Jurassic Park: Dinosaur Battles

Jurassic Park: Dinosaur Battles is a PC game, released in 2001, in which you take on the role of a government agent sent to Isla Sorna, to rescue a junior explorer group who arrived on the island with a small motor boat thinking it was the Cabo Blanco nature reserve.

Rather than controlling a human a cut scene shows you in 1st person view arrive in a lab and find a DinoVoc (a hand held computer screen that allows the user to send computerized calls to specially cloned dinosaurs) and you take control of dinosaurs in game. As you progress in the game, you are forced to battle different species of dinosaurs in order to search for the survivors.

Story
Harrison Manly has planned the trip of a lifetime. He's leading five talented kids, winners of the Harrison Manly Junior Explorers Expedition Team essay contest, to Cabo Blanco Nature Reserve. Located just off the coast of Costa Rica, Cabo Blanco offers a hands-on chance to experience a tropical jungle and to discover new plants and animals. Of course, Harrison is far too experienced to consult a map… When the group accidentally lands on InGen's infamous Site B, it doesn't take long to realize that the island is crawling with dinosaurs and that InGen may be up to something even more sinister than cloning dinosaurs...

As a newly recruited agent, the call goes out to you. Before you know it you're hang gliding in to Isla Sorna, armed only with your wits. On the island you find tools to power up and control dinosaurs. You're on your way!

Game Start
As you land on Isla Sorna, you quickly duck into an InGen lab. Here you find notes from Dr. Irene Corts, an InGen scientist who has found a way to clone, genetically engineer, and control dinosaurs. She provides her dinosaurs with specific skills and then sends them commands over a device she calls the DinoVoc. You also find one of her experimental dinosaur eggs. The Velociraptor that grows from it has only bite, rest and dodge skills, but it's a start.

Play
In the Lab, you'll be able to see the dinosaur you are currently working with -- here a Velociraptor -- and the skills your dinosaur has -- in this case a Bite skill. The lab contains all the tools you need to build up your dinosaur's skills with DNA.

Dinosaur Skills
The skills that your dinosaur currently has appear along the right side of the Lab. Each skill has an icon associated to it. In the picture to the right, the icon shows the bite skill.

There are four pages of skills. Click on the tabs along left of the skills area to see each page. Each page can have up to six skills, although most pages will only ever have three or four skills. Click on the tabs along the left of the skill area to change pages. The first four pages represent a posture that your dinosaur can take in battle and shows all the skills your dinosaur will have when fighting in that posture. The fifth tab links to your dinosaur's overall stats.

Fighting
As you move your dinosaur around the island, you soon find other dinosaurs ready for a fight. Time to put your dinosaur's skills to the test! You always view dino fights through the computer screen on your DinoVoc. This keeps you at a safe distance from your opponent and gives you an interface you can use to send commands to your dinosaur. There are two sets of commands to control your dinosaur in battle: Postures and Skills.

Important: You don't move your dinosaur around directly in a battle. She only responds to commands generated by the DinoVoc. Clicking on your dinosaur during battle or on the ground around her will have no effect.

Commanding Your Dinosaur - Postures
Posture buttons generally tell your dinosaur how close or far to stay from your opponent. There are four postures:

Use this posture to keep your dinosaur close to your opponent. For most attacks, you'll need to be close by to hit the other dinosaur. But be careful, the offensive posture can use a lot of stamina since your dino will chase after a fleeing opponent.
 * Offensive

The Neutral command makes your dinosaur stay a few steps away from your opponent. Your dinosaur doesn't usually run in the Neutral posture, so you won't use much stamina. Neutral is useful for sizing up an opponent.
 * Neutral

In the Defensive posture your dinosaur will stay as far away as possible from your opponent. Since your dinosaur will run away if necessary, the Defensive posture can use a lot of stamina. Defensive also gives you access to the Dodge and Rest skills (if you have them activated).
 * Defensive

The Flanking command tells your dinosaur to try to attack an opponent from the side, instead of head on. This is very useful when you have a fast dinosaur fighting a slow, armored one, such as a Triceratops.
 * Flanking

Commanding Your Dinosaur - Skills
Each posture has skills that your dinosaur can use in battle. To command your dinosaur to use a skill, simply click on the skill button.

Your DinoVoc will send out a computerized call and your dinosaur will launch the attack - if she can. You should remember two things about your dinosaur's skills: Every skill takes up stamina, except Rest. If your dinosaur does not have enough stamina, she will not be able to carry out the skill. Your DinoVoc also lets you keep track of your dinosaur's health and stamina.

The orange bar shows how much health your dinosaur has left. Every time an opponent hits with a skill, your dinosaur loses health. When this bar reaches zero, your dinosaur will be knocked down and the fight is over. The green bar shows how much stamina your dinosaur has left. Stamina is used up by running and using skills. When this bar reaches zero, your dinosaur will be unable to walk, run or use a skill. Standing still or using the Rest skill is the best way to gain back stamina. At the top right of the combat interface you'll find health and stamina bars for your opponent. Keep an eye on these to see how well you're doing in battle.

Flee​​ing Battles If things get really bad in a fight, click on the Flee button at the bottom right of the combat interface to command your dinosaur to leave the battle. You can then go back to the Lab to power up your dinosaur's skills or choose a different dinosaur.

The Rest Skill
The Rest skill is one of the most important tools you have during battle. It will make your dinosaur stop and start healing. While resting, both your dinosaur's health and stamina will be restored. Be careful, though, your dinosaur will not run away or attack another dinosaur while resting.

The Dodge skill increases the chance that your opponent's attack will miss. Use the Dodge skill when you are low on health against a tough opponent, but you have more stamina than your opponent or at least it should do that but used in game it becomes obvious that the dodge skill has no effect.

Stun Skills
Certain skills have the ability to stun a dinosaur if they connect. If another dinosaur stuns yours with one of these skills, your dino will be unable to respond for a few seconds after the attack. The good news is that you can also find and build up stun skills. You can tell a skill can stun if it has the word "stun" in it's name, like Tail Stun, Stun & Run, or Stun Snap. Look out for these skills - they can be very effective in battle. Stun skills will give you a short amount of time to rest, or to flee from your opponent.

Piercing Skills
Piercing skills are the only attacks that can damage Ankylosaurus. In addition, they have the unique property that the damage they inflict is not affected by normal armor (except for Ankylosaurus). This makes piercing skills very useful against heavily armored dinosaurs, such as Triceratops and Tyrannosaurus, as well as Ankylosaurus. Even though the cost and damage of many piercing skills makes them look unattractive, it is a good idea to have at least one piercing skill. Piercing skills like Piercing Chomp (for T-Rex) or Piercing Lash (for Stegosaurus) can be obtained by defeating particular dinosaur.

Dinosaur Armor
All of the dinosaurs you will encounter have some kind of armor. For the most part, armor subtracts from the damage a skill does. If your Velociraptor has a skill you've built to do 45 points of damage, for example, it will only do 35 points of damage against an opponent with an armor value of 10.

Spiked Armor
The Ankylosaurus has a special kind of armor called Spiked Armor. This armor not only protects the dinosaur really well, but it can also cause damage to a dinosaur that tries to attack!

The only way to beat an Ankylosaurus is to find and activate a piercing attack skill. The only piercing attack skill which you don't have to win in battle is the Triceratops Piercing Toss, though there are several more.

Keyboard Shortcuts
If you prefer, you can always use keyboard shortcuts to control your dinosaur during battle. Few people know this. To change your dinosaur's battle posture, use these keys:


 * Key - Posture
 * 1 - Offensive
 * 2 - Neutral
 * 3 - Defensive
 * 4 - Flanking

To command your dinosaur to use a skill, use the Q, W, E and A, S, D keys:

Q W E

A S D

These six keys correspond to the six possible skills your dinosaur can have in each posture. The position of the key matches the position the skill has in the skill area. For example, for Velociraptor's Offensive posture, the bite skill is in the upper left corner of the skill area. This corresponds to the Q key. Similarly, when the Raptor is in the Defensive posture, the Rest skill can be triggered by the "D" key, as it is in the lower right corner of the skill area.

Dinosaurs

 * Velociraptor: Small, fast and agile fighter. Strong against the average herbivore (particularly when the Velociraptor has a piercing skill) and small predators.
 * Stegosaurus: Medium size and speed fighter. Unreliable against most opponents.
 * Triceratops: Large and slow fighter. Is somewhat effective against strong Raptors and some Carnivores. Strong against Ankylosaurs.
 * Ankylosaurus: Small reliable fighter against all Dinosaurs. It is a very cheap victory against most enemies (including the final boss); in fact, only 6 total enemy dinosaurs can even damage Ankylosaurus (Slasher/Mature/Temple Guard/Maze Guard Velociraptor, and Lab Guard/Maze Guard Dilophosaurus), only Mature Velociraptor presents a real threat.
 * Tyrannosaurus: Large strong fighter, good against most opponents despite its small amount of accurate attacks. Its rumored that some of its attacks double the value of certain DNA skills.
 * Spinosaurus: Large powerful and versatile fighter, it can be used against nearly every opponent. Using it to beat the final boss unlocks Rising Stun, an attack that provides extra stamina rather than depleting it.
 * Dilophosaurus (opponent only): Fast opponent, advanced Dilophosaurs have strong piercing attacks that can pierce through Ankylosaurus armor.
 * Gallimimus (opponent only): Small and weak opponent against all dinosaurs. No redeeming qualities.

Final Plot
As you progress through the game you uncover the hidden plot for the game, which is hinted at in the beginning when you find the journal in the opening cut-scene, Dr. Irene Corts has been tampering with DNA, first dinosaur DNA but then human DNA.

The dinosaurs were mutated to respond to computerized calls generated by her Dino-Voc.

With the humans she cloned an ancient culture from Isla Sorna known as the Primos just like John Hammond did with the dinosaurs on Isla Nublar and hopes to make super human clones from the DNA tampering.

She is working directly for InGen who wants 100% control over the dinosaurs (but it is never mentioned if they ordered or even know about the human branch of the experiment dubbed "Project Primo" by Corts.) and has them doing various jobs such as guarding a bridge to make sure that the intruders (junior explorer troop) from getting to her labs and going after useless helpers (a primo) and has 3 of her most powerful troops (Ferry Guard T-Rex, Prime Spinosaurus, and an unspecified Pteranodon) guarding the 3 possible exits and calls them the 3 great protectors.

Trivia

 * The Primos are an illogical impossibility on Isla Sorna because they are never mentioned in the movies and you even find their large ruins on the island. However, there WAS a civilization in Isla Sorna and Isla Nublar before InGen bought the two islands from Costa Rican government.
 * The 3 great protectors wouldn't be very efficient on their job because if prime Spinosaurus (Protector by Sea) were guarding the ocean there would be nothing to stop intruders from leaving on a boat from the other side of the island. In fact, Spinosaurus are not aquatic creatures (even though they feed on fish).
 * The Ferry Guard T-Rex (Protector by Land) is an unnecessary protector because THERE ARE NO WAYS TO LEAVE THE ISLAND ON LAND rather he is just guarding the cable ferry (in fact, there is around 150 miles of open ocean that separates the island from the main land, so it's clearly impossible to escape the island by land)).
 * After using the combat simulator the background map music will stop playing for a long while or until you quit the game and restart it.
 * There are actually several unused skin variations for most dinosaurs in the game. Among them, are skins for a Dilophosaurus and Gallimimus that have "plyr" next to their file names and are located in the same general location as the other playable dinosaur skins, indicating that the player was originally intended to obtain a Gallimimus and Dilphosaurus as well at some point.
 * Dinosaur Battles and Jurassic Park: Scan Command are the same game but Dinosaur Battles does not require a barcode scanner to progress.\
 * It is unknown why ancient paintings of the three Great Protectors can be found on the cave walls, since the original Primos apparently died out long before InGen cloned their dinosaurs.