Primal Rage - SEGA Saturn - Intro & Arcade Playthrough as Sauron with Ending [4K60]
22Full gameplay, longplay, playthrough, walkthrough trueplay and guide of Primal Rage on SEGA Saturn as Sauron. It many not be quite arcade perfect, but this Saturn version is very close to the original 1994 Atari Games PCB. There's some incorrect audio, missing animation frames and visual effects like the background lightning and skeleton on the final stage of defeated enemies.
As a whole this plays very close to the original arcade and the Saturn version looks to have the least amount of cut frames with the PlayStation version coming a close second. The high point of Primal Rage is the excellent stop motion animation that you can see in the game, alongside some really great looking and out of this world character designs. Making it looks very much like it was made by Ray Harryhausen who did the special effects on classic films such as Clash of the Titans (1981) and Jason and the Argonauts (1963). Sadly the rest of game is full of problems, the biggest one being that Atari didn't really finish the game and no we aren't talking about the unreleased sequel either.
The first key problem is the roster is very small with only seven character and two characters Diablo and Chaos, being smaller palette swaps of Sauron and Blizzard, finally Armadon, Talon & Vertigo make up the remaining cast. It seen that the final boss Necrosan and possibly an eighth player character Slashfang got cut. Both would go on to appear in the toy range long before the sequel. Both were also very much needed in the original to flesh out the game to nine characters to make it more on a par with other fighting games rosters at the time.
However, to make matters worse, because Necrosan was never finished the final battle was a placeholder gauntlet battle, that sees you face off against all seven characters again. This is a brutally unfair fight that makes the game almost impossible to finish on a one credit clear without months of practice or using cheat bots.
Then there is the control scheme, while the movement is excellent, the game used a six button attack system with only four buttons in arcades. The heavy attacks required, you pressed the two upper or lower attacks together to use them, making combos cumbersome to pull off! Fortunately the SEGA Saturn pad and control system address this issue, but it can't fix the terrible way special moves are pulled off, by holding down buttons and then moving the joystick, again making combos troublesome. While the game has an in depth combo system, there is no breaker move allowing for overly high damage combo with no escape.
It's not a terrible game and our editor has a soft spot for it, but it was clear this was made by a team that didn't understand the genre at all well. The end result is an arcade game that needed more work from Atari and one that despite getting so many home ports, really just wasn't worth buying compared to the competition at the time. It's not clear how successful the arcade was, it was fairly hard to find and disappeared from arcade very quickly. The home ports also reviewed badly and it's unclear how well they performed, but likely the fate of Primal Rage II may have been linked to sales of the home games.
The only home release of the arcade game todate were included on Midway Arcade Treasures 2 for Xbox, PlayStation 2 and Gamecube along with Midway Arcade Treasures Deluxe Edition on PC. Even this version features a number of bugs and emulation issues. Something MAME has as well due to certain elements not being emulated correctly yet.
Also known as: プライマルレイジ (Japan)
Year: 1996
Developer: Probe Entertainment (Saturn)
Atari Games (Arcade Original)
Publisher: Time Warner Interactive
(PAL & NTSC/U) Game Bank (Japan)
Genre: One on one versus fighter
Players: 1 - 2
Version Shown: PAL
Format: Sega Saturn (SS) / セガサターン / 세가새턴
Primal Rage is also on the SEGA 32X, Sega Mega Drive / Genesis, Super Nintendo, Gameboy, Game Gear, 3D0, Atari Jaguar CD, Amiga, PlayStation, PC, Xbox, PlayStation 2 & Gamecube. The game hasn't been released on an system now for well over a decade.
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Outros included in this video, template from Panzoid by Magnus DZN, edited by Riven, outro music is Kawaii! by bad snacks.
Footage is captured directly from original hardware in this case a PAL Sega Saturn console at 60Hz via RGB Scart. Using an Elgato Game Capture HD60 Pro and a open source scan converter (OSSC). Upscaled to UHD 4K to improve the video bit rate, watch in HD or UHD for best video playback on YouTube.
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