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.
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| 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?
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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!
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| 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.
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