Valley Weekend : VIDEO GAMES : Playing Primal Rage Makes Prehistory Cool

Primal Urges: Ah, the good old days, the days when giant lizards roamed the Earth, fighting for territory and feeding off the flesh of the vanquished. Primal Rage--from Time Warner Interactive for all game platforms--is a fighting game’s fighting game, pitting dinosaur-type prehistoric gods against each other in a grudge match for world domination.

As such games go, Primal Rage is quite nice. Already one of the top games at the arcades, the home version keeps all the coolest elements, but pares them down to fit on 16-bit machines. On Super Nintendo, for instance, characters like Armadon, Chaos and Diablo are nice and big and backgrounds are full of colorful detail. Versions for 32-bit machines are on the way.

Gore factors can be switched around to fit the various tastes of players--from tame little snapping matches to blood-squirting orgies that end with the victor taking a bite out of his opponent’s hide.

Tasty. And all in all, a cool game.

Playday: Sony’s entry in the video game wars, PlayStation, hits shelves Saturday morning and promises to deliver. Sony likes to tell folks its system is 100 clams cheaper than Sega’s Saturn. But for $300, PlayStation buyers get only the main unit. No games. Expect to spend about $400 to pick up the game unit and at least one game, not to mention an extra controller and an RF cable for those playing on older television sets.

Plan to see Namco’s Ridge Racer and Sony’s Battle Arena Toshinden for sale on Saturday. The rest of the launch lineup is still up in the air, but over the next several weeks Sony and its licensees promise a raft of titles like Total Eclipse Turbo--a 3DO port from Crystal Dynamics--Novastorm from Psygnosis and, of course, a golf game.

That aside, the system rocks. It’s the one to beat this Christmas.

Start Me Up: So Bill Gates paid the Rolling Stones gobs of money to hype Windows 95 with their music. But no one seems to have noticed that the song in question also includes the line, “You make a grown man cry,” which is the reaction of choice for many new users.

PCs still have a long way to go before they can deliver the ease of use and high-end play that next-generation machines are already putting out, but Windows 95 holds at least the promise of less frustrating nights ahead for computer gamers.

I tried Activision’s Pitfall: The Mayan Adventure--proof that old games never die, they just change platforms--on Windows 95 and was amazed by how easy it was to get running. Drop the CD in the caddy and the game begins. No rewriting my config.sys file. No lockups. Very sweet.

On the other hand, getting Interactive Magic’s Apache--a DOS game--to run properly was a typical headache, made even worse because I am still learning the ins and outs of Windows 95 and its new relationship with DOS.

* Staff writer Aaron Curtiss reviews video games every Thursday. To comment on a column or to suggest games for review, send letters to The Times, 20000 Prairie St., Chatsworth, CA 91311. Or send e-mail to curtiss@news.latimes.com.