Starting as a lowly fish in the primeval oceans, you gradually evolve legs that let you emerge from the water, then dominate the continents as a dinosaur, and then proceed as a mammal through the ice age until you eventually become a human in time for the final showdown with a giant amoeba. E.V.O.: Search for EdenĮ.V.O.: Search for Eden has as its central conceit a mechanic that I’m flabbergasted nobody has copied by now: you hunt prey and evolve your creature body-part-by-body-part until you become an apex predator. What you probably won’t see in the new Far Cry: anthropomorphic pigs, gliding using an umbrella, mermaids. There’s, uh, there’s a good chance you’re going to see something like that in Far Cry Primal. Tomba! was unique and interesting when it was first released because of the way it structured its objectives: having multiple missions running simultaneously and asking the player to backtrack and accomplish side-missions in order to unlock new areas. He’s got the big hair, the green loincloth/shorts ensemble, the pronounced canines-if he’s not an anime teen caveman, I’ll eat my bearskin. But Tomba himself, the protagonist, is obviously a caveman.
Okay, full disclosure: Tomba! isn’t really set in the prehistoric age.
Actually, laid out like this, Tail of the Sun sounds an awful lot like what Far Cry Primal is probably going to be like, minus the whole mammoth-tusks-stacked-to-the-sun thing. Mostly, this involves wandering a vast, green landscape, picking up items and eating them to improve your caveman’s (or cavewoman’s) stats, but there’s also a fair amount of battling wildlife, from saber-tooth tigers to paleolithic bison to the mammoths that are your ultimate objective. Tail of the Sunįew developers released more out-and-out odd games for the PlayStation than ArtDink, and Tail of the Sun is no exception: the game sees you taking on the role of a series of cavemen as they attempt to grow their tribe, explore their territory, and collect enough woolly mammoth tusks to build a tower to the sun. ( Far Cry Primal will almost certainly not feature this.) 2. The Bonk games didn’t have the flash of Sonic or the polish of Mario, but they’re fantastic little platformers with bright, cartoony visuals and plenty of prehistoric enemies: parasaurolophuses, giant dragonflies, some sort of iguanadon wearing boxing gloves… At the end there is a tiny, pink plesiosaur princess who gives you a kiss for finishing the game.
The TurboGrafx-16 didn’t have nearly the install base of the SNES or the Genesis, but it did have a mascot to go toe-to-toe with Mario and Sonic: Bonk, the Charlie-Brown-lookin’ caveman, whose primary method of attack was (appropriately) to smash his head into things.