George vs Blizzard
Table of Contents
What’s the Theme Here?
Battle of the video game King Kong clones.
Simple as.
In fact, George and Blizzard are so much Kong clones that during the develop of Rampage, George was originally going to be Kong until the license fell through, and during the development of Primal Rage, Blizzard was codenamed “Kong.”
George
Say you want to make a giant monster game. What kind of game do you make? A fighting game seems the obvious answer, and that’s what most giant monster games these days are. You can’t go wrong with a proven formula. War of the Monsters and Godzilla: Destroy All Monsters are the time-tested gold-standards of giant monster fighting games.
But you know, monster films aren’t always monster vs monster. In fact, most of the classics don’t feature a second monster. King Kong, Godzilla, Mothra, Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, 20 Million Miles to Earth, Tarantula, The Amazing Colossal Man, etc, are are solo affairs. The name of the game with these films is man vs nature with man as Glass Joe and nature as a speed runner.
So why not make a game like that? Why not make a giant monster game that doesn’t focus on monster vs monster fights but instead focuses on putting the smack-down on a city, on ruining a municipality harder than a Democrat mayor?
It’s been done, and its been done well.
In 1981, Crush, Crumble, and Chomp was released for the TSR-80 and Apple II. It was basically a computer version of the board game The Creature that Ate Sheboygan.
In the board game, you have one map (of Sheboygan, naturally) and one player plays as the monster. You can either use premade builds to play as something like “Goshzilla” (best name for a Godzilla clone ever) or create your own monster through a point-buy system in case you wanted to created something out of Tad Danger, Substitute Ranger.
I wish there was a modern giant monster game with a create-a-monster system, that would be the best thing ever.
Because it’s a computer game, you get more than one map (Tokyo, Washington DC, New York, and Golden Gate), but there’s no multiplayer. You play as the monster and the computer plays as the hu-mans. You can choose from several objectives, but they all boil down to the obvious–break stuff and don’t die fast. Eventually, you’re going to be taken down, either by the military or by a mad scientist in a helicopter armed with a poisoned bullet (likely a reference to the ending of Beast From 20,000 Fathoms.) It’s not about getting out alive, its about taking down as many innocents with you as you can.
The Movie Monster Game improved on the graphical presentation of CCC and simplified the rules. Gone was the monster creation feature (a pity) and you no longer had to factor in the position of your head, what was in your claws, the direction of the wind, etc. It also scored the Godzilla license–that’s not like, Nogzilla up there, that’s officially Godzilla and MMG is an officially licensed Toho product. Wild, huh?
MMG had a lot of polish and love put into it. It’s opening and menu screen are stylized like you’re entering a movie theater. It even has cheesy ads for lobby refreshments. It also added a few scenarios so that the games felt more like the films they were based off of. You had a mode where you had to find and save a tiny monster (when you’re playing as Godzilla, it’s Minilla) which was similar to the plot of Mothra. In another mode you have to escape the city just like in King Kong (though strangely there’s no King Kong clone to play as.) For casual gamers, I represent trying out MMG before CCC and then if you feel like playing something with more customizability and number crunching checking out CCC.
And then in 1986, the monster vs city genre moved from board game sims and strategy games to action platformers. This was a huge move, because lets face it, strategy and board game sims are niche, and will always be niche, because the barrier for entry is higher. Your five year old is not going to play Crush, Crumble, and Chomp, but even he can figure out a joystick and two buttons.
The Rampage had begun!
According to PatmanQC (I highly recommend subscribing to him and watching his videos if you want to level up your arcade game knowledge), Rampage began with inspiration–wouldn’t it be cool for a collapsing building to be featured in a video game? A giant monster with a punch attack was created to break the buildings, and then was pitched…and promptly rejected.
The big guys in charge felt that Rampage was too different as a video game and didn’t like that you had to play as a bad guy.
Sometimes I feel like history is a struggle between creatives and stupid people.
Rampage was then taken to Midway, who gobbled up the idea, but with a caveat–they wanted to attach the Universal Monster license to the game because they were still leery about how well it would do at arcades. You think it would be weird to have Dracula, Frankenstein’s monster, and the Gill Man grow giant sized and break buildings? Well, yeah, but you got to remember this was 1985. We’re at the tail end of the Hammer revival so weird parodies are still feasible. However, while the devs signed off on King Kong, Wolfman, and Gillman, Universal was adamant they put in Dracula. The devs declined because they thought Dracula becoming giant-sized was just too weird…as opposed to the others…and so the Universal license was completely scrapped. Wolfman became Ralph, Gillman became Lizzie, and King Kong became our fighter in brown fur today, George!
The game’s story–what little there is–is that Scumlabs, a hilariously corrupt Captain Planet villain level industry, accidentally exposes several people to radioactive ooze which turns them into giant monsters. They go on a rampage, destroying city after city and even knocking over a moon colony for good measure (though to be fair, their destruction is kind of limited to three-four buildings and then they move on to the next. That’s pretty merciful in light of Russian/US invasions). Later installations in the Rampage series would throw in a lottttt more giant monsters to play as and would slightly retcon elements of the monsters’ origins, as if anyone really cared. This isn’t the kind of series to get hung up on continuity and lore. You’re giant monsters on a rampage. Go out and rampage.
I remember not liking Rampage much as a kid. I just wanted to destroy stuff, yet I was this big, slow critter who kept getting shot and losing life so I’d have to chase down the humans and the health they gave back was so tiny and I just wanted to break stuff man, the game was encouraging me to break stuff, but was preventing me from doing so. My kid-brain felt cheated. But now that I’m older and looking back, I appreciate the game a lot more. For its time, it easily the best choice for pixelated carnage. What other game in the 80’s let you knock over several buildings while eating people? Sure, you’d get Blast Corps in 1997 and Hulk: Ultimate Destruction in 2005, but it all started with Rampage.
And the gameplay isn’t bad either. You just need to be in the arcade mindset for it. You can’t scroll to another screen, remember, we’re so years away from Super Mario Bros, so the action has to consist entirely on a single screen. So the gameplay has to make the most of a small screen with big monsters and buildings, because the appeal here is getting to see big monsters climb big buildings, something previous monster vs city games could only represent by moving the monster sprite onto the building map sprite. How do you make it challenging? How do you make it a game? You make it so that sinking every building is a big task–you got to go up one side, across the roof, and down the other. You make it so that the player is constantly aware of how big they are and constantly looking at those big, beautifully detailed sprites, by making death come in the form of tiny projectiles shot by tiny targets.
I do think Midway did a great job with the game. Rampage wasn’t the first game where you played as a giant monster, but it was the first game where you felt like a giant monster.
If you want to try Rampage for yourself, I recommend getting a copy of Rampage World Tour for the N64. It’s a nice party game, and easily the best installment of the series. It’s not going to be surpassed anytime soon, and maybe not even at all. If the movie couldn’t bring out a new Rampage, I’m not sure anything can.
Speaking of which…
The Movie
Rampage got a movie?
What?
Well, damn. This really is a crazy timeline we’re living in, isn’t it? Anyone going to make a Sinistar film? I’d watch it. Even if it was complete trash I would watch it.
The George from the film won’t be factored into this fight. That’s not a knock against the film, I actually thought it was a neat little popcorn flick, sort of like what-if Mighty Joe Young got the Gozilla treatment and started fighting against other giant monsters, but it’s just too different from the source material, you know? It’s not just that the movie George is albino, which they probably did to make him as distinct from Kong and Joe as possible for marketing purposes, he’s not a guy that turns into a giant monkey, he’s just an ape that got bigger, and instead of teaming up with George and Lizzie to go on a rampage, he fights against them to protect the puny hu-mans.
Sorry fans of the film. But it’s like using the movie versions of Sonic and Mario, it just doesn’t feel right.
George’s Powers, Abilities, and Cool Stuff
A Very Big Monkey
It wasn’t that hard to figure out who was the bigger monkey in this fight. By looking at the humans around George and Blizzard, it’s easy to see George has the edge on his opponent in size.
And with great size comes great power, and as you all know, with great power comes great irresponsibility.
George is strong to, with a little work, tear down buildings. With one blow, George can shatter tanks and planes He can’t shatter a building with one punch, but he can cause it to fall apart (and its so satisfying when it does) by making holes around it in circle pattern. It’s like cutting out a magazine article, you got to surround the building. I’m not sure exactly how this causes it to fall down, but okay, I’m not an architect, and I’m not going to argue with a giant monkey. I do parent teacher conferences, I do that enough in off-line life.
George is reasonably durable for a giant monster. Rifles do hurt him, but it takes a lot to drain his health bar and force him to turn back into a helpless (and embarrassed) human.
George typically works with other monsters to destroy the hu-mans instead of fighting them…though you do get a power-up if the other player dies and turns into a human and you eat them. Remember that the next time you’re playing with your friend! But he (along with, presumably, your friends if you have any) did fight the quasi-boss of World Tour, Eustace Demonic, the CEO of Scumlabs who turns himself into a giant, obese, abomination to God and nature.
So Blizzard has an edge over George here–George isn’t as used to fighting his own kind as Blizzard is.
Arcade Power-ups!
Should George be allowed to pick up power-up items?
I mean sure, why not? What, are you claiming that in the “setting” for Rampage the power-ups don’t actually exist and its just a concept that exists solely within the interface between player and game? Bro come on, its an arcade game. None of its real. What, you can accept a giant ape that can eat 500 people and then shrink back down to a human but spontaneous power-items is where you draw the line?
Let the monkey play.
In World Tour, each monster was given a favorite food called a MEGA FOOD, and eating their specific MEGA FOOD would grant a MEGA HEALTH BOOST. George’s MEGA FOOD was bananas. Good call there. I bet if they made a Rampage game nowadays some jackass would change it to Brussel sprouts to be subversive.
George also gets a few offensive power-ups in World Tour. The hot loogies power lets you spew loogie fireballs (man, everything in the 90’s had to have a disgusting edge to it, didn’t it?), the death breath power lets you emit a sonic scream, and a barrel of toxic waste lets George transform into VERN–Violently (and violet-ly) Enraged Radioactive Nemesis.
Yeah, this dude. He’s like a big Joe Dante Gremlin if a Gremlin could use its ears to fly. It’s also a flying purple people eater. It’s not one-eyed or one-horned, but close enough. Props to Midway for the reference.
People Eater
No George, spare them!
Little kids that just saw the film and decided to emulate the game online were probably real surprised to discover that George actively chows down on people to recover health.
And you know something? His opponent is always followed by a train of followers. It’s not often someone’s opponent brings a snack tray to the party…
Cool Stuff
–Friends with the Rock.
–Did nothing wrong.
–You may not like it, but this is what peak Kong gameplay looks like.
Blizzard
The year is 1992. Video games are in the grip of Mortal Kombat fever. It was all about tournament fighters with Image sensibilities–violence, death, absolutely insane background lore and worldbuilding, and a tongue-in-cheek self-awareness. And recolors passed off as characters, don’t forget that (am I the only one that wants MK Ninjas vs Power Rangers? Even as just a gag fight?)
Oh, and fatalities, can’t forget those, though they never called them fatalities. I’m not sure why. I don’t think you can copyright a description. Case in point, Primal Rage’s fatalities were called “finishers.”
Say you wanted to make your own fighting game to cash in on MK mania, but you know if you just made a game about a bunch of weird martial artists pulling each other’s spines out, it’ll be drowned out by a sea of imitators.
So what do you do? You use giant monsters instead! You create…
Dino Rex.
Yeah, Dino Rex. I was surprised to. Primal Rage came out two years later in 1994.
Though, if you want to get really technical, Dino Rex was only the first dino fighter during the MK boom. There was actually a game for the TRS-80 Color Computer back in 1980 called Dino Wars. Red T-rex fights Blue T-rex in a prehistoric territory dispute over cactus badlands. Interestingly, the loser doesn’t die but runs away. I think we need more games like this. There’s something satisfying in making the other guy GTFO that you just can’t get with a fatality.
Believe it or not, Dino Wars may be the first ever fighting game. It predates Karate for the Atari 2600, which came out in 1982, and ties with Boxing for the 2600 (Boxing came out in July of 2600, and I can’t find what month Dino Wars came out. The information may be lost to time.)
Behold the original Ryu and Ken, everybody:
Dino Wars would be remade in 1990 for the Amiga. It was pretty cute game, I would have loved playing it as a kid. It came with a little encyclopedia menu to teach kids about dinosaurs and paleontology and to serve as a way to sneak a gun little battle chess game into schools. That’s right, it’s a game about an army of dinosaurs fighting another army of dinosaurs–truly a dino war! And it’s BATTLE chess, not chess, so you actually get to control the dinosaurs fighting. And they fight to the death now, no letting the losing dino live and run away. This was the 90’s, man. No mercy.
Dude, it’s like Archon! Anyone remember Archon? Archon was awesome! Any game where you actually get to control the chess pieces fighting is awesome.
I recommend checking out the Amiga Dino Wars, not only to see what kids back in the early 90’s were playing in the computer lab between games of Number Munchers and Oregon Trail but because I think it might be the first ever fighting game that allowed you to select your character (in the sense that you control your pieces) and the first ever fighting game that let you kill your opponents. Killing them was in fact, mandatory in Dino Wars, which makes it even more of a game of mortal combat than Mortal Kombat. Imagine that!
So Dino Rex isn’t the first dino fighter of the 90’s, it’s just the first dino fighter of the MK era (can we call it the MK Kontinuum?)
Dino Rex may have been the first dino fighter of the MK era, but it also sucked, don’t let the cool sprites fool you, the game is as responsive as Joe Biden on student loan forgiveness, so lets move on to the next Fred Flintstone fight club in line–Primal Rage.
So what’s the story behind Primal Rage? Why are all these giant monsters fighting?
The arcade opening and it’s cgi remastering on the Sega Saturn lay it out for you: one day in the near future, a meteor hits the planet causing civilization to roll back to archaic times and conflate sorcerery with science. It’s the classic Jack Vance dying Earth setup, just like Thundarr the Barbarian and Crystalis (remember that match?)
But in addition to this rollback, ancient beasts long held in slumber within the Earth awaken! It’s just like Beast From 20,000 Fathoms, Godzilla, and Superman: The Arctic Giant. These ancient beasts, called draconians, were worshipped as gods by primitive man long ago, and now in the new Earth (spelt Urth, so I guess everyone in the future really accentuates that first consonant) these old gods are worshipped again! But they are jealous gods, and so fight amongst themselves for the total domination of Urth!
The age of man is long over! Now is revived the age of the draconians!
And Blizzard, whose bio is revealed in his ending (remember when to know about the guy you picked to play as you had to beat the game as them first?), was a draconian “frozen in the heart of the great ice” who was freed by the meteor. He is “a noble god, the essence of animal spirit and power, who sits upon his icy throne and contemplates things man can never know.”
Who is he fooling, he’s clearly contemplating banana pops. You know it, I know it, all the universe knows it.
Sounds pretty simple, right?
But you know how fighting games are. There’s what’s obvious, and then there’s the lore. At the surface level, Street Fighter characters don’t seem like much at all, but then you get into the lore and it turns out that they can blow up islands and stuff.
Okay, buckle up, because we’re going to take a look at the instruction manual.
First of all, the draconians are actually gods. They’re embodiments of elemental principles given form and their existence is tied to the spirit and substance of Earth…I’m sorry, Urth. I don’t want to be using Urth’s slave name, but I just can’t help it for some reason. They’re spiritual beings, and the big monster you see if just a form they assume. They embody life and death, growth and decay, good and evil, real primal concepts. Blizzard, for instance, is the god of wisdom, goodness, and ice.
I mean, why not ice? What, you wanted light powers? That’s so played out for gods of goodness.
Then things get weirder.
A wizard from another dimension named Balsafas comes to Earth and decides that the draconians are a threat to the entire galaxy. He wants to kill them off, but though he’s powerful, he can’t kill a single one of them. But he gets a plan. He seals one of them, Vertigo, in the moon Rita Repulsa style, and this creates an imbalance within the spirit of the Earth which seals away the draconians and creates a giant explosion that does away with the dinosaurs.
But the meteor disrupted Balsafas’ magical seals, allowing the draconians to rise again and form two factions–the Destructive Beasts who want to total the world, and the Virtuous Beasts who want to preserve it.
Blizzard, being the god of goodness and the guy on the cover of the box, because the leader of the Virtuous Beasts. Blizzard was kind of like the Ryu/Jago/Liu Kang of Primal Rage. He was the good guy good guy, the vanilla face character, though not all of his pals were as virtuous as he was. Team Virtuous Beasts consisted of himself, Armadon who was basically Anguirus’ tiny brother, the T-Rex Sauron, and the giant raptor Talon. Armadon is a good dude. Though he’s big into the whole “balance of nature thing,” the comic shows that he’s actually teaching his tribe industry so that they can return to how things were before the meteor. It’s nice to see an eco-head that’s figured out how industry creates means to preserve elements of the environment. But Sauron just wants to eat. As the god of hunger, he’s got a raw deal in that to maintain his immortality, he’s got to keep eating and eating and eating. He opposes the Destructive Beasts simply to protect his food stores. And Talon wants his tribe of raptors to rule over humans, keeping them as pets and cattle.
Blizzard likely teamed up with them only because the Destructive Beasts were so much worse. They included Diablo, who was pretty much Devil Dinosaur but evil and with the ability to breath fire, Vertigo, fresh from her Moon prison, and Chaos, the world’s last biogeneticist who sought divine immortality with his experiments and accidentally turned himself into a disgusting abomination. Unlike the other characters, Chaos is not strictly speaking, a god. He’s a guy that’s turned himself into the next best thing to a god. As his name implies, he’s all about chaotic destruction, but he’s infamously known as one of the most disgusting fighting game characters of all time. Bo Rai Cho has nothing on Chaos. Chaos attacks with projectile vomit, toxic farts, and comes with a fatality where he pisses on you and melts you down to skin and bones.
Hey, it was the 90’s. Gross was in. You had Boogerman, Ren and Stimpy, and Nickelodeon slime.
The comics also fleshed out Blizzard and his pals a little. In the game, their followers all pretty much the same with the only difference being that their Raquel Welch fur bikinis are different colors. But in the comics, each draconian’s tribe has a different cultural flavor. Vertigo’s tribe is Celtic theme, because druids be crazy and shit, just read Oi!: Tales of Bardic Fury if you don’t believe me. Blizzard’s tribe, being situated in what was once the Himalayas, are…Japanese.
Yeah. He’s a giant monkey weeb.
And then there was the sequel…sort of.
Primal Rage 2 was never released outside of a test cabinet which now rests at the famous Galloping Ghost Arcade in Brookfield. It was more or less finished, but it was declined a release because the higher-ups feared it wouldn’t turn a profit–the fools.
Should I include Primal Rage 2 for Blizzard in this fight? Yeah, I think so. True, the game never had an –official– release, but it was made, and you can play it today, and it’s finished enough to be a whole game. I call no foul.
Primal Rage 2 has a very interesting history, and this video here goes into it, but the general idea gleaned from behind-the-scenes lore and the 85% complete ROM floating around online that you totally shouldn’t download because video game piracy is evil and corporations really need your money, peon, was this–you know that meteor that caused this whole dying Earth…I’m sorry, Urth…mess in the first place? It’s not a rock, it’s an egg, and when the egg hatches it unleashes Necrosan who is like the Space Godzilla of the franchise. He was actually intended to be the final boss of the first game (in case you ever wondered why the game doesn’t have a final boss and instead forces you to fight all the draconians back-to-back) but they ran out of time and so shelfed him for the sequel. It’s why Necrosan actually had an action figure released with all the others–I bet that confused a bunch of kids.
You just know some kid spread rumors that you could unlock Necrosan if you beat the game with Chaos only using the fart attack.
Anyway, Necrosan’s deal is that he wants to destroy the world and infect humanity with his insect larvae spawn turning them into useful servants for his alien masters, who in turn are fighting a losing war against an evil more evil race of aliens.
Man, they really had ambitions for this series! Imagine if MK II set up Onaga and Chronica.
You’d think Necrosan would have gotten along with the Destructive Beasts, but no, he didn’t. It might be because they didn’t want to share the planet with a bunch of vaguely defined alien overlords. Necrosan opened up a can of whoop-ass on all the draconians and imprisoned them, but the draconians had a trick up their sleeves–their avatars, human champions that they can share their power with even while in dormancy. They can enlarge these humans to giant size and even transform them into copies of themselves. The avatars have to work together to defeat Necrosan and release the draconians.
Primal Rage 2 was thus sort of like Bloody Roar but everyone is a giant. I don’t think this was the right direction for the series. The whole avatar concept, while novel, feels like a sour note. We’re here for the giant animals, not giant people, and the stop motion gives the humans a cartoony look that really clashes hard with the draconians. The probably put in the humans to try and capture more of the traditional fighting game audience. They probably figured that sells were down below expectations because the game had animals, not because the game had a really bizarre and really frustrating “hold down two buttons then move the joystick to do a super move” mechanic (more on that later!)
Blizzard’s avatar was a samurai with an ice katana named Kaze, because of course a big weeb like Blizzard would pick a samurai as his avatar. Kaze isn’t going to be factored into this fight because one, he’s technically an entirely sperate character and while he is empowered by and in spiritual connection to Blizzard, he’s no more Blizzard than Moses is Yahweh, and two, by his very nature he’s kind of a downgrade on regular Blizzard. He borrows Blizzard’s power, but he is not Blizzard’s power in total.
Now there’s one more weird twist to Blizzard’s story and it comes with his Primal Rage 2 ending.
After vanquishing Necrosan, Blizzard crunches the numbers in his monkey brain and figures out that if he adds enough ice to the North and South poles that he can alter Urth’s rotation in such a way as to raise Atlantis from the depths and release its builders, the rest of his sasquatch race.
So Blizzard is a giant ice-creating weeaboo monkey Atlantean. Atlantis was built by giant monkys.
You know, sasquatches are usually believed in by the same people that believe in Atlantis, but I don’t think they ever cross streams like this. It’s like if ghosts were also space aliens…though now that I type it, that does sound like a fun little worldbuilding exercises…
Man, why can’t Japanese fighting games ever be this weird? My imagination is legitimately getting inspired by Primal Rage.
Further Information
There’s something I got to talk about.
It’s bothering me greatly.
No, it’s not the fact that school shooters are always known by the FBI who are notorious for encouraging and enabling mentally disturbed young men to commit mass slayings under the justification of “entrapping and preventing” yet the FBI is never investigated for this practice. That’s long subsided to a dull pain in the back of my mind.
What bothers me is this:
Why is Blizzard brown?
Let me get this off my chest real quick. I’m going through a Mandela episode here. I remember this dude being a blue-skinned monkey with white fur, but as I researched him I found that he had a lot of brown to him with his white coloration mostly limited to his back. Don’t just take the box art as evidence, look at the game itself.
I swear this dude was white. I got a vivid image of my child self looking at the Primal Rage Sega Genesis box in the Albertsons video rental area and the dude was whiter than Shaun King.
Digging a little further, it seems that the Primal Rage guys pushed for Blizzard to be white. His player two color looks way more like the Blizzard I remember as seen here (and I recommend watching this playthrough over the previous. The last guy was kind of a button masher and didn’t use the special moves while this dude is a pro and knows the combos).
Blizzard’s action figure was also white. Yeah, they had action figures. EVERYTHING had an action figure back then. Look at the commercial! God I wish they still made commercials like that…
In the brief comic series (as in they only made two issues out of what was supposed to be four), Blizzard was also white.
Even in the Primal Rage parody on Dexter’ Lab, Blizzard is white!
It seems that Blizzard was white everywhere else but in the actual game!
And in the unreleased sequel (more on that later), you guessed it, Blizzard is white!
So what I’m saying is, if this ever gets animated by a vs battle show, Blizzard damn well better be white. Brown Blizzard is like Ryu with shoes. It’s his prototype look.
And you know, its a weird little commonality Blizzard and George have in that they both started brown but as time went on they transformed into giant white apes.
Okay, OCD digression over.
Now ready yourself for another.
I got a real soft spot for this game, jankiness and all. It’s a beautiful little time capsule of 90’s childhood. Sure, Primal Rage may not have been the most technically sound fighter, but it sure was memorable. It never reached the popularity of Mortal Kombat, but it was way above offerings like Eternal Champions and Kasumi Ninja. It even got action figures! I can’t ‘think of another fighting game franchise outside Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter that had toys in the 90’s.
It had heart, it had personality. It’s stop-motion graphics bring to mind the monsters of Ray Harryhausen, and the devs even cited Harryhausen as an inspiration. That alone makes me want to give them a medal for creativity, since you know know much of a Harryhausen fan I am, but there’s more to love. Health bars are depicted by hearts that beat faster and faster the more damage you take until they explode. Stun bars are depicted as brain stems. You suffer brain freeze, more or less, if you take too many hits at one time. Winning is called conquest, flawless victory is called total domination, rematches are called vengeance, and you know how in Street Fighter II the level screen between matches is a world map showing you flying around the planet fighting people in their home countries? Well, the world map in Primal Rage has you conquer the territory of your rivals until you rule over a neo-Pangea in the shape of a dinosaur skull breathing fire.
I love this game so much.
The coolest thing is that you have worshippers.
Every giant monster is worshipped as a god by the fallen and tribalistic survivors of humanity and they cheer on their giant monster when its winning and weep in despair when it dies.
Man, I kind of feel bad when I win in Primal Rage. I don’t just kill another giant monster, I killed a god, something worshipped by people breaking down into an existential crisis as I keyed in the fatality.
Sucks to be them. Never worship a god with a hylic component, it’s just asking for disappointment.
And for readers that don’t know what “hylic” means, now’s a great time to google it. Teach yourself something cool.
The worshippers are one of the coolest mechanics in Primal Rage and I wish other fighting games had similar systems. Your score (remember when video games had scores?) isn’t just a number, its the number of humans that worship you, which is awesome in and of itself, but this manifests in gameplay as a gathering crowd of worshippers that, as I’ve mentioned, cheer you on and react to how the fight is going. When you pull off a cool combo, your worshippers come forward from the background to kneel at your feet. When you get stunned, they come forward to try and encourage you to shake it off. While they’re in the foreground, you can eat the worshippers–yours or your opponent’s–to gain a bit of health back. Every character has a designated special move for eating people and some eat people faster than others.
That’s soul. That’s just pure soul.
Eating your own worshippers will detract from your score and thus total number of worshippers, because “worship me, I think you’re tasty,” is a hard sell, but eating the worshippers of your opponent will add to your total because who doesn’t love a good jihad genocide?
Kill em’ all, Blizzard will know his own.
Was this the first pet simulator in video games? Yes, I think so. The worshippers depend on you and positive actions bring positive reactions from your worshippers while negative actions bring negative reactions. In the end, before the final battle, your worshippers will offer themselves to you as sacrifices to restore your strength before the boss rush stage (meaning you get an extra health bar whose size depends on how many worshippers you eat). This is just like the inevitable moment when a chao/digimon/nightopian/whatever dies and leaves an egg for you to raise, just with more bloodshed.
Mom told me that my Tamagotchi sprouted wings to go back to his home planet.
You accept the sacrifice of your worshippers so that you may go forth and conquer in the name of the greater good–or alternatively, you gleefully chow down on them because you are a mighty god and they are puny hu-mans.
Think of it like the 90’s version of emergent gameplay. You get to the same bloodbath but through different motives.
And look at the dates–
1997-Digimon
1996–NiGHTs Into Dreams (It’s Nightopian system was part of Sega’s A-life project which would be fleshed out into the chao gardens of the Sonic Adventure series)
1996–Tamagotchi
1994–Primal Rage
Who would have thought the first pet sim would be a fighting game…or that the pets would be people?
The worshipper system is 11/10, but not every bit of innovation in Primal Rage was good. I think the devs dropped the ball (ha ha) with trying to innovate special move input mechanics. You see, for…pretty much every fighting games, special move are done by doing a movement and then pressing a button. You make a quarter circle with your stick or pad, press a button, and out comes the fireball. But in Primal Rage, its the other way around. You press and hold the button and then make the directional movement.
Not only did this mess with people who already built up schemas playing Street Fighter II and Mortal Kombat, but you had to hold down two buttons on a four button system and then do the move. Sometimes you had to hold down all four.
The idea here was good. The idea was to make the game approachable for casual button mashers. The idea was that, in their flailing, they were more likely to make the cool moves come out if the moves were button first, movement second. This documentary here (featuring an interview with one of the devs) goes into more detail, I highly recommend it.
The idea was good–but in practice it was horrible. Dev guy says that Primal Rage’s inputs are easier to figure to figure out than, so say, the classic dragon punch movement. I got to disagree and disagree hard with him here. I’d much rather spaz out on the bottom left quadrant of my pad than try playing button-piano. I’d much rather do the SNK pretzels than button piano. I really think the special moves were a big detriment to the game. Who knows? In another world, maybe the special moves were changed, and people now play Primal Rage 5 at EVO.
But there were other innovations which I feel Primal Rage pulled off pretty well. It featured a cheese detection system, and I think it may be the best thing I’ve seen in a fighting game since Dive-Kick’s Fraud Detection. What the system did was that whenever someone tried to lock their opponent in an infinite by so say, spamming Blizzard’s ice moves, the move would play, but without the hit or effect. Blizzard would raise his arm to summon ice, but no ice would come out, and a symbol of a hunk of cheese crossed out would show up in the middle of the screen.
This is so much better than just changing the properties of consecutive hits to prevent infinites, which modern fighters do. This announces to the arcade that someone is being cheesy. Even if you lose, you win a kind of victory, as you weren’t a cheese-meister.
I recommend trying Primal Rage. Yeah, there will be jankiness. But its a nice experience you won’t find with any other game.
It’s radical, man. It’s primal.
Blizzard’s Powers, Abilities, and Cool Stuff
Ice Powers
Can you believe I didn’t intend for the “cool stuff” pun?
Someone on the dev team really liked Sub-Zero, because Blizzard is basically King Kong plus Sub-Zero. His freeze powers are very similar. They turn the enemy blue, end in a second, and have the inexplicable ability to make those frozen become perfectly still in mid-air in violation of kinetic energy and gravity. If anything, Blizzard has an edge over Sub-Zero because he doesn’t suffer from double ice backfire.
Blizzard has two ice moves (again, like Sub-Zero in MK 1, who had the ice ball and an ice slide). He’s got a slow-moving ice projectile shot from his mouth, which got faster in Primal Rage 2, and an ice wall he summons from the ground. The ice wall in particular is really good. Punishes jumps, stops projectiles, easy to combo into and out of, it’s great. And Blizzard does a cool RISE, MY ICE! pose when he does the move.
It’s worth noting that Blizzard’s ice powers don’t work like most ice powers do. He doesn’t free water in the air into ice. Instead, he actually generates ice. He magically causes ice to form out of nothing. This is explained in his Primal Rage 2 ending where he actually adds so much ice to the north and south pole that he tilts the planet just right so that Atlantis rises out of the oceans. You can’t add mass just by freezing water.
Superstrength
Blizzard is a strong and, relatively speaking, tactical fighter. He has a dash punch of varying length and power called the mega punch, think of it a little like Makoto’s punch. He can even cancel it to feint. Smart monkey! The mega punch packs a lot of ommph and is capable of sending other giant draconians flying.
Blizzard also has an anti-air grab where he jumps up and tosses his opponent back down to Earth. I’m sorry, back down to Urth. This move works really well with the ice wall move. You freeze them in mid-air, and then you air-grab them.
But how strong generally is Blizzard and other draconians? That’s hard to say. I certainly wouldn’t put them anywhere near where vsbattlewiki puts them. They take a lot of assumptions like thinking Diablo’s ending has him set the entire planet on fire in one attack when the actual ending says that someone from “across the sea” came to challenge Dialblo in the end. They also think the continents in the game got that way because of the draconians moving them while they fight, but that’s not what actually happens. The meteor landing caused the continents to shift–I don’t know how exactly, the lore is murky on this point, but it probably has something to do with the “spirit of nature/balance of nature” thing. If Vertigo getting trapped on Earth…sorry again, Urth… was enough to cause the planet to imprison all the draconians then it seems like Necrosan landing in his meteor-egg was what caused the continents to shift. As for how the continents changed in Primal Rage 2, we don’t have a lot of information on that, but its reasonable to think that it was caused by the meteor releasing Necrosan and further putting the spirt of nature out of order and not the draconians brawling.
Still, draconians are pretty powerful. Blizzard’s to-the-moon fatality doesn’t actually send opponents to the moon, but it does send them sailing over the horizon in a single punch. Tor’s Primal Rage 2 ending has him and Armadon throwing Necrosan’s meteor egg into the sun. The book adaptation, Primal Rage: The Avatars apparently has a line where Blizzard gets worried Chaos is going to knock him into the moon and that seems like hyperbole at first glance but in light of Armadon and Tor ehhhh…it doesn’t seem all that unlikely he’s being serious. And back in the Mesozoic wars, dimension hopping wizard Balsafas took one look at the draconians and went “Nope, I can’t kill them. The best I can do is send one to the moon.”
Do I think they’re continent level like vsbw? No. But I’d say they’re punch-you-to-the-moon level. Big mountain level.
Atlantean Sasquatch
You read that right.
Blizzard’s Primal Rage 2 ending is really weird. It reveals that Blizzard is actually a member of a race of draconian sasquatches who built Atlantis
So…yeah. Blizzard is actually really smart. His people were the Atlanteans. And he somehow crunched the numbers to figure out
I suppose the writing was always on the wall. I mean, the tribe he leads in Primal Rage manages to survive in a land of ice and snow. That implies some pretty good logistics on behalf of the big ape in charge.
Zen Warrior
If Blizzard is ever in a jam, he enters a state of samurai zen which boosts his damage. It’s like the X-factor from MvC3 except that it gives a blue aura instead of a red one.
If you think Blizzard being a zen master and powering up like Domon Kasshu is crazy, his buddy Armadon enters samadhi. The dude’s mind contemplates the universe without the restrictions of ego.
Apparently, the universe wants Armadon’s opponent to die.
It’s worth noting though, that as cool as zen mode and samadhi mode are, they’re just recolors of the rage modes other giant monsters get. It’s kind of sad that Chaos going insane is just as much of a buff as a zen state.
I debated with myself whether to include zen mode for Blizzard because it’s exclusive to vs mode. One-player mode doesn’t have it. If you get your ass handed to you in one-player, you’re just going to lose. What, you think 90’s arcade developers were going to give you a bounce-back in one-player? The bounce-back is you putting another quarter in, chump.
But I decided to give Blizzard the zen mode. I’m giving both George and Blizzard the benefit of the doubt when it comes to game mechanics. George gets his power-up items so its only fair to give Blizzard his zen mode.
People Eater
No Blizzard, don’t!
Though a noble god of wisdom and goodness, Blizzard is capable of and willing to chow down on his followers for instant health boosts.
He’s a big monkey weeb. He probably sees it as samurai performing their giri to their shogun. Who are you to deny their sacrifice? In life, they are nothing, but in death, they become energy for the monkey god of justice.
Cool Stuff
–The temperature of his opponent
–His stage music, which is incredibly chill for a game about giant monster homicide.
—Giant Atlantean sasquatch ape weeaboo god of wisdom, goodness, and ice.
So Who Wins?
Blizzard conquers.
And he won’t even need to enter his zen state to do it.
George is bigger…but that’s about the only advantage he has.
When I went into this fight, I had my money on George. He was more cartoony. His gameplay features him shrugging off modern weaponry. But I didn’t know Blizzard. To me, he was just Sub-Zero King Kong. I didn’t know he was actually a god who fights alongside beings that can toss things into the sun. I didn’t know he was an Atlantean sasquatch.
Let’s start with the biggest factor in play here–raw power. In a fight between giant monkeys, raw power is really all you need to win. George can knock down buildings…after he punches them enough times. Blizzard is able to punch giant monsters over the horizon, his friend Armadon threw a meteor into the sun with an assist from his avatar Tor, and his ice generation was so good that he was able to create enough to tilt the planet.
Advantage Blizzard.
But raw power isn’t the only edge Blizzard has over George. Let’s say we use Swank logic to buff up George so he can match Blizzard by saying that he’s “large city level” even though he in no way destroys a city in one attack or even several hundred attacks. Blizzard still wins because his powers and moves are just going to bamboozle pure George.
Rampage monsters are like giant slapstick children. They got to grab everything, they got to climb on everything. George sees an ice breath projectile coming to him, he’s going to try and grab it, and get frozen. George sees an ice wall, he’s either going to try and punch through it or climb over it, and get frozen. And as for George’s power-ups, Blizzard has an answer to them once he figure out what they are and what they do–he just freezes them. George can’t pick them up then.
And as weird as it sounds, Blizzard is actually way, way smarter than George. I know, you’d think it would be the other way around because George is a human turned into a giant ape while Blizzard has always been a giant ape, but Blizzard is an ancient god capable of running a thriving quasi-Japanese society in the Himalayas. His people created Atlantis. He somehow figured out how to tilt the planet by building up the polar ice caps in such a way as to raise Atlantis from the depths and free his ancient Atlantean sasquatch brethren.
Compared to this, a normal dude like George just can’t compare in brains.
Or in brains, as in the brain meter that’s going to be empty out faster than a Biden rally as Blizzard combos him into oblivion.
What about VERN? VERN-mode isn’t going to save George. The fireballs get shut down by the ice walls, and I’d pick Blizzard to win a projectile war over VERN. Remember, he output enough ice to tilt the planet. Sure, I doubt he did it in a day, but that should let him put out enough ice to ground VERN. Blizzard’s air-grab will also help him with VERN.
As George or VERN, George loses.
The fight should go like this–lean into the slapstick of the fight. George enters a time warp and finds himself in the city stage from Primal Rage, because its the coolest stage, and you got to have George and Blizzard fight on one of the skyscrapers to reference Rampage. George eats one of Blizzard’s followers to start the fight and at first George is on the back foot because he keeps bumbling into Blizzard’s attacks. He tries to eat the ice projectile. He tries to punch the ice wall. Then George recovers with power-ups and blasts Blizzard with a death breath attack.
The fight goes to a skyscraper, and they both try to climb it from opposite sides. You got to bring Rampage gameplay into this. They trade swipes and punches as they climb until Blizzard freezes George and heads to the top. Pissed that Blizzard is going to get there first, George scrambles up to the top…only to see Blizzard start to climb back down and punch the building to cause it to crumble. Cue the cute Rampage animation of Blizzard covering his eyes as he jumps and gets air-grabbed by Blizzard and tossed to the ground.
They keep fighting with Blizzard having the advantage due to his range game, not much you can do against ice projectiles and dash punches when a jab is virtually all you have as an attack. George turns into VERN mode, and that makes Blizzard hunker down behind ice walls. If we were going to put in Kaze just to show off all that Blizzard could do, we would probably put in Kaze here, but I really don’t want to include him at all. Blizzard then shows off that god of wisdom title by ground-pounding a fissure, destabilizing a nearby skyscraper to fall on VERN, which turns him back to George, because he’s got to die as George. It’s an honorable death that way.
George goes to pick up a turkey and a coffee uncovered from the skyscraper rubble, but Blizzard freezes the power-ups before he can touch them.
Cue a big uppercut that send George flying through the air, taking out several pterodactyls as he goes, and planting himself on the side of another skyscraper. Blizzard dashes in and the music swells as he freezes the entire skyscraper including George and then shatters it all with one punch.
George lands and gets up, ready to resume fighting…but then reverts back to his human form.
Then Blizzard picks up George and eats him, for Blizzard is a jealous god, and thou shalt have no monkey gods before Blizzard.
Oh, and the fight music would have to be called Primal Rampage. I mean, what else could you possibly name it?
it not often primal rage gets cover in versus
Actually I think I only found one instance of a versus battle feature a primal rage character, though compare to your research it kinda sucks. I find it kinda ironic that this battle is an ape vs ape fight considering comic trope’s recent video and that atlantean part a little more ironic (I know exactly what my next superhero idea’s gonna be)
In terms of feedback, you might wanna double check somethings, there are point where you repeat word mix up george and blizzard’s name’s