Continuing our series of “fighting game treasures”, we offer Primal Rage, a game in which you fight gigantic creatures that emerge from their slumber on Earth after civilization is destroyed by a meteorite(?).
Game system
- The game was a traditional 2D fighter, and although it had a standard joystick system for movement and four buttons for attacks, it featured several unusual features, such as: Notable movements in conventional games are performed by joystick movements culminating in the push of a button. Not in this game: you had to press two or more buttons and then perform the sequence with the joystick while holding them down.
- The game included a rudimentary anti-infinity mechanism: you couldn’t use the same special move twice in a combo. When you repeated the special action, it would not connect, and a cheese sign would appear on the screen (cheese = cheat).
- Stage Hazards are present in certain games, such as Eternal Champions and Injustice (meaning there are items on stage that can harm you). This game, um. It featured people you could eat for a living.
- The chip damage was there, but you couldn’t die from it; you had to take a clean hit.
- There were deaths throughout the game. Which is my favourite? The one of chaos.
Characters
- You had a total of seven characters to choose from:
- Sauron: A kind of T-Rex with a mouth that shoots waves of energy; the “Ryu” of the game. He also has a hook move.
- Diablo is a clone of Sauron, except that Sauron is a T-Rex that uses its jaws to unleash several fire blows.
- Blizzard: A colossal gorilla that specializes in ice attacks and fires a missile that freezes you. He has some fantastic combinations, which made him my particular favourite.
- Chaos is a clone of Blizzard, except this gorilla belches, urinates, and farts. Really.
- Vertigo: I’m not sure what kind of animal this is supposed to be, but it was the “zoned” figure of Dhalsim. He can even teleport.
- Amazon: It looks like a Triceratops and has one of the best attacks in the game: The Iron Maiden. Like an iron maiden, the insect rises into the air and falls with the spikes on its shell.
- Talon is a “small, weak and fast” character. I hated having to fight him.
Was he a good person?
It was definitely a lot of fun. The game wasn’t particularly polished; at times, the animations seemed lacking in smoothness or the collision detection algorithm (which decides when a hit lands and when it doesn’t) was “strange”, but it was still enjoyable. The combinations were fantastic and, by the way, not accessible at all.
