Primal Rage

Lets take a quick trip back to 1994.

Bill Clinton is president.  Boys II Men and Whitney Houston are on top of the charts. George Foreman is world heavyweight champion and Major League Baseball is on strike.  O.J. Is on the run. Kurt Cobain is dead.  And I don’t care about any of it because I am six years old.

It may have been an eventful year for the world, but my world revolved around video games and dinosaurs.  I knew more about dinosaurs than most people know about their own families.  The same was (and may still be) true of video games, especially fighting games.  I had grown tired of games like Mario and Duck Hunt, I was starting to get into RPGs, but at that time, I was all about Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat.  When I heard they were going to make a game that was essentially Mortal Kombat with Dinosaurs, I lost my tiny little mind.

It took a year, but in 1995 Primal Rage finally made its way to the SNES.  I begged and pleaded to go to KMart to buy it with my hard earned allowance, a request my parents obliged.  I had been talking incessantly about it for a year since I saw a preview in GamePro, so I am sure they were happy to.  This was going to be the best game ever.  It had to be...until it wasn’t.

It may have been a commercial success, but in no universe could I call Primal Rage a good game, at least not the SNES version.  I have certainly played worse, but outside the unique premise there really isn’t much substance.

There is a story, about prehistoric gods resurrected as dinosaurs vying to take over “Urth” or something like that.  It’s a fighting game, so I really don’t care, although it does play a little bit into the gameplay here.  Unlike most tournament fighters, you must defeat all the computer opponents with one character to conquer their region.  It kind of makes the game more frustrating than it needs to be.  

Graphically, the game looks outstanding....when its on pause.  As soon as the action begins, the character animations get very, very choppy.  The character models look like they are constantly covered in fog and all the attack animations are fuzzy.  This may sound weird, but the grounds of the arenas look like they don’t have any depth or texture, like they were made in Microsoft Paint or something.  The backgrounds are generally pretty boring, although there are a few that stand out.  The same is true of the music, there are a few standout tracks but most are forgettable. 

And speaking of boring, the cast of characters here is massively disappointing.  There are only seven, with two sets of palette swaps.  You have two T-Rex’s (Sauron and Diablo), a velociraptor (Talon), a Stegosauras ( Armadon), a weird snake like thing (Vertigo) and most disappointingly, two monkeys or apes or baboons or whatever they are (Chaos and Blizzard).  One monkey would have been okay for some variety, but there weren’t enough dinosaurs?  No Dilophosaurus? No Parasaurolophus? No Pterodactyl?  Come on.

Wow, I went a long way without talking about the actual gameplay.  Well, its nothing to write home about anyway.  The button layout is pretty standard for fighting games, with high and low punch and kick.  The problem here is the special moves.  Any fighting game fan is going to pick up the controller and try a quarter/half circle, charge move or Mortal Kombat style button combo.  Primal Rage uses button combos, but there’s a catch.  You have to hold one of the attack buttons and THEN perform the input for the move.  This is confusing and while it works okay on an arcade machine, it does not translate to a SNES controller.  Trying to hold Y and A while also pulling off a button combo and not getting destroyed by a computer is damn near impossible.

The characters all feel different, yet they all kind of play like characters from other fighting games.  Blizzard is the simian Sub-Zero and I started calling Sauron “Ryusauraus” after a couple opponents.  Not a fighting game character, but Talon also has an Oddjob vibe going on as he can’t be hit with high attacks. Chaos’s primary attacks are burping and farting, which I found juvenile even when I was a kid.  One of his fatalities (the one where he disintegrates his opponent by peeing on them) was edited out of the SNES version of PR and caused a mini controversy back in the day, resulting in the game being pulled from shelves and re-rated from T to M.  With all the blood, it should have been rated M to begin with. I guess the same ESRB employee that rated Doom Troopers rated this too.

Primal Rage was an interesting novelty, but there is really no reason to go back and play it today.  It’s biggest selling point, the graphics, just aren’t that impressive anymore.  Even then, there were so many better options.  You could certainly do worse (trust me, stay tuned next week to see how) but you are just better off playing Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat or one of the bevy of tournament fighters from the early 90s.

Version differences:  Primal Rage was ported to just about every console imaginable, but for an apples to apples comparison we will look at the Genesis and SNES.  The Genesis version looks even more washed out and choppy.  It doesn’t play that much faster, the sound is waaaaay worse and the controller layout is even worse for the controls.  The only thing it has going for it is the one uncensored fatality.  Unless watching a giant monkey take a piss on a velociraptor is on your bucket list (and I wouldn’t judge you if it is), stick with the SNES version.

4.25/10

Play this game if:

You are a dinosaur aficionado

You prefer Mortal Kombat to Street Fighter

You can find it in the arcade or on the PS1

Avoid if:

You hate frustrating controls

You prefer your fighting games to have more depth

Jurassic Park made you nervous