Backlog Beatdown: Revisiting MORTAL KOMBAT!!! with MORTAL KOMBAT!!!

I bought Mortal Kombat on a whim at some point earlier in the year, as part of a package that contained the first three games in the series. I’ve been playing it on and off, as it is one of the few games I play on my laptop that doesn’t require the use of a controller or a mouse (I’d have preferred to use a controller, but I couldn’t get either of the ones I own to work!) so I can definitely pick it up and have a play. And after a few months, I finally beat the game with all seven characters.

"GET OVER HERE!!!"

Mortal Kombat is a fighting game set in a fictional universe where a centennial fighting tournament safeguards Earthrealm from invasion from the other realms, including the mysterious Outworld. The first three games of the series used digitized fighters; real people photographed in combat poses became the player avatars. There was blood, gore, and the opportunity to finish off your opponent once you had won the match. There was an obvious rivalry to Street Fighter back in the day, but while the latter has always produced a sufficiently solid fighting game, Mortal Kombat pushed a lot of boundaries – if only to discover where the boundaries were.

Cage takes revenge for his $500 sunglasses...

In the game, you choose one of the seven fighters and take them up the ranks of the tournament to become the Grand Master. Your first six fights are relatively straightforward, taking down each of the other fighters. The seventh fight is a mirror match – a fight between you and your own avatar. The following three fights are endurance matches, between you and two other opponents – the second one enters where the first one falls, and these matches are the bulk of the game’s challenge, as they are extremely difficult to beat. After that, you take on the reigning champion Goro, a four-armed half human / dragon, who has lots of power but presents a very large target. Finally, you take on the sinister Shang Tsung, a soul-wielding sorcerer who can take the form of any of the other fighters. Beat him, and you win the game, and are rewarded with an ending for your chosen character.

Yeah, and don't you forget it...

The most prominent question to ask of any fighting game is: Is the fighting good? And here’s where the quality of Mortal Kombat starts varying wildly. There were seven characters, but apart from their special moves and some very subtle differences with their reach, the move set for each character was identical. There was no real combo system, though it was possible to set up a combo by doing your attacks in a certain order. It inadvertently managed to invent juggling – a combination of attacks to keep the opponent in the air. The endurance matches were a huge difficulty spike; the only way I found to beat them is to spam your flying kick and I’m in no way surprised that this was the only Mortal Kombat game where these occurred. And the controls had a clunk to them that never really got fixed in any iteration of the game that I’ve played.

The presentation of Mortal Kombat was beyond excellent for the time; digitised avatars were a new development and for the first time there seemed to be some stakes involved in the fighting tournament. I played the DOS version, which is probably as close to the original arcade version as you can get in a home copy; the graphics aren’t quite up to their original polish but are still a good version of the game. The sound is as clear as it needs to be; the voices are implemented a little too often, but they work, and the music is thematic and sinister. The controls are a little wonky, since fighting games don’t lend themselves well to keyboard controls, but with practice you can make them work.

With all that having been said, I’ve had a tonne of fun playing through this. Very few other games make me feel like punching the air in triumph when I finally beat them! But many aspects of the game were improved upon in later iterations, making Mortal Kombat very difficult to recommend as a stand-alone game.

Final Score: 2/5: If you’re sure.

Last Week's Games: Final Fantasy XV, Mortal Kombat 2, Patrician

Due to a family member being in hospital, (not for COVID-19, don’t worry!) my time for playing games has been restricted mainly to the middle of the night.

And what a middle of the night it’s been! I’ve been playing a lot of Final Fantasy XV over the last few nights and I’m really enjoying it. I had a bit of a faff getting it started – even to this day I still have to remember that playing a new game on the PS4 is contingent on still wanting to play it in the hours it takes for the download, and the first time I tried it, it turned out that I’d overextended the memory limit on the hard drive so I had to delete some games off it (games that, as far as I know, we don’t even own, so I’m not missing anything!) It really puts it into perspective how big games are now; I’d tanked the memory on my Xbox 360 as well but that was from putting roughly 60 games on there; not about 10!

Seriously, this could be a shot of the first arrivals
at a rock festival...

But once I’d got going, I played through the tutorial that I suspect has told me roughly half of what I need to know, and then started through the main campaign. You play as Prince Noctis and his entourage of… I don’t know what to call them. Bodyguards? They’re called the Crown Guard, but they all seem far too friendly with Noctis for their relationship to be entirely professional. The effect is to make it seem like you’re playing an adventure game about four lads on a camping trip, (indeed, that’s initially what it is!) and that is what’s making the game for me currently.

That might sound odd, but I play a lot of role-playing games, and when there is a party of characters, they’ve usually acquired each other along their journey. There’s rarely a pre-existing relationship between the characters at the start of the game, and if there is, it’s rarely developed upon. Whereas with Final Fantasy XV, Noctis, Gladiolus, Ignis and Prompto look, sound and act like they’ve all been friends for years. That one detail has put a fresh spin on the idea of them all taking a journey together and it’s a really nice way of presenting the game.

One of the many side-quest "hunts."

As for the actual gameplay, well, it’s good. SquareEnix couldn’t quite break free from the shackles of turn-based combat for this iteration of Final Fantasy, as there’s a mechanic that stops time for a limited time when you’re not moving – you can turn this off, but it is necessary to keep it on initially, as this is the mode in which you can analyse your enemies and find out what kind of weapons and spells they might be weak to. Other than that, the combat works well; the characters have a broad array of situational weapons and Noctis has an ability to phase in and out of different locations by throwing his weapon there; a nice touch! One issue I have run into is that as all the characters are dressed in black and so are most of the monsters, it can be a little difficult on a busy screen to see your contribution the cluster bomb unfolding before you. I’ve also manged to get caught up in all the side-questing and treasure hunting, as though I’m terrified that I’m going to miss out on something if I don’t! So it’s going to take me a while to get through this, as it always does with RPGs – let us hope that the rest of the game is as engaging as the first bit!

That's the pits...

I had a go with a couple of games on the PC as well: Mortal Kombat 2, which is great fun up to a point but there’s an absolutely horrible difficulty spike when you get to Kintaro, and I haven’t managed to get to Shao Khan yet, and the Patrician, where you trade goods around a medieval Europe. This comes from a bygone era of gaming that didn’t necessarily feel the need to tell you what to do, and while some autonomy is nice, I’ve currently got no idea what I’m supposed to be doing!

Backlog Beatdown: Taking down the Syndicate with Syndicate

My never-ending quest to get through all my video games is hampered by my love/hate relationship with long form role-playing games and strategy titles, requiring levels of commitment that often take months to get through an entire game, if I ever manage it. That being the case, it was a refreshing change to play a relatively short game!

Your HUD - Heads Up Display - is in an AR system
that goes across your field of view.

Syndicate, then. I might as well address the elephant in the room right now: I never played the original games that were released back in the 90s so I had no basis for comparison between the two different iterations of the game. For how many people have snarled at this 2012 Xbox 360 title for not being as good as the original game, it reviewed surprisingly well at the time, but I wasn’t tempted to buy it until it was on sale at a second-hand game shop, on the basis that I’d found the game on Metal Jesus’ Hidden Gems videos.

Syndicate on the Xbox 360 is a first-person shooter game with hacking elements, set in a grim Cyberpunk world of mega-corporations, asset wars and a downtrodden forgotten people. You play as Miles Kilo, an Agent, an augmented super-soldier created to enforce the mega-corporations they’re attached to. So far, so Shadowrun meets Deus Ex.[1] Your initial goal is to eliminate corporate rivals and protect your company assets through a series of linear levels, but as is very often the case with games like this, nothing is as it seems…

Looking back at that previous paragraph I’m not surprised to recall I’ve ended a few opening descriptions with “nothing is as it seems.” There’s nothing wrong with that; plot writers and consumers love a good twist and imagining a nightmare future where western life is bartered with and ended on the whim of the people in charge is sufficiently compelling enough to engage. But when I played Syndicate, it was hard to escape an exhausted sigh of “haven’t we been here before?” You just know the huge corporation you’re working for will turn out to be behind it all along, and that the people you thought were friends were enemies and the other way around. It tells the story reasonably well – it’s just that even at the time there was nothing new here.

No health bar here - your injuries are displayed by the
blood splatter effects on the screen.

As for gameplay, the shooting mechanics work reasonably well; we’d reached a point in gaming history when controls were standardised, so it was pretty much impossible to get it wrong. Syndicate gets it wrong anyway by forcing you to equip grenades like any other weapon before you could throw it, rather than mapping it to one of the buttons, but other than that, it works OK. What Syndicate brings to the table is hacking mechanics and what the game calls a DART-6 system, where you go into a Matrix-like view of the stage, slowing down time, making enemies easier to see and I think you do more damage as well. Hacking objects in the game basically amounts to activating switches remotely, but things get interesting when you start to use them on enemies – causing their weapons to backfire, forcing them to commit suicide, or even fight for you for a few moments. This is a way of balancing out otherwise hopeless fights and when used well can produce some positive results. It is almost crucial for the boss battles, which are entertaining, challenging, and one of the few things Syndicate does well – each has its own gimmick and method to defeat them, and it’s up to you to figure it out.

The level design is accurate in its theme, but uninspired and dull with repeated corridor and open sections. That might have been the whole point, but it doesn’t make for a very interesting game! The graphics and sound are good, with some harsh edges and lighting effects that make for a unique if unsettling experience.

Syndicate is a standard experience with flashes of brilliance in places, hinting that the game could have been so much more. It won’t change your life, but it’s worth a look at least.

Final Score: 3/5: Worth a look.

---

[1] Not that I’ve played a massive amount of either, but I’ve heard enough about them to know the general overlaying themes!

Last Week's Games: Mortal Kombat (last time, I promise!) Dobble, Disney's Villainous

I’ve been banging on about the original Mortal Kombat game for a few weeks now. I’m sure there are some people who never want to see me talk about Mortal Kombat again, and those people aren’t necessarily wrong; this has gone on for a while! But the whole point of this blog is to offer my opinions and experiences in video games and others, and I came to the end of my journey last Sunday night when I finally beat the game with all seven characters, so yes, I’m going to talk about that! I’ve put up a review which will be released next Friday, but those reviews tend to be sweeping overviews of the game as a whole, whereas in the blog I cover the specific details of my experience if I can spare the room.

Here's Daniel Pesina doing the motion capture for Scorpion...

The thing is with Mortal Kombat, I’ve had a great time with the game, but I’ve rated it quite low. I can’t, in good conscience, recommend it as a stand-alone game when later iterations have done what it does far better. But that detracts from the huge amount of fun I’ve had with it, working out the best attack patterns, playing each character’s special moves (or at least, those I could do!) to my advantage, and feeling like an absolute champ every time I beat Shang Tsung at the end. Why is that?

Funnily enough, only Sonya has any substantial
difference to her colours in a mirror match...

I think Mortal Kombat’s flaws make the game, to be honest. The plot of a centennial fighting tournament safeguarding Earthrealm from invasion is ludicrous, and the developers know it – but at least there was something at stake, both generally and for the characters. The move set was almost identical between the seven characters, apart from their special moves – but that made you appreciate the very subtle differences between their speed and reach.  Digitized fighting games wouldn’t look good if we tried it now, and if we’re being honest they didn’t at the time of release either – but we’d never have known until we tried, and as I said in my review, if we weren’t pushing the boundaries, we’d never know where the boundaries are! Arguably, Mortal Kombat’s biggest contribution to gaming was the formation of the ESRB to regulate age-appropriate games; was this a good thing or a bad thing? Maybe it was, but it’s brought to the table a list of controversies bigger than anything Mortal Kombat has been blamed for!

Ever the villain...

It’s also worth noting that I played this game quite a lot when I was younger on the Sega Megadrive, and I spent quite a lot of time with the DOS version I’ve been playing noticing the differences between them. Presumably due to memory constraints, there was a lot more variation in the voices you hear during the fights; I certainly don’t remember the nonsense coming out of Raiden’s mouth when he does his Torpedo move! The final endurance fight takes place in Goro’s lair, and he arrives straight after you win – but in the DOS version, the screen shakes and you hear roars as he stops and screams off camera, which was a nice touch. Kano’s ending was different as well – presumably the text was the same, I can’t remember, but the picture in the second part depicts Kano holding a machine gun, which apparently was too much for home consoles!

Noticing those differences and adapting to the clunky but enjoyable game mechanics created an enjoyable experience for me, but I wouldn’t feel comfortable recommending the game expecting anyone else to find the same.

Elsewhere, Kirsty received some games for her birthday, and we’ve been having a fine old time trying them out. Dobble is a great game; a more elaborate version of Snap but we have a lot of fun playing it and can even engage Jessie with it to a certain extent, though we need to be careful on how quickly we’re moving through the game. Also, we’ve been playing Disney’s Villainous, which took a few goes to understand but once we did, we had a great time trying to outwit each other between Ursula from the Little Mermaid, and Prince John from Robin Hood! We’re looking forward to trying both games with more players.

Last Week's Games: Mortal Kombat, Might and Magic X, Syndicate

This has been a busy week for me with birthday arrangements, so I’ve not found much time to play many games – and the one I managed was another pick-up-and-play job.

How many of you have wondered what
Goro is packing down there?

I speak of course of Mortal Kombat, where after trying for weeks to beat the game with Scorpion, I finally managed to do it with Johnny Cage. It’s been an interesting journey for me since I have been recognising a lot more of the technical aspect of the game, rather than just brutalising the opponents, fun though that is. In Cage’s case, what won it for me was his special moves – for their additional effects as much as their damage. As with most of the characters, using them is not without risk, as they don’t return to their ready positions for a second or two, which makes them vulnerable to reprisals. With Cage, the Shadow Kick gives a great knockback effect, but if your opponent blocks it, they can very easily follow through with additional attacks. The Force Ball, however, won the game for me, because it stuns your opponent for a precious moment for you to either get your bearings or launch a follow-up attack. I never even did the split punch, as the command for it is fiddlier than the version that appeared on the Sega Megadrive and it was rarely useful.

As usual, the end of the game came down to the last credit (I wouldn’t have it any other way!) and a lot of it depends on what Shang Tsung morphs in to on the final level, but I managed to come through and beat the game. Cage’s ending, while not canon, nonetheless is representative of the direction his character made in the later editions of the game – in spirit, if not in activity!

The Naga Temple. Might need to grind some XP before
I tackle that bit again.

About a week ago I had a go with Might and Magic X on my laptop. Might and Magic sounds right up my alley in terms of game theme, but I’d never really played one before because the reviews I’d seen on the game were coming up at the bottom end of average at best. However, the games in the series were on sale, I bought it, and the other week I played it. I quite liked it, as well. It’s a role-playing game that basically works on a grid; even though it is a first-person game, the game works by moving your characters to certain squares on the grid and filling in the map from your line of sight as they go. On the one hand this is unrealistic, on the other hand, I quite like games that remember they’re only games, so I ran with it and was pleasantly surprised with how much fun I was having. The nearest game I’ve played to this so far has been the Legend of Grimrock, but the difference here is that the game progresses when you act, so whatever you can see will only move when you move. This works well for me as it gives me time to figure out what to do, as opposed to dealing with Grimrock’s horribly clunky interface in real time. Whether I’ll see it through to the end or not, I don’t know – it’s actually quite rare for me to do that with RPGs, as regular readers of the blog will know – but I’ve enjoyed my time with it so far and I hope I continue to do so.

I played Syndicate at some point as well and managed to get through the level where you must make your way through the Downzone. This is interesting as you can no longer rely on your hacking powers to kill your enemies, as the better ones are shut down. It also ended in a boss battle where the enemy uses stealth, which took a few goes, mainly because he explodes when he dies, and because I didn’t realise this, he killed me too the first few times. It took the story in a direction where, as I’m sure is quite common in Cyberpunk games, the lines between good and evil are blurred, and you don’t know who to trust – a familiar trope, but it works well for these games.

Last Week's Games: The Ultimate Doom, Syndicate

This week I’ve spent most of my time playing the Ultimate Doom. I reached the end of the Inferno episode a week or so ago, and I’m now trying to play through the levels of the fourth episode, Thy Flesh Consumed. I’d tried this before and I’d forgotten how brutally difficult these levels were, I don’t think I ever got past the first level when I played Doom before on the Xbox – and that’s when I was playing it on standard difficulty; I’m at Ultra Violence now! I ended up watching a video on YouTube to show me how to get past it, and while it helped me on the first level and shown me what to do on the second, I haven’t got the accuracy to pull it off yet. Hopefully I’ll do it in the future!

I've used this picture before, somewhere...

Now I’m aware that these levels are designed to be very difficult; indeed, the first two levels are supposed to be the hardest levels in the entire Doom franchise. I’ve also sung the praises of Id Software’s level design in the past, celebrating what they managed to achieve with very limited resources. So, are the levels on Thy Flesh Consumed well-designed? I reckon they are. They’re tough, no doubt about that, but they include some quite unique puzzles of deciding what to do and in what order, knowing where the weapons are, and what is appropriate to use and when. For example, before last week I’d never even have considered wasting ammo for the plasma gun on shotgunners. These days, I’ve developed an instinct for making sure all the hitscan-wielding enemies die very quickly, as they’re arguably more deadly than even the toughest demons.

If you don’t know, hitscan weapons are guns in early video games that don’t faff about with things like bullet velocity or trajectory – you point at the thing, press fire, and the shot instantly connects. In Doom, this is how the Pistol, Shotgun and Chain gun work, and why the Shotgun is pretty much the most commonly used weapon. If enemies have such weapons, which a number of early ones do in Doom, there’s usually a delay between the monster seeing you and shooting you to give you time to react – but if they get a shot off, you have no way of dodging it. This is different from the fireballs launched by the Imps, Cacodemons and Barons of Hell, as those enemies shoot projectiles you can see coming and can dodge. It’s also why the Spider Demon is the final boss of the game, rather than the Cyber Demon which guards the end of the second episode. Even though the latter has the stronger gun, its shots are easily seen coming, whereas the Spider Demon has a hitscan chain gun and you don’t get as much of a chance to dodge. (It’s still quite easy to beat if you don’t kill the other demons, as it will be distracted by them.)

So, defeating these levels will be a learning process, but I’m happy to accept the challenge!

Looks like quite a nice day, actually!

Elsewhere, I’ve been playing Syndicate on the Xbox 360. I mentioned this last week and having played through a little more of it I can say that this is probably going to be another average game. It’s got some good ideas, like hacking the enemy chips to force them to break cover or shoot their allies. But in fight after fight, their use becomes quite routine, and the occasions where their use is obvious don’t contribute to the challenge of the game. I’d also probably appreciate it more if I hadn’t played the first two Bioshock games to their endings, as what they do to develop the idea of single player shooters added a lot more to the experience. Some critics have said Syndicate was rubbish, and I’m not disagreeing with them; most of them will have played better games than this. It’s not as bad as all that, and I’m having a decent amount of fun with it, but I doubt I’ll feel the need to come back to it once I reach the end.

Let’s see if I can beat a game before the end of the month…

Last Week's Painting: Space Hulk, Terminators and Genestealers

This is the first in a new, hopefully monthly blog series I’ll be doing called Last Week’s Painting, where I’ll document what I’ve been painting over the last month. They’ll mostly be Games Workshop models; it’s extremely rare for me to paint anything else but I’m open suggestions! I’ll initially try to get these out on the first Thursday of every month but I’m already late for the first one, so let’s just say I’ll try to get it out at some point in the first week!

My painting for this month has focussed on the 2009 Space Hulk boxed set. I’ve owned this set for over a decade and even managed to play the game a few times as detailed in some very early editions of this blog, but I’d never quite got around to painting them. There were a lot of reasons for that but the main one was that there was no expectation that I had to. I acquired the set when I was a member of Games Workshop’s staff; they’ve released a few board game-style games over the last several years but rarely support them post-launch in favour of their core games. And in the shop, there was an expectation that if you were going to use your models in the shop, you had to paint them – or at least show that there had been some progress on them. So, when painting, I prioritised models from those games at the time, and as my backlog of models I need to paint has only grown since then, the Games Workshop boxed games haven’t been painted.

But when lockdown hit, I’d run out of models to paint for the Chaos Space Marine army I was working on, so I proceeded with the Space Hulk models I’ve been putting off for over a decade. I started with six of the Terminator models and tried as much as I could to paint to the reference on the back of the Mission book. For the most part it worked reasonably well, although I might try to mix the red a little thicker next time because it was a faff painting multiple thin layers on a black undercoat. (I’d never have known until I tried, and I’d like to do Blood Angels at some point so it’s well worth remembering!) Where I deviated from the reference was the Power Sword, which I’ve never been good at doing, and the gems, which I had idea how to do. With the sword, I painted it a deep blue to begin with and then tried a lightning pattern freehand across the sword. I don’t think I did a particularly good job of it, but by that point I hadn’t painted for over a month and wanted to finish them off without getting bogged down. The gems, under the advice of Steve from Warlords and Wizards, were painted silver initially then coated in the purple paint that I think is supposed to go in an airbrush. It seemed to work!

Here we see the Genestealers I’ve been working on in the last week or so. This has been an interesting challenge because I’m definitely not used to painting Tyranids; I tried it many years ago when I was still in school, and I think once when I was staff I painted a model for the shop, but I’ve never collected a whole army of them. I think that’s largely because their complete lack of humanity made them very difficult to relate to, so I wasn’t tempted to try. These days, of course, I know that’s the whole point of Tyranids – to create an unstoppable force of alien creatures to scare the life out of anybody unfortunate enough to have to face them; and the human element is the one they create – not the one they have. I’m following the guides available on Warhammer TV and painting them the classic Genestealer colours. The one at the front is the one where I’ve attempted to do the highlighting on the flesh; I ran out of time to do any more, but it worked relatively well and will probably take up a bigger portion of my time next week!