First-to-10 in Dino Rex, let’s go
There are a lot of really bad fighting games out there that you’ve probably heard a lot about by now, but digging into the ones from back in the early days of the genre — when things were a lot more experimental — you’ll often come across something that you never heard of before that you simply can’t believe you haven’t.
Enter Dino Rex, a competitive fighter from 1992 that is, well… a really bad game. In fact, it’s one of the worst fighters ever made, and Matt McMuscles recently released a video that details exactly why it is and ranks it among the various other “worst fighting games” he’s rated previously.
Now, we probably all remember another, more popular prehistoric fighter called Primal Rage that saw giant dinosaurs and apes doing battle as they towered over tiny humans that ran around the stage in fear. Primal Rage was developed by Atari and released in arcades in 1994, and you likely had a copy of the game on either Sega Genesis or Super Nintendo back in the day (or knew someone who did).
But before Primal Rage there was Dino Rex, a 1v1 fighter developed by Taito that featured, well, giant dinosaurs doing battle as they towered over their tiny human overlords. And it was a rough game to say the least.
As Matt McMuscles explains, Taito cemented their legacy in video game history by being the developers of the classic Space Invaders title. The company’s specialty essentially became shoot ’em up games, and in 1991 a team at Taito was tasked with developing another game that began as more of the same, but ultimately evolved into being a competitive fighter due to Street Fighter 2’s massive success.
Right out of the gate, Dino Rex had two major things going against it. The team that developed it didn’t have any experience designing competitive fighting games, and the fact that it started out as a shoot ’em up game became apparent shortly after you began playing it.
It featured giant, muted colored dinosaurs that would tail swipe and claw at each other until a victor was crowned. As McMuscles describes it, Dino Rex barely even feels like a fighting game at all in terms of how it controls and its game mechanics.
There are two attack buttons, one for punches and one for kicks, and it’s one of those games where pressing up doesn’t make you jump. Instead, you’ll have to press down then up very quickly, and even then, it will only see you perform a neutral jump.
From terrible controls to bad sound design, Dino Rex is just a strange dino-based fighter that suffers from a lot of clunkiness and jank. Check out the full breakdown from Matt McMuscles below, as well as where he ranks it among the worst of the worst.
Source: Event Hubs
