Last Week's Games: Injustice 2 and Mortal Kombat 2

I’ve been playing some fighting games last week, funnily enough…

Mad as a fish.

The main game I’ve been playing on the PS4 lately is Injustice 2, a fighting game based on one of the DC storylines. Years ago, in 2013 I played Injustice: Gods Amongst Us on the Xbox 360, and I really enjoyed it at the time – but this was before I was doing my blog anywhere near as regularly as I’m doing it now. In actual fact I only published five blogs that year, before the No Game New Year event really began to develop the drive and structure in my writing. The result is the position I find myself in, writing a 700-word blog every week as I’m playing the next-gen sequel to a pretty good fighting game. I’ve really enjoyed this one as well, not least because I’ve been able to play it with Kirsty – it’s not often that we play video games together, but when we do it’s a lot of fun. The thing is, we take very different approaches to playing through the game. I like to learn a few moves and combos, and some of the real fun in Injustice comes from finding the environment interactions and using them to great effect so I like doing that to and getting through the game that way. It works fairly well. Kirsty doesn’t necessarily know how to find all the special moves and combos but does know how to press all the buttons until something falls over, and it works about as well as playing methodically.[1] Of course, the Super Moves are spectacular and we really enjoy doing them, and seeing which character does what. Highlights include Green Lantern’s super move, which looks brutal, and Harley Quinn’s, which is quite representative of her madness even though she’s turned face for this game. At the time of writing, we’ve played through the story mode twice and got both endings, which I won’t spoil but it does a fine job of blurring the lines between morals and necessity. I’m also trying to play through Injustice 2’s equivalent of the Ladder mode – I thought they’d omitted this, but it turns out it’s in the Multiverse mode, and I’m playing through with each character to try to get their endings. So far, I’ve got six – but at the point I’ve got them all, I’ll consider the game “beaten” for my purpose.

I suspect that number of wins is going
to go down by quite a bit...

I haven’t been having quite as much success with Mortal Kombat II, though. The problem I’m having is quite common with the Mortal Kombat and Netherrealm games – horribly cheap difficulty spikes. The game requires you to beat all 12 playable fighters, to begin with. Notwithstanding the fact that most of the special moves don’t work properly as your opponents almost always block or dodge them, you can beat the required 12 fights without trying; even Shang Tsung is nowhere near as powerful as he was in the first game. Then you’re put against Kintaro, and you might as well go home at that point. Your attacks do half the usual amount of damage, his moves are disgustingly powerful, and he has a jump/stomp attack that you have about 1/14^th of a second to react to and is absolutely devastating if it hits. Even the usual cheap tactics of jump kicking doesn’t work well, since if you land too close to Kintaro he just picks you up and throws you. The only way I’ve found to beat him – and this has only happened once, not enough to win a match – is to freeze him with Sub-Zero, which leaves him open to an uppercut which is your most powerful attack. It works sparingly at best, since actually doing the freeze move with Sub-Zero leaves you open to the jumping stomp attack. This isn’t to say that Mortal Kombat II is a bad game; as a multiplayer experience it’s excellent and I have fond memories of playing this with my brother when we were both well into adult life. But it’s a very hard game in single player mode!

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[1] In our experience, anyway. Anyone who plays the game at a pro level might tell you something different but we’re a long way from that!

Last Week's Games: Dungeons and Dragons, Pathfinder, Injustice 2

This week I was delighted to return to the Black Country Roleplaying Society. I had to stop going for a while due to childcare issues, but currently neither Kirsty nor I are going to work in the usual sense so it’s not the issue it very often can be. The lockdown situation has caused a lot of restrictions on a great many aspects of life, but ironically in this case it’s freed me up a little.

This is what my character
will look like eventually...
or something like it.

So, it was a pleasure to be welcomed back, and I joined a Dungeons and Dragons game with the Odyssey of the Dragonlords setting. While the published player’s guide is quite insistent that it’s not based in Ancient Greece, that’s clearly where it’s drawn some of its inspiration. I created a female human ranger called Halia with the intention of making her into an Amazon later down the line; this happens at level three. At character creation, I like to roll up random personality traits, ideals, bonds and flaws from the Player’s Handbook, and also the background information from Xanathar’s Guide to Everything – this creates some instant background for the character which is surprisingly easy to tie into a motivation for becoming an adventurer. In this case, Halia was raised in a conclave, but at some point, was wrongly accused by an adventurer of a smuggling and assault, and did a year’s time before escaping with the assistance of another adventurer. This means she is wanted in one of the key cities of the game. Also, since I put charisma as her dump stat (currently at 9) I decided that during her incarceration she was badly burned on the side of her face and now has burn scars that she hides with her hair when she isn’t fighting. She’s also quiet, withdrawn and overeats (I rolled up a surprisingly high weight for her) so there’s some personal issues there, which I’m hoping will be addressed and maybe even resolved during the campaign. As for the adventure itself, it took a while to get going, but we ended up hunting a giant boar which had the potential to wipe any one of the party members if it managed to connect an attack. Unfortunately, it suffers from a problem that 5^th edition very often runs in to – action economy. As it’s only one giant boss monster against five characters, chances are we’ll drop it before it has a chance to do any significant damage, which we did at very little harm to us since when it managed to connect an attack, our Dungeon Master rolled spectacularly low on his damage roll. But we levelled up to second level, and I’m looking forward to seeing where this goes.

These provided more of a threat than the boss...

I ran into the same problem when I ran Pathfinder: Rise of the Runelords over the weekend. We’re in the fifth chapter out of six, and the dungeons in the adventure should be terrifying my players, but as they’re almost all hysterically overpowered, very little is presenting a challenge for them anymore. Yesterday, they fought what was supposed to be the hardest boss in the dungeon, but because of a combination fire snakes and some disgusting fighter feats, they dropped the boss in two turns and wrapped up the entire combat in three. I speak no exaggeration when I say the party have done more damage to themselves than I ever have!

In video games, I had a go with Injustice 2 on the PS4. It’s a fighting game featuring some DC Superheroes, a couple of Netherrealm’s characters, and whatever other major properties they license. I played the original game on the Xbox 360 and I really liked it; this version has more mechanics and strategies added – not necessarily a good thing for me because I’m awful at it – but I did note one of the most crucial improvements I’ve ever seen in a fighting game: The tutorial and training modes offer the option to view a training video to give a much better idea of what those moves and combos are supposed to look like, and give a better idea of the required timing! They require very fast presses though – I’m not sure how quickly I’ll get there.