of that - put these dino species together, and instead of having them kill each other explicitly in the instructions, watch what happens and take care of the results, bam, mission done! That would teach me about the mechanics of the game instead of just "do what you're already doing." I had to look up if there was any way I could put herbivores and carnivores together without murder happening, because the game doesn't suggest that you can do that until one of the missions on island 5, and I really needed it for tiny little island 4. You can, by the way - larger herbivores aren't bothered or are bothered rarely by smaller carnivores, and same-size creatures CAN exist provided that the herbivores are armored and have defense ratings higher than the attack ratings of the carnivores.

Also, very little about this game is actually explained properly. Why do I get "building constraints" when trying to place things when absolutely nothing is marked in red sometimes? What are the "building constraints" constraining me from building my park? What the fuck is resilience and why is it a dinosaur stat? Do any - what do any of these dinosaur stats mean in terms of totals? They aren't percentages, because dinosaurs with 110 resilience aren't impervious to getting sick, if that's what resilience even relates to. Why do I have to have a path connected between EVERYTHING and the main entrance? Why can't it be good enough for me to have a monorail connection to an area only connected to the things in that area? Island 5 starts off with all the guest items locked in the paddock and all the dinosaurs running absolutely bananas free, but the "path must connect back to start" bullshit prevents me from keeping that coolness, because I need to run paths through areas I would otherwise completely lock off from guest passage, to allow the dinosaurs to run freely. Dinosaurs can't run freely if people are at risk of getting hurt just from existing and going to the places where they look at dinos. Your game mechanics are interfering with your game ideas in this game. Island 3 is supposed to be about "oh, you really need to make smart money decisions here" but after 20 minutes of extra careful consideration of what buildings to sell and what first dinos to print, the game runs exactly the same as the rest of the islands - no penalties to running costs or lack of guests or increased costs to buying dinos, you know, things that would ACTUALLY change how gameplay worked on that island in association with the "smart money decisions." The storms are terrible on Muerta and Pena, and Pena is very tiny, you can't get around that. But on Matanceros, Tacaño, and Sorna, number 5, the novelty of each of their quirks wears of very quickly, so you're just playing the game in a barely-different locale as the previous island. This game is extremely samey and very full of waiting and neither are good for its likeability.

I'll give this game an overall 2 out of 5 dinosaur footprint fossils, personally. I got to island 5 out of a drive to 5 star and get all the rep rewards for each island - in a sense, "complete" the game, 100%-wise - before I stopped playing. The thing that made me stop playing on island 5 once, was, once I finally had my 5 stars, I started going for reputation, and the first mission that popped up asked me to make 5 different dinos at x amount of total rating for each dino. 2 of those dinos, the Spinosaurus and the T.rex, are both large class carnivores, and thus can't be in a paddock with each other without killing each other. All dinos have to live in most missions, so I would have to completely empty at least 2 of my paddocks for just those 2 bastards, and the other 3 would also need yet another paddock. I'd have to sell a large amount of existing animals and then somehow retrace my steps once the mission was over to get back to 5 stars, only to potentially do it again for the other 2 missions. Once I had fully processed what I needed to do to do the mission, I quit without saving and immediately uninstalled. I had 5 star'd every island, that was good enough for me, thank you very much. It was absolutely an engrossing romp, as evidenced by the previous sentence, but would I call it "fun?" Not even with a threat on my life, thank you! There's an abysmal amount they could have done to put in variety, options, methods of skipping all the fucking waiting, make the game better than the waiting simulator we ended up getting. It makes me upset, because as anyone else with even a smidge of interest in science, dinosaurs are super cool and the chance to see them, even in a video game environment, should be equally as cool as it sounds. This just wasn't, and its very disappointing.

Friendly reminder that this is an opinion podcast, and my opinion, positive or negative, does not mean I think the same way of people who do or don't like any game I talk about. In other words, you're allowed to think whatever you want about the games I talk about, just like I am, and with a little luck we can have meaningful discussions about both the good and bad while still respecting everyone involved.

Speaking of respect, I have a Patreon, for anyone who has enough respect and appreciation for this podcast here to support me! I also have a Twitter and business email where we can have those respectful discussions about this game, or talk about future games and topics for future episodes! For Twitter's discussion for today's episode, that hashtag is #VGTDinos once again, all four of the first letters are capitals. Links to all those sites will be in the description, as well as links to today's opening and ending themes, which are respectively Humanity (NCS Release) by Max Brhon - "Bron?" "Brr-hon?" - B-r-h-o-n and Blue Eyed Demon the NCS Release by ROY KNOX. If you liked this episode, please give me a like wherever you're listening to this, it lets both me and the system know what I'm doing right so I can keep up the good work and give you guys fun things to listen to. All the plugging done and my rant wrapped up, I hope you enjoyed - I hope y'all enjoyed today's episode, and I hope you have a good weekend. Bye!