How Universal Made the Worst Theme Park Game Ever

How Universal Made the Worst Theme Park Game Ever

The latest video war video game war is heating up tonight. Nintendo’s Gamecube system is about to hit the stores. All new 3D role playing adventure only for Nintendo GameCube. Hang in there, little guys. Pikmin, only for Nintendo Gamecube. Resident Evil, more terrifying than ever. Come to Nintendo Gamecube. [Music] The Nintendo Gamecube was the predecessor to Nintendo’s smash hit console, the Nintendo 64, and ushered in a new era for Nintendo as a whole, bringing enough graphical and computing power to outperform the PS2. And Nintendo had a newly found focus on more mature content. This would be Nintendo’s attempt to shake their child-friendly reputation with the company allowing more mature games like Resident Evil 4. And when it released in North America on November 5th, 2001, it sat second place in the great early 2000s console war because no one could outsell the absolute juggernaut that was the PS2. The GameCube was really something special with timeless classics like Luigi’s Mansion, Pikmin, Animal Crossing, Wind Waker, Mario Sunshine, Twilight Princess, and the Universal theme parks adventure. I guess that exists. You heard correct. Published by Chemco, a game subsidiary of a Japanese manufacturing and engineering company, and developed by Nia Digital Works, whose credits are only on this game, Universal Theme Parks Adventure works as a digital interactive advertisement for the various Universal theme parks around the globe, inviting players to immerse themselves in the many attractions and lands featured within the parks. There’s no documentation on the history of this game, but my only guess is that Universal outsourced companies to create a game to give people the Universal experience from the comfort of their own home. This was also used to promote the opening of Universal Studios Japan with the games world being fairly accurate to the actual park. At least this was the idea. In reality, this is considered to be one of the worst video games ever created with such esteemed critics like IGN. What the [ __ ] is going on? Rating at number 78 on their worst video games of all time list, the game sees players putting themselves in the shoes of a kid going to Universal Studios, exploring the various rides and attractions to collect stamps for the all-seeing overlord Woody Woodpecker. I have a clearly very deep obsession with both retro video games and theme parks. So, I decided to dive head first into this game with the goal of completing it in its entirety to get the true experience. So, today let’s take a look at Universal Studios theme parks adventure. Once you launch the game, you are greeted with an incredibly loud animation showcasing all the wonder and excitement contained within this game. The main goal is to experience every attraction and collect all the stamps in your stamp book. There is also a little side objective where you have to collect hidden letters around the map that spell out Universal Studios. It sounds simple on paper. Walk around the poorly rendered PNG theme park, find all the letters, and you should be done in no time. Actually, similar to a drug dealer, the first hit is free. In the beginning of the game, you collect your map at the park entrance and walk up to whatever attraction you see first. After playing said miniame, you are now locked out of every attraction due to large crowds filling up the lines. This is when the trash collecting mechanic of this game really comes into play. And yes, this theme park universal interactive demo has players unable to experience the attractions due to lines and forces you to pick up trash to be able to go on them. One thing I forgot to mention is the point system within this game. Successfully completing miniames, depositing trash, and shaking hands with the creepy characters of the park gives you points that which can be redeemed with Woody Woodpecker for various hats and accessories. The hats give you priority access to the attraction the hat is based on and is essential for being able to complete this game. So now we pretty much have our game loop. Collect trash for cool hats and continue our quest of completing our sticker book. I have dumb gamer brain and I am not proud of how long it took me to figure out I had to do this. I just skipped through all the text and did not read what Woody was telling me. One of the most frustrating parts of this game is simply walking around. The camera is not your friend. The only thing I can think of that’s comparable to the way that the maps and environments are in this game is the first Resident Evil. You have to awkwardly walk around these fixed camera environments and the movement stick is constantly changing direction depending on the angle. This makes it a real mind [ __ ] just to do simple things like walk from one place to another. Considering this game came out in 2001, these game mechanics were dated even back then. Once you master the labyrinth that is the game map, you can now collect enough trash to buy a hat. So now you can actually experience another miniame. And now is the section of the video where we discuss the miniames featured within this game. The first miniame I played was the ET adventure which was a sidescrolling battle toads jet skies game where a character is fleeing the cops with ET. The miniame sees you dodging various objects in the road and also trying to maintain balance on your very janky bike. There’s nothing really wrong with this miniame. It’s a fairly basic paper boyesque miniame. It really has no ties to the actual attraction. I would have loved to see our bike go to the green planet so we could maybe get a really low poly rendering of Botanicus like most of the games featured on this game. You can tell that it was done pretty quickly and lazily. The next miniame was Jaws, which for some reason I locked the [ __ ] in on. The miniame has you on the orca throwing barrels at Bruce as he tries to take a bite out of the various sections of the boat that act as your health bar. This mini game was incredibly hard for me to get the hang of at first, and it actually requires some skill, some some on your top right, you have a radar with a red dot showing you where the shark is. The shark does circles around the boat before charging at it. And during this time, you have to quickly grab a barrel and be able to throw it at the shark’s face, smacking it, taking a small chunk off its life bar. Timing and aiming these throws incredibly hard to get used to, and I spent almost an hour just to get my perfect flawless no hit run. Why did I do this? I I don’t know. If my goal was to complete the game as fast as possible, I should have just completed the level, but I must have been hypnotized or something. The next mini game was Back to the Future the ride, which followed pretty close to the story of the actual ride itself. Biff steals the Delorean from the Institute of Future Technology, and now we are sent in a Delorean of our own to bump Bick back to his original timeline. This level is uh on rails, almost acting like our racing mode, featuring all the environments we actually see on the ride. This miniame feels like they’re actually trying and tried to make something that feels like the actual ride it’s based on. And there was also a slight skill gap to this one that kind of made it somewhat of an enjoyable time. The next one is Wild Wild West, based off the shooting western stunt shows featured at the various Universal theme parks. This one was a shooting gallery with you facing off a gunslinger to see how many targets you can hit and attempt to beat a score. I’m a sucker for shooting galleries. I love the one at Disneyland. I kind of wish I could just shrink myself and live inside of it. I love all the shooter dark rides, so this mini game, as simple as it felt. It was like one of those IR blaster arcade games, so it was pretty fun. I might be sounding overly positive, but compared to some of the other awful mini games, this one was way less offensive. But again, all of these are five out of 10 across the board, and it only gets worse from here. Next up is Jurassic Park, which sees our character strapped to the back of a jeep blasting dinosaurs with a laser gun. This section feels like it was ripped straight out of the various Jurassic Park arcade games. It’s an on-rail shooter with various dinosaurs chasing after you, and you have to time and aim your blast just right to make sure the dinos parts of your jeep. On paper, this sounds like it could be pretty fun, but it’s actually incredibly long and boring for no good reason. Each section is just a plain open field where thousands of velociaptors charge at you and you just kind of mow through all of them. This game encourages you to kill as many dinosaurs as you can, which I think is really funny considering how much love the Jurassic World franchise has for dinosaurs. Now gone are the days of being scientific horrors and a lesson on the lengths people will go for money. And in are the dinosaurs being lovable, enjoyable Baby Yoda style marketable plushies. But again, you just hold the fire button and shoot straight for most of this miniame. And it goes on for about like 20 minutes or so. It’s just incredibly boring and uninteresting and again is nothing like the river adventure. A miniame actually themed around the ride and the river adventure would have been actually pretty cool, but otherwise this was kind of a chore to complete. Last, but certainly least, is Backdraft based on the warehouse fire experience at the park. Backdraft puts our character in the shoes of a firefighter as we help save various NPCs from burning alive. This miniame is brutal and incredibly hard. The camera again is worse this time with the move stick inverting depending on the fixed camera angle. Each part of these buildings are like a maze with the camera adding more confusion to where you’re walking. As you maneuver this building, you put out fires with your hose and you dodge audio peeking brutal explosions shooting out of the windows. It’s genuinely taken so seriously and it’s kind of jarring. What is this supposed to be telling me about Universal? That they’re going to put me in a burning building and make me the keyh holder of a dozen people’s fates? I don’t really know what else they could have done, but something is so funny to me that my character, who is supposed to be a child, is being blown up by exploding rocket barrels. It is a warehouse fire, so I guess it gains points on being true to the attraction it’s based on. But this miniame was the one that caused me to rage quit my original playthrough. aiming the hose, moving around, doing anything in this was incredibly frustrating, and the difficulty level at the end is actually insane. You’re essentially being firebombed in every direction at the end of this game, and if you don’t have enough hearts, you are for sure going to have to start back over again. This made me question why I even started playing this game, and it’s clear from my silence in my gameplay, I was not having a good time. The last miniame is a quiz based around various classic movies and a ton of questions about Dragon Heart. I thought this quiz would be fairly basic and easy, but it has some incredibly deepcut movies that I haven’t seen, so I had a hard time trying to complete it. I had to retake this quiz a good 10 times before I could pass it. Also, this game likes to use this comic sands type font throughout the entire thing, which is a perfect reflection on the game’s quality. This quiz especially looks ugly, and it is for sure a cheap way for them just to squeeze a drop of content into this game. And once we’ve collected all the letters and completed all the mini games, we speak to Woody Woodpecker. And this animation plays where he looks like he’s going to start singing a song or something. This is when fireworks shoot out from the stage and we see the characters we met around the park like the Spirit Halloween Universal Monsters and of course the Dawn himself, Chilly Willie, enjoying the fireworks as they shoot out over the various sections of the park. Even the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park are having a good time. And we get some photos of our adventure that fly by like bowling alley animations. And we get jump scared one last time by Woody Woodpecker as he says goodbye. But we all know he will never leave. This game was given out for free to the guests of Universal Japan, I could see it being a really cool little demo of the park. But otherwise, releasing this in North America and charging people the full $50, which adjusted for today’s inflation is almost $90, is absolutely insane to me. This game looks and plays worse than some of the games on the N64. And even if you were a diehard Universal theme park fan, this wouldn’t really give you anything resembling what the parks are actually like other than the game’s horrible PNG hell of a map. I lost more playing this game than I gained, but it was in a very interesting look into Universal Theme Park’s first step into the video game world. Today, the closest thing we have to this is the Minecraft DLC map. That’s a pretty accurate recreation of Universal, even featuring ridable rides and the various fan servers on Roblox and Minecraft that do their own recreations of Universal with the Roblox one even featuring lines that you have to wait real time in with other players. I’ve had a lot of fun checking these out. These are incredible fan-made worlds, and they’re incredibly accurate to the parks they’re based on. These people don’t make any money, and they just do it for the love of the game, and I have so much respect for them. To conclude this video, I now understand why this game is to considered one of the worst games of all time, and it makes the $10 Minecraft DLC look like a work of art. Thank you all so much for watching. Uh, hope you liked more of this coverage into other things other than the rides themselves. This video game is very weird. Thank you guys so much for watching. I am so glad to be back making a Universal video. I got kind of lost in those movies, but thank you guys so much. Talk talk to you later. Bye. Heat.

Before Planet Coaster and minecraft I guess, there was Universal Studios Theme Parks Adventure—a GameCube-exclusive that tried to bring Universal Studios to life… and failed spectacularly.
In this video, we take a deep dive into one of the most bizarre and broken theme park games ever made. From clunky rides and awkward minigames to a creepy Woody Woodpecker tutorial, this game is a theme park fan’s worst nightmare.

Whether you’re into old theme park rides, retro games, or just love a good trainwreck, this is a trip through Universal Studios like you’ve never seen before.

Let me know in the comments: Did you ever play this game?

I do not claim ownership of any footage used in this video. All rights to the original content belong to the respective owners

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