I've been generous with other games. I let them off. I found beauty where there was none. Where others find only dirt, I found diamonds.
I can't do it for Primal Rage, this game is awful. Really, really bad.
It is not only the 3DO version, all versions of Primal Rage were bad.
It is not too hard to image the scene.
It is 1995, Jurassic Park was still popular, 'Walking with Dinosaurs' was on the BBC (I think) and everyone was playing Beat'em ups. Street Fighter II, Mortal Kombat, anything on the Neo-Geo.
Yes, digital fighting was big, massive, humongous, ginormous, you get the picture. So, a small group of pony-tailed big wigs sat around a table muttering on about the future of interactive entertainment. "What?", they thought, would embrace this new golden age of digital wonderfulness? Perhaps the mixing of these two things so close to the media watching public's heart. Namely dinosaurs and fighting.
So, after much grunting and groaning the pony-tailed bigwigs managed to squeeze a pitiful little blob of fighter from some lowly developers glands. After producing such a shameful secretion, he, the developer, had but one emotion... Primal Rage.
After some initial testing, the questions over how good the game actually was or wasn't, were finally answered. To their complete and total apathy, the game was declared still-born. And for the sake of humanity, it would have been better off left that way.
Yet, sadly, no. It had life thrust upon it.
'Bad', so they tell me, is a relative term. However, if that relative is Uncle Colin, the kleptomaniac ugly transvestite from Telford, who is dying from itchy groin syndrome, then 'Bad' is not a relative you'd want to go to the swimming baths with. And that is how the game testers felt about Primal Rage. They didn't want to go to the swimming baths with it or for that matter anywhere else.
However, a bad game should never get in the way of good profits. So they, the good marketing folk at Atari, went straight to plan B. Plan B is labelled: "Port it to every computer platform under the sun and market it until every-body's eyes bleed."
And lo, so it was written and so it was: It was available for every platform known to man, god and beast. Magazines blossomed to double their normal size, simply to hold all the extra Primal Rage advertising.
It was crap.
Totally, utterly, awful. Nothing stinks like forced-ware. And none were so forced than Primal Rage.
Let me reiterate just how rubbish this game is. My copy is 10 years old and still looks brand new. Compare this with my copy of Need For Speed, which looks like it's 100 years old.
Yeah, eBay, blah, blah, game stinks, yadada.
3DO kid.
