Primal Rage

Developer: TWG
Publisher: Time Warner

Primal Rage was a 2D fighter that garnered quite a lot of attention in the arcades during its heyday, it had an interesting premise of dinosaurs and giant apes battling it out for control of a post apocalyptic Planet Earth (Or Urth as the game calls it), features amazing graphics and animation for the time and it even took a page from Mortal Kombat, offering over the top violence and stage fatalities.

I certainly can't point any fingers at the game's production values, the monsters, while 2D are animated in CG, giving it a stop-motion feel while the humans are all animated through digitized sprites, similar to Mortal Kombat, finally, the backgrounds feature some really nice parallax scrolling giving a great feeling of depth and I love how the villagers will often run into the battle just so they can get their ass kicked.

Unfortunately, as awesome as the game looks, I was never a fan of how it controls, especially when it came to special moves, you're always required two press two buttons at the same time and then input two or more directions, on a console this takes some time getting used to and if the direction you were supposed to press was 'up' then chances are that you'll just end up jumping instead of pulling the move.

On the PC however I found it impossible to pull these moves off with my OS, see, Windows XP, Vista and 7 don't register when three or more keys are pressed at once, meaning that unless you're playing this on Ms-Dos (not Dos-Box) or Windows 95, pulling off special moves is impossible, it doesn't help that the keyboard layout is awkward at best, you use the keypad to move and the home, end, page up and page down buttons to fight, though I did try to connect a 360 and a PS3 controller and then setting them up with X-padder, but even then I couldn't pull off the moves due to Windows' input limitation.

Maybe this game is worth it if you still have an old computer lying around or if you already have a dual boot setup system installed, but if you don't fall into either category, than its probably better you skip this one

Pros:

- Graphics look great from an artistic and even technical standpoint

- Giant dinosaurs fighting each other? If nothing else the theme itself is awesome

- Love the continue screen with the girl begging you to keep playing, so cheesy!

Cons:

- Special moves are impossible to pull off unless you're playing this in Dos or Windows95

- Keyboard layout is extremely awkward, making a controller mandatory

Final Grade: D-

The cover art certainly stands out, you have a very detailed rendition of Blizzard screaming at the player, it kind of calls out to you.

The manual however is kind of a mixed back, it gives you some backstory, character descriptions, their special abilities and general information about the game, but I have some problems with it, the first is that it turned high and low punches and kicks into numbers, so when I'm reading the attack combinations, I'm constantly flipping to the first page just so I know if a '3' means a low kick or a high punch.

The manual assumes that you're using a controller, granted that's the best way to play the game so it's a minor a complaint, but this is still a PC game, I'm sure many people back in the day played this with a keyboard and lastly, I wish they had printed the instructions in color, but this is just another nitpick.

It's a shame that they didn't add anything to the packaging, like a foldout poster with artwork on one side and the special moves on the other, the manual isn't perfect but it's still pretty good and the game's cover art always make me want to fire up Primal Rage one more time.

Packaging Score: B