Come to Universal Studios, stand in line and pick up our trash

Universal Studios Theme Parks Adventure on GameCube is a title I would never have appreciated on the day it released in December of 2001. Having found it 15 years later for $2 at a flea market, however, made it exactly my kind of Weird.

It’s a game that glorifies the Universal theme parks by making you buy special tickets to bypass the unending lines at every ride. And how do you pay for these tickets? By picking up garbage that constantly appears all over the park, even at the feet of mindless staff members. In this fantastical land of Hollywood magic each “ride” presents you with a mediocre minigame, all of which are unique but not really fun. At its best it puts Sega to shame by offering the closest thing to a home version of both Brave Firefighters and the arcade lightgun game of Jurassic Park. At worst, you watch a five second pre-rendered clip of the Waterworld attraction’s finale… from five different angles.

All it took was the $2 price tag to turn the awkward and simplistic gameplay into a pleasant (and hilarious) afternoon recording. Getting that recording online was the real traumatic experience here. My editing software refused to process the second half of the video so I spent a week chopping it into two parts that start and end at the right spots.