Tuesday 25 October 2011

Sega Mega Drive: Primal Rage

Year: 1995
Genre: Beat 'em Up
Players: 1
Our Rating: 5/10

Mini Review

Primal Rage, it’s a game that exists on the basis that any game can exist. Fighting games were nothing new back in 1995, in fact they make up a significant proportion of retro games. We had already been introduced to some of the gaming worlds great successes including the Mortal Kombat, King of Fighters and the Street Fighter Series. The market was getting a little crowded for conventional arcade style fighting games. However, Primal Rage was one of the break out titles in the arcades. Primal Rage looked and sounded great there. However the game fared less successfully in the home market. Due to the technical limitations the overall result comes off as a little second class compared to it’s competitors of the time.

Primal rage is in essence a 2 player beat ‘em up frenzy of dinosaur action. For some reason there’s also two playable King Kong style characters (Chaos and Blizzard) and cavemanesque characters as background interest. It’s about as chronologically confused a game as you will find. In adition to the giant apes you have the choice of playing Sauron, Talon, Armadon, Vertigo, Diablo which represent the more traditional dinosaurs. The smart option seems to be Talon as his speed seems the greatest and also inflicts good amounts of damage if you can pull off the combos. Primal Rage isn’t a bad game, it’s simply a game that took a look at the animation and sound design of Mortal Kombat and said “We won’t get sued if we make the characters dinosaurs”. All children will have some memory of this game if the passed an arcade in the mid 90’s. It’s worth a look but greatly overshadowed by it’s retro competitors.







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