Rebooting Primal Rage: A Thesis

Those of you regular Chatzygoers may have had to endure me gushing about the new Killer Instinct, the reboot of the 90's fighting game series that most people don't really remember. Reboots as a thing are becoming increasingly popular nowadays - seems there's a big market for nostalgia, and one could indeed argue that Mighty No. 9 (which broke it's funding target in 24 hours holy shit) could be considered a reboot of Mega Man, since Capcom have no interest in the property anymore. With this in mind, I'm going to conduct a thesis on rebooting an intellectual property, one that hasn't seen much action since the halcyon days of the 1990's and probably deserves, out of all the ones I could think of, to get the modern upgrade treatment.

That property, predictably, is a fighting game. And that fighting game is...

...Primal Rage.

What?!
Primal Rage is an arcade fighting game developed by Atari Games and released in 1994. In it, one controlled not human fighters, but giant dinosaur gods struggling for control of a post-apoaclyptic "Urth" after a meteorite strikes the planet and wipes out modern civilization. With the seven characters divided into the "Virtuous Beasts" and the "Destructive Dinos", each one features it's own selection of unique special moves, as well as three gruesome fatalities to perform on defeated opponents. Another notable feature was the troupe of worshippers that followed your dinosaurs about, and occasionally could be eaten to regain health.

Whilst many point to Mortal Kombat as the sole progenitor of the Violent Games Controversy of the 90's, they forget that Primal Rage also had a large hand in the cause of the outcry and it's results. The gore in the game was frankly ridiculous - characters lost gallons of blood with every hit, the life meter was a heart that exploded when you lost and the fatalities themselves were often borderline tasteless. It was Chaos' Golden Shower finisher, where he dissolved the enemy to bones with his acidic urine, that resulted in many of the console ports becoming heavily censored, as well as the formation of the ESRB. To this day, nobody has been able to perfectly emulate the original arcade experience, due to unusual copy protection that has yet to be cracked.

Why?
The thing about Primal Rage was that despite being a clone of Mortal Kombat, it really took off. Atari had high hopes for making a franchise out of the property and pushed it as hard as they could with hundreds of home console ports, a trading card game and even tie-in action figures, which to this day are highly-regared and extremely saught-after collector's items. And while it didn't exactly gain mainstream popularity, the fact that it managed to carve out such a niche on it's own merits is certainly impressive and a sign that an audience for a remake certainly exists.

However, it simply wasn't to last. In the end, Atari simply gave up on the property, as it was deemed unprofitable due to the controversy surrounding it. This resulted in the cancellation of an update that would have outfitted the game with Necrosan, a skeletal alien dragon and the intended final boss, and the sequel, which featured Killer Instinct-style visuals, a new character called Slashfang and human warriors that could transform into the animal gods from the previous game. While the sequel was adapted into a novel, it was clear that Primal Rage had been abandoned as a future franchise.

Also, Killer Instinct got rebooted. If that game can, so can this one.

How?
Rebooting something like Primal Rage is no small task, so we're going to have to get straight to the bone of the matter and talk about the game mechanics first of all. A lot of the game was created in a mad attempt to distance itself from it's inspirations, Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter, and as such the system is a bit of a mess that requires something of an overhaul. Let's begin, shall we?

• Special Moves: This was the major thing that kept Primal Rage down. The commands for the Special Moves often required more than one button, and instead of traditional SF or MK controls, one had to hold down the attack buttons before performing the joystick motion. While this was remedied in later versions, and also indirectly lead to the creation of Negative Edge (look it up), the fact one needed to press multiple buttons made combos hard to remember and too complicated. In the reboot, Special Moves shoul be performed Street Fighter style, with the properites of the move changing depending on what button is pressed.
• Combos: Combos, while quite fast, tended to suffer due to the wonky nature of the Special Moves affecting the timing of Links. At best, Sauron could only pull off a maximum of 8 hits per combo, and while that's a lot in those days you couldn't get away with it in today's high-octane fighting-game market, unless you're Netherrealm. The introduction of String Combos akin to MK9 or Tekken would solve this issue, as this would allow characters to perform bigger and better combos whilst still feeling similar to the original game. Links would remain in as well, of course.
• Returning Mechanics: Several mechanics from the original Primal Rage would be kept in for prosperity, and also because of their use in the game. The short hop would remain, as it was vital for pulling of combos that required use of jumping attacks, and the Stun Bar, represented by a brain in the original game, would remain as well. The return of the edible worshippers would have to be considered deeply, as that could afford players too many advantages by recovering health.
• Super Bar: Like Killer Instinct and MK9, Primal Rage would benefit from include some sort of super meter into the mechanics. Not only would this encourage a more agressive playstyle in order to build it, but it would add an extra layer to the game's complexity that the original game sorely lacked. What it would be used for, besides the obligatory super attack, I am not sure of. That would be for more talented people to decide.
• Fatalities: It wouldn't be Primal Rage without the Fatalities. And just as MK9 got creative with it's Fatalities, so should Primal Rage. Sauron doesn't just eat you, he tears out your throat, then pins you down and rips out your beating heart. Armadon doesn't just electrocute you, he zaps your arms off and then takes off your head with his tail club as well. Diablo should burn opponents down to the bone, Blizzard should pummel foes to a pulp. Of course, classic Fatalities could make a comeback if there is enough interest.

But the mechanics are nothing if one has boring characters, and Primal Rage's cast of beasts were indeed the main draw of the game. Just like Killer Instinct, a reboot of Primal Rage should consider refining the characters into designated roles and removing the more over-the-top moves to prevent them playing alike. New characters would have to be created to buff up the roster, but here's a brief summary of the how first playable eight should be redesigned and updated.

• Blizzard: Include bracelets and armlets with mystical runes, ice-covered hands and feet akin to Sub-Zero. Very balanced character, has a move for any situation and can implement it easily. Shouldn't excell at one thing.
• Armadon: Cover him in dirt and moss, as if he's been sleeping under the ground for aeons. Make his design smoother and less cluttered, but still recognizably bulky. A grappler who excells at close range, can use electricity as a weak projectile.
• Talon: If we have to give a badass animal like Talon feathers, then make them big and flashy. He should have the feel of a Native American chief about him. A fast, nippy rushdown character with lots of mixups. Possibly a wall jump?
• Sauron: Base him on a stockier dinosaur than Allosaurus, make him somewhat bloated to reflect his role as God of Hunger. A zoning character that uses his sonic scream and weight to keep opponents away from him.
• Diablo: Make him look demonic, all horns and spikes and horrid outgrowths. Glowy eyes are a must. Another zoning character, this time utilizing teleports and different projectiles to confuse enemies.
• Chaos: Dress him in typical voodoo attire - bone necklaces, etc. Another grappler who also uses various status effects to curse others or bless himself. Whilst he should remain filthy and disgusting, this should be toned down massively from the original game.
• Vertigo: A more alien design would suffice, based on HR Geiger's works - more sleek and unnerving. A mixup character who has various tools to keep enemies on their tones. Should bring to mind Quan Chi from MK9.
• Slashfang: A bipedal smilodon who was going to appear in Primal Rage 2, but never did. A bulkier rushdown than Talon, Slashfang should excell at shoving opponents about and basically being a massive bully.

That's all I got for now. This post may be updated with more info in the future, so keep an eye on it. I may also create in-depth documents of how the characters should work and what moves and Fatalities they should have, if people are interested enough. Until then, feel free to discuss this in the comments!

A Pokémon Reboot Ramble (Update: Minor Ideas!)

Now, before we begin, I shall admit to all that I still enjoy playing the Pokémon games. There's something about catching a variety of coloured animals and making them beat each other up to evolve into bigger animals that is both oddly cathartic and maddeningly addictive. But now there's at least five generations of mainstream games, adding up to a total of over 649 or so of the little bastards now, and like an ancient family cake recipie the main formula of the game has barely changed, aside from a few ingredients that don't really do much of anything.

And the occasional physical embodiment of all living matter, but you don't really taste that.

With that said, I feel now is the perfect time to introduce a few ideas I have been tossing around for a hypothetical reboot or (Arceus forbid) a sixth generation of games. So without further ado, let's release these little mental gremlins from their balls and get rolling.

Drop the National Pokédex
The whole point of the Pokémon games is to fill up your Pokédex - which you recieve at the start of every quest - with every kind of animal available in the game's region. You do this by catching the little buggers in the wild, evolving them by beating the tar out of other people's animals and trading them with friends. Unlike the average person, I was never able to do this, either because I got bored of wandering through the tall grass to find that goddamned Abra or I was to busy kicking the gym leader's backsides. But if you are a better person than I am (and I'm sure someone reading this is), then you manage to accomplish this amazing feat alongside thrashing the bad guys and becoming the champion of the league, which is like being a movie star except not.

Whereupon your reward... is to catch more of the things.

Let's put this into context, shall we? Over five successive generations of main games, the number of Pokémon has swollen from a relatively small mob at the time of Red and Blue to something equal to a goddamned Roman legion by the time of Black and White. There's over 649 of the things. Six Hundred and Forty Nine. Not coutning the alternate forms of Deoxys or Rotom, because they're hard enough to keep track of in the first place.

And you thought the line for the school lunch queue was bad.

Now, don't get me wrong. I loved every generation's Pokémon equally, because I'm not some rabid nerd who likes to think that Bulbasaur was way better than Snivy, not by a long shot. I even hold a grudging respect for the oddballs like Jynx and Wobbuffet, because they add a bit of spice (or racism accusations) to the legions of animals. But to ask me to catch every species of the damn things from every other region after I just worked my tailbone off filling up my first Pokédex, kicking some extremist moron's head in and filling my wallet with enough money to purchase the Unova region several times over on the way, is asking way too goddamn much. I simply cannot put that much time and effort into repeating something I have been doing along the course of the But Thou Must plot for the sake of fulfilling the proffessor character's obssessive-compulsiveness. It's like being asked to sweep the leaves off your driveway in the hopes of getting a nice crisp fiver at the end of the day, only to be told that now you're expected to sweep the leaves off the driveways along the entire damn street. It's too much of the same thing, arbitrarily thrown in your face after you think it's all over and done with.

Also, I see no value in catching the monsters you worked your socks off to earn in the previous generations. Catching a Pidgey in every game gets boring after a while.

Nobody likes you, Pidgey.

So let's just do the sensible thing, Nintendo. Save the players the trouble and just drop the National Dex altogether. I know that you like to give the occasional nod to all your previous games, but overwhelming us with the task of catching every single one (or R4 cheating them in my case, mwah hah hah) is too overwhelming. Let us focus on the new guys just for once, and let the Golden Oldies relax for a bit.

Make the Main Characters Less Wimpy
This is a point that I feel is the root cause of quite a lot of things in the Pokémon series, and ties neatly into my next mad gremlin of an idea. It could also be rendered somewhat moot, considering your voiceless, pre-pubescant, animé-haired avatar eventually has to square up to creatures that could easily be considred living gods.

Trust me, you need serious cahoonies to stand up to these guys.

But that's not what I'm on about. What I'm trying to say is that your avatar, wherever it be a dude or a chick, is largely constrained by the plot that is rather arbitrarily thrust upon them. I feel that too much of them is expected - they have to catch over six hundred different types of potentially world-destroying monsters, they have to beat up skilled trainers to become the game's equivalent of celebrities, and they are also required to stop some cookie-cutter cartoon terrorists from screwing up the environment or the fabric of space and time or whatever they're trying to smash beyond repair this time. And they all go along with it because that's how the story goes.

Now, I know that the characters can't just up and say "Screw this, I'm outta here", because they can't. They're just blank, voiceless slates for the player to project themsevles onto, and it's kinda hard for the silent hero to refuse the call of duty. Besides, the fun you can have with that can liven up the dull moments when you're stuck in one city because that gym leader is too tough for you. My playthrough of Pearl saw me turn my character into a Duke Nukem wannabe who spouted nonsense about chewing gum and kings at the start of every trainer fight, whilst Heart Gold saw me imagine an irritable bastard who laments the fact that everyone only thinks of good ideas at the last minute, which often seems to be the case in these games.

"Why, oh, why am I the only sane person in this region?"

But all of this is compunded by the fact that, as is the case with every JRPG I could name, all the player really does is ferry Duke Katchem from one mind-numbingly boring conversation/story event to the next, tied to the rails of a plot that veers back and forth between Rocky and Ocean's Eleven in tone. One moment you're training your critters to kick your rival's butt into next week, the next you're foiling Team Plasma's (admittedly original and intruiging) plot to screw up your concept of Pokémon/Trainer relationships beyond recognition. It would be nice to have the option to simply ignore one part of the plot and focus on another - gleefuly ignoring the rampant terrorism to gather an army of demigods worthy of Noah's Ark.

Also, when you lose a trainer battle and have all of your Pokémon faint, for some reason your character "whites out" and wakes up in the nearest Pokémon Centre minus a few hundred dollars. What's going on there? Is our hero secretly a pacifist who cannot stand the sight of wounded animals? Did all the excitement and stress of the fight cause the blood to go to their heads? Or did they suffer a spontaneous heatstroke, causing them to pass out in the middle of the road? And why would the dude you've just been fighting drag you all the way to the Pokémon Centre, only to loot your unconcious form and rush back to their predetermined spot on the road in anticipation of the inevitable rematch? At the very least, you should just be able to walk away on your own to revive your team, unable to fight other trainers or wild Pokémon until your team is at full strength again.

And on the subject of story...

Give Us Some Choice
This is a thing that me and the guys on Skype have been talking about, and we all agree that it would be a nice thing to see implemented. The Pokémon series has an underlying theme of growing up and independance which, I feel, seems to get lost in the madcap rush to say you captured the God of Time. And the obligatory "Catch 'Em All/Become The Champ/Save The World" story is getting a bit hackneyed, to be brutally honest. So in order to try and coax some life into this series, I'd like to propose a moral choice/story path hybrid system. You know, the thing that Shadow the Hedgehog claimed to have, but didn't because it was an awful game.

Now, I'm not saying we need to go the Mass Effect route and conjure up a thousand different story paths for the mute protagonists, and not just because it probably wouldn't be technologically feasable. Given the cutesy nature of the game, it's not really a good idea for the player to swing between righteous paragon and puppy-kicking bastard at the push of a button, because it just wouldn't mesh with the tone of the series in general. Also, there's also no real need for an optional story path that sees you go all vigilante, build an army of Pokémon to storm the bad guy's base and wreck his shit up.

Not gonna lie, though, that would be awesome.

No, what I'd like to see is something a bit more basic than that. Instead of being forced into what is basically the world's biggest fetch-quest, you get given the Starter Pokémon and the Pokédex, told to make your own way in the world and sent out to do your thing. And this is where it gets interesting - you could collect the whole set of super-powerful beings, but you could also choose not to. You could also choose not to foil the terrorist group's evil plot, or not to climb a mountain of humiliated foes to become the regional champion. You could do any one on its own, or a combination of them, or all three - the player makes the desicion of how to approach this big sprawling world full of monsters and people. Or - and this is a big or, because I'm not sure where this would fit in with what I have now - you could reach a point where you're given the option to simply say "sod it", settle down and start a family.

This, I feel, would be the biggest and most important change to the games. Not only would it dispose of a storyline that's gone a bit mouldy, like week-old bread, but it also gives the player a bit more freedom. In a sense, it changes the genre of the game from a standard Adventure/RPG hybrid into something akin to a sandbox crossed with the RPG elements - you're free to pursue whichever aspect of the plot suits you best as you feel like it. I know some of you are going to draw comparisons to GTA, because we all know GTA did the sandbox-game thing first (/sarcasm), and while it might be a bit of a stretch to imagine that Nintendo would approve of this idea, with their long history of recycling the basic plot of their beloved franchises, it would be nice to think that something like this could be done. It would breathe a bit of life into the series as a whole, because frankly, I'm getting sick of being told I have to save the world, I have to be the very best and I have to catch 'em all. What if I don't want to?

I have a bucketload of minor ideas that could also go into this post, but I feel I've typed enough already. What do you guys think? Comments? Critique? Batshit insane ramblings on how you absolutely hated Lt. Surge? (I know I did, smug git.) Fire away!

Update: Minor Ideas
So, here's some minor ideas that I think could be worked into my hypothetical Pokémon reboot, thrown in at the last minute.

• Take the "Version Exclusive" gimmick and expand it - for example, one game takes place in the north of the new continent, and the other takes place in the south, the player only able to access the other game's world after beating the Elite Four or something. Or, for laughs, version exclusive starters.
• The ability to groom your Pokémon before a contest - cleaner Pokémon are more likely to win bigger points.
• Using your Pokémon in the overworld could easily be expanded a bit more. For example, you could have a fetch-quest that involved using your Pokémon to track a scent, perhaps a kidnapped child. ("What's that, Zigzagoon? Timmy's stuck in a cave?")
• Have a trainer fight against a Mewtwo. Because that movie was awesome, no matter what Nostalgia Critic says.
• Bring back Ruby and Sapphire's Secret Bases, damnit!