Because I grew up loving Kaiju like Godzilla, I always wanted a 16 bit tournament fighter featuring the larger than life creatures that I could control at my whim. Well, we never got that here in the United States. Godzilla Kaijuu Daikessen was released for the Super Famicom, but never saw an international release. The closest I had at the time was that Ultraman game on SNES, which may have been less awesome than my memory recalls. That'll get its due date here...

So when Primal Rage got a home port on various platforms (SNES, Genesis, Gameboy, Game Gear, 3DO, Saturn, PS1, Jaguar, 32X...), I was really thrilled, and I consider this my essential monster mash of a fighting game. The story is a meteor strikes the earth, causing a Cataclysm, leaving modern civilization in ruins and regressing to a primitive stone age and Earth becomes known as "Urth". Seven creatures awaken from within the Urth's crust and humans see them as their deities. Of the seven playable "gods", there are the nobel and more benevolent (Sauron, Blizzard, Talon, and Armadon) and the more chaotic and evil (Vertigo, Chaos, and Diablo). The roster may be small, even for fighters around this time period, but the production of Primal Rage is done with pain staking hand-crafted figures utilizing digitized stop-motion animation. So this fighting game has stop-motion animation, AND giant monsters, including DINOSAURS. Primal Rage has four of my favorite things on the planet.

Primal Rage was released at the height of the Mortal Kombat clones. While gameplay wise it's got its fair share of problems, it's more playable than Kasumi Ninja or Way of the Warrior. But that's like saying instead of suffering from a rusted rod being driven through your calf, a you get a slight bone fracture in your wrist. Primal Rage's fighting is clunky at best. There's chain combos and juggles, it feels like Incredible Technologies' Street Fighter the Movie (if you've ever had the joy of playing that game. Yes, I'm a fervent defender of the Street Fighter the Movie the Game. It's better than given credit), albeit pretty slippery. Then there's execution of the special attacks. I don't know what paint fumes they were inhaling, but I suppose Atari thought they were being different. In any general fighter, you'll input the common commands you may be familiar with, like quarter-circle forward and punch, Dragon Punch motions. In Primal Rage, you hold down one or two buttons, input the motions, AND THEN release the buttons. Works the same way for the fatalites. Yes, an impractical programming choice like that will certainly take a potential series far. At some point, the arcade versions were patched to include more conventional button inputs. I have a history of making fun of the various home ports of Street Fighter II, but when you couldn't patch a home port, an updated redistribution was the next best option (Thanks for the mid-air diagonal fireball, Akuma. You've been the bane of my Street Fighter play for 25 years). You can get used to it, but it's something that never gets recorded to memory and one of the elements of Primal Rage that's aged the worst. Frequenting Gamefaqs just to try and remember which button to hold down for a finishing move is a pain in the neck. Speaking of, the finishing moves in Primal Rage are pretty gruesome and visceral. I'll still say that Rage has my favorite fatalities for games of this era. Mortal Kombat's violence was turning into Itchy & Scratchy around the third game, so vicious monsters ripping into each other and eating humans to replenish a bit of health during combat was rather satisfying. 

A fun easter egg in the game is a volleyball mini-game can be triggered by swatting the humans and keeping them off the ground for a certain period of time.

Primal Rage may not have had a series of games, as plans to produce a sequel were scrapped when Atari folded. Over the last several years, the original arcade builds of the planned Primal Rage 2 in their incomplete stages were found, and by 2017, a playable emulation was available on MAME named MAME4RAGE2. The roster is small, but each monster fights unique enough to offer some variables. While its play style is rather antiquated compared to Killer Instinct, Primal Rage can be an entertaining novelty, and I still enjoy the hell out of it if I'm in the mood to throw down with some savage beasts. The stop motion digitized graphics highlight the time period when this existed and still looks fascinating to this day. The Saturn port is a very good port of the game, and my preferred choice. Because I can't stop putting over the Sega Saturn.