10 More Underrated Video Games Way Ahead Of Their Time

Even defenders of 1998's Jurassic Park: Trespasser will admit that it's not a great game, but it is nevertheless far from being just another lazy movie tie-in - in fact, it was a massively ambitious game and hugely ahead of its time.

The PC-exclusive title was built using a proprietary game engine that broke new ground for the genre, delivering complex and expansive environments - like fields full of trees - by continually rendering new geometric and texture data to the player, not unlike The Getaway's streaming utility.

Trespasser also used an innovative "imposter" rendering technique, whereby objects were visualised as 2D sprites until the player got sufficiently close to them, at which point they morphed into 3D objects.

Furthermore, Trepasser boasted state-of-the-art physics, namely the implementation of ragdoll mechanics years before mainstream gaming dared touch it, and complex AI which drove both the dinosaurs' behaviours and movements.

Despite scarcely being known by players at large these days, Trespasser has been cited as influencing some of the biggest and most successful games ever made, from Halo: Combat Evolved to Far Cry, Doom 3, and Half-Life 2.

It was ultimately a game undone by its own runaway ambition - PCs of the era struggled to run it properly, and the rest of the game couldn't even begin to live up to its engineering ingenuity, yet it absolutely deserves a snug spot as a necessary precursor to much of modern AAA gaming.