What Video Game Did I Play Yesterday?

Prehistoric Isle (Switch)

October 22nd, 2022

I don't click on my own profile enough, so this is a weird start to a post. A few days ago, though, I got a comment on a post from another user, faustian, and didn't see it until this morning. (Their site might be gone when you click, but the fact that things can be ephmeral if the webmaster chooses them to be is one of the cool things about Neocites, I think.) It was about taking my game experience and making the ultimate game, which is interesting, and I can also picture my trainwreck of an ultimate game with surprising clarity.

For this site, though, my feeling is more, "If I want to write about games, I'm gonna write about games!" This isn't anything complete or polished, nor does it have to be. If I want to turn it into something later, it's a nice bonus that I can lay the foundations here. Plus, having sat in classrooms talking about peer review and publication processes, it's hard to take the ability to just do what I want here for granted. I have no publication barriers, no editorial mandate to focus more on critical than experiential perspectives on games, no advertisers to worry about- it's fun, even on a bad day!

That's maybe not why I started this site, but it's why I stay excited about coming back to it.

All of that is maybe an unnecessarily thoughtful leadup to my discussion of last night's game, Prehistoric Isle. I have to take this weird medicine through a nebulizer machine right now, and it's boring, tedious, and unpleasant, but blasting through old arcade games makes it go a lot faster. I have to say, it's maybe not the ideal conditions under which to play Prehistoric Isle. By the end of it, my hands were shaking like crazy, which is not great for accuracy in a side scrolling shooter that's already pretty difficult. The difficulty seems thematically fair, though, because if you don't want to die, it's not a great idea to fly a biplane in a giant dinosaur's face.

I'm not sure I think this was a good game. The kills were super cheap, the screen got so swarmed at times that it seemed out to get your quarters rather than provide a fair challenge (which, fair enough), and I felt like the final boss's patterns were almost easier to parse and avoid than those of a lot of the bosses in the midst of the game. However, this is also a side scrolling shooter where a dinosaur can grab your plane out of the sky and crunch it up to kill you, with really cool sprite art, especially for 1989, and for that, I cannot recommend it highly enough. I took a lot of screenshots while playing, because it was neat, and picked the ammonite for this post because I thought it had good charm. All the bosses are pretty cool, though, and they made this pretty playable for me.

I'll probably have another game along these lines to post about tomorrow.