Retro Gaming: Primal Rage
There have been some pretty great fighting games, especially in the 90s when everyone was trying to clone the success of Street Fighter II and all of its incarnations. After Mortal Kombat opened the floodgates to ridiculously bloody and gory violence, Atari stepped up with a primordial fighter of their own, known as Primal Rage.
I loved this game. The control scheme was quite different than other fighting games of the era. Instead of performing a movement with the control stick followed by a particular button press, you did special moves in Primal Rage by holding the appropriate attack button(s) and then moving the control stick before releasing the attack button(s). It took some getting used to, sure, but it felt like second nature once you got into it. And boy was it easy to “get into it.”
Like, who can’t fall in love with a fighting game that features a bunch of overgrown gorillas and dinosaurs, battling it out as they chomped down on their poor human worshipers below. It’s like Rampage kicked up to the nth degree. My personal favorite character was Talon, which was based on a Deinonychus. Most people thought Talon was a Velociraptor, thanks to the latter’s appearance in Jurassic Park. My buddy Dylan Duarte was more a fan of Chaos, if only for his Golden Shower fatality. Too bad it got censored in the SNES version.
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