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: 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!