Primal Prey, world map, by Alex Biffar.

A fairly unknown PC game from back in the day. Unfortunately I can no longer get it to work on modern systems. Even back then it was pretty buggy and was never patched. It is basically a hunting game, but you hunt Dinosaurs, much like the Carnivores series, except you get actual missions with different goals. There is only one map in the game and this is it, though this make it look a lot smaller than it is. Dinosaurs spawn randomly, but there are certain areas that they tend to be.

I think this is Primal Prey? I’ve never played it, never even heard of it, but a little bit of googling goes a long way if you’re willing to fill out the ol’ crossword in pencil like I am.

I never really played any dinosaur games that I can recall, other than one little dino-survival thing for the Amiga where you could play as either an herbivore or a carnivore, trying to eat enough plants or herbivores, respectively, to not die of starvation. Sort of a very, very low-rent Tokyo Jungle? I was never very good at it, and I don’t know if that’s because I was actually just bad at the game, or because the game was bad in general (a lot of odd titles for the Amiga were), or because the game was set at an extinction event and the whole point was that you’d die, or what.

That game also had a construct-a-dino mode that as far as I can recall you could do nothing with, which seemed to sort of be a nasty tease in a game where you play as a dinosaur. Like if Skyrim put you through character creation but then that character was just a picture in a locket some other dude carries around all game.