Ok here is one some might remember but most not because the game bombed in reviews. However, I never saw those reviews and was a JP nut from the Genesis days so I had gotten a copy.
Watch the opening of this for the best Dreamworks logo ever...
http://youtu.be/R4svzPI6lqIIf you want the most frustrating...infuriating...best game ever made, this was it. I kid you not, this game was a trial to play and even worse that you had to play through over half of it to get to the good parts. On top of that there was no save system. Everything worked with passcodes so you had to write them all down as you played and if you didn't, you'd have to go back through the nightmare again. Honestly, I never beat the game in it's natural form. I got to the last level as a T-Rex and gave up. Though I used a gameshark later to cheat and beat it.
Why am I so nostalgic about it? Because coming off the Genesis JP games, there was nothing more satisfying than being the Raptor or the T-Rex in full 3D and tearing people apart or eating them whole. You could also scare the crap out of them with raptor calls or Rex roars.
The music was beautiful and masterfully done too. If you put the game CD in a CD player, you could hear the entire score anytime you wanted. Course it was one entire song track and you had to fast forward through it to find songs since none of them were separated. But man, in high school, people would ask why I had PSX CDs in my player and I'd say..."Cause the music is awesome!"
Just, once I finished it with the shark, I never booted it again. Soo many hours wasted on it. I'd come home from school, pop it in, then threaten the TV with death by controller or practice colorful metaphors. It was so terribly balanced and overly difficult on some levels. You had to nail it just about flawlessly and the dinos didn't always control well enough to do it. The Compy levels...*shudder* Oh that little bugger was insane to control at times. I'd even purposely get it killed on some levels because I just got so mad at it. "F it, I don't care anymore, get eaten and die torn to shreds, you green lizard chicken that controls like a beached whale!"
Still, great moment in gaming that I almost missed due to reviews. Course I don't blame reviewers for the bad reviews. If I was one of them and had to spend an hour with the game, I'd have written the same. However, it did garner a few decent reviews back then. I'd guess because of either bribery or the reviewer actually endured it and got to the fun parts.