Your True Opinon On... (#1): Mortal Kombat

[Memfis]

I don't understand fighting games. They all feel like there is no tactics and the players just mash buttons. I guess I'm just a noob.

[DeathevokatioN]

First few were good, I have great memories of them as a kid, I remember there was one later in the series which I did NOT enjoy at all, can't remember which one but I remember the controls and movement were cumbersome and the environment was that proto pseudo 3d crap and looked ugly.

[hex11]

Just remembered a couple others from the 80's:
Yie Ar Kung Fu
Way of the Exploding Fist

Then there were beat 'em up games, which are close to but not quite fighting games:
Bruce Lee
Kung-Fu Master
Way of the Tiger
And a bit later (Sega Genesis era):
Streets of Rage

[Solarn]

I've only played the first three MK games and Ultimate MK3 and I liked them. When I first saw them, I was at an age (and it was a time in the world) when gore in games was a Big Deal and an Exciting New Thing, so I started playing them for that, but what kept me playing were the character and stage designs. They were just gorgeous. I still play them sometimes, even though I suck at special moves and usually get my ass handed to me.

[DoomUK]

DeathevokatioN said:

I remember there was one later in the series which I did NOT enjoy at all, can't remember which one but I remember the controls and movement were cumbersome and the environment was that proto pseudo 3d crap and looked ugly.

Sounds like MK4. Not the most well aged example of early 3D visuals.

EDIT: I think this screen is from one of the console ports, though. I can't recall if the arcade version was a little more easy on the eyes or not.

[dannebubinga]

I think the MK series is awful. It's butt-ugly and the gameplay is extremly weak compared to Street Fighter. Maybe if I didn't worship the SF series, my opinion might have been different.

[Phobus]

I'm sure I played a Mortal Kombat game on the SNES at some point. Not only do I barely remember it, but I'd say that my general opinion of the games as a series is that I'd play them with mates, but I'd not own one myself.

[brinks]

Memfis said:

I don't understand fighting games. They all feel like there is no tactics and the players just mash buttons. I guess I'm just a noob.

At a high level they're pretty much all about being tactical, playing mindgames, reading your opponent, baiting your opponent into certain attacks, etc. Basically like a strategy game with an advanced execution barrier to get past. Of course I myself am nowhere near that level, but I am well aware that button mashing is a very fine way to have your rump served to you on fine china.

My experience with the older Mortal Kombat titles as a child basically boils down to me laming out the CPU by throwing constant streams of projectiles. That said, the latest Mortal Kombat title is great. Feels much more fluid than most of the previous titles. It's less technical than most other fighters this gen like BlazBlue, Street Fighter 4, and Marvel 3, but that makes it like a nice relaxing break in between playing those. Also the fact that NRS is constantly patching the game and looking to make it a true contender in the competitive scene is fantastic. Now if only they'd get that damn netcode patched up already...

[geo]

I just remembered MK1 was a big rip off of movies. Kano / Sonya = Terminator / Sarah Connor. Other characters like Raiden & Shang Tsung came directly from 'Big Trouble in Little China.'

The first MK movie was a modernized version of 'Enter the Dragon' with Bruce Lee.

[Mr. T]

The first movie was great, too. Raiden really made it. Shang Tsung was an awesome bad guy too.

[Sharessa]

Memfis said:

I don't understand fighting games. They all feel like there is no tactics and the players just mash buttons. I guess I'm just a noob.

Apparently, there is a lot of strategy involved in them, and they have some dedicated fans who have serious competitions with them. They usually play Street Fighter or Marvel vs. Capcom games, though.

[geo]

That competition thing is why people... usually in Asian countries buy games instead of just rent them. Otherwise MK would be sold for $20 after 1 month.

[Captain Toenail]

I don't really 'get' fighting games either. I've never really had any interest in Mortal Combat at all, and I certainly cannot identify the characters.

The only fighting games I've ever played were Street Fighter on the SNES at my neighbors house a long time ago, and Soul Calibur 4 which I was rubbish at. According to the stats screen I've played 20 online vs games, and won none of them. :/ To me it just seems like button mashing, the only way I can win rounds is to repeat the same throw attack over and over, but of course this doesn't work on human players.

[sirjuddington]

Not much into fighting games either. MK is a slight exception, I've had a bit of fun with some of the games in the series. Other fighting games though... meh.

[gggmork]

Super street fighter for genesis with the 6 button controller (snes shoulder pads suck) has had exceptional single player replay value for me. After doom, I've probably spent the most hours ( days? years? decades? :( ) playing that. You obviously need to spend some time learning/practicing the special moves, and they're easy to commit to memory, unlike mortal kombat (especially the fatalities).
The CPU characters are fun and challenging on the hardest setting with some subtle loose patterns giving it a 'do this in this situation and that in that situation' memory subgame, yet it still feels like each fight is unique and its still rare that they fall for cheap repetitive leg sweeps or similar (if you find a 'loophole' you can simply choose to not exploit it to make it more challenging). Some enemies are programmed better than others, like cammy isn't that great since she almost always predictably jumps. CPU Ryu, ehonda deejay and zangief are almost always fun/challenging to play against. With a powerful character like ken or guile its an extra challenge to get 100% perfects (I've done it with ken and guile, maybe vega or sagat too I forget).
Some stuff is just fun to do, like with guile for example, you can shoot a slow projectile, and due to his quick recover time and fast speed, start walking toward them and use that projectile in a combo. I even like how the game kinda slows down due to processing when doing a combo too fast, ha ha. Then ken can do this bizarre hurricane kick immediately after you jump in the air to quickly dart across the screen, or do a high punch immediately followed by a hurricane kick or high punch dragon punch combo. Rarely its a slight bug or something but not really, and fun to do, but you can hurricane right above them as they get up which hits them side to side on their right/left much more than usual.
One flaw of mortal kombat is the speed of projectiles is too fast, like scorpion's 'get over here'- there's little time to dodge and little strategy, making mk twitchy and button mashy. Like with baraka, just do the same basic special moves over and over, depending on enemy distance.

[j4rio]

Played Little Fighter 2 for a bunch of years, good times, one of the best fighting games imho. Community crumbled due to official forum database crash and now I'm stuck here.

A preview I was part of making when I was like ... 14? It's quite shite but reminds me of stuff with long-gone czech pals.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sq81phtlu1o

[Jodwin]

geo said:

That competition thing is why people... usually in Asian countries play in arcades.

Fixed.

@j4rio: Little Fighter 2 is a beat 'em up, not a fighting game.



I can easily see why a lot of people think there's little to no depth to fighting games; I used to think the same way too. It's mostly because you'll only be playing against the CPU or friends, and in most fighting games the CPU is either extremely abusable or can be beaten with mindless button mashing (sweeps and roundhouse kicks in Mortal Kombat are a great example), and when you're playing against your friends the game isn't serious enough to require any depth from your playing. So it's easy to get the false impression on what fighting games' depth really can be like, just like playing singleplayer in Doom doesn't tell a thing about what deathmatch is like.

[Clonehunter]

Captain Toenail said:

Mortal Combat

Really neccesary? You more or less look like a dick in my eyes.

[j4rio]

Jodwin said:
@j4rio: Little Fighter 2 is a beat 'em up, not a fighting game.

In general yes, once you get into network games the main thing to play that's preferred is 1 vs 1 in HK (the most cramped background) so many guys considered it as a fighting game rather.

[Snakes]

Mortal Kombat is probably the third longest I've ever been devoted to a game series, after and Doom. Sonic would count, but I just can't bring myself to try the new games anymore. Sad.

I enjoy the series pretty thoroughly, though MK4-MK:Deception is kind of a dark period. On the other hand, MK-MK: Trilogy rocks my shit. MK9 looks fairly awesome as well, but I don't own the systems it runs on... Go figure. It's depressing that it wasn't released on the Wii, though that system probably isn't fit for the more frantic-looking gameplay it sports. Haven't really gotten around to the adventure games, either. Also, if it weren't for Mortal Kombat, I wouldn't have blocked the word "Annihilation" from my memory for a whole decade. Fuck you, John R. Leonetti. Fuck. You.

Mortal Kombat - 6/10 (too few characters)
Mortal Kombat II - 10/10 (the only MK game I've beaten on the hardest difficulty while drunk.
MK 3 - 5/10
UMK 3 - 7/10
MK: Trilogy - 9/10
Mortal Kombat 4 - 3/10 and the "ugh" award
Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance - 5/10
Mortal Kombat: Deception - 5.5/10
Mortal Kombat: Armageddon - 6/10 (only played twice)

[The Ultimate DooMer]

The original was fun back in the day (despite the crappy misspelling of Raiden's name on the consoles and the toons all having a projectile and something else), 2 was ok (TOASTY!!!) and 3 was too (when playing with friends ofc), stopped playing after that. If it's been milked that much since then, it's no wonder that it sucks now :P

Didn't really like the 3D generation of fighting games, they seemed a bit awkward and clumsy.

gggmork said:

The CPU characters are fun and challenging on the hardest setting with some subtle loose patterns giving it a 'do this in this situation and that in that situation' memory subgame, yet it still feels like each fight is unique and its still rare that they fall for cheap repetitive leg sweeps or similar (if you find a 'loophole' you can simply choose to not exploit it to make it more challenging). Some enemies are programmed better than others, like cammy isn't that great since she almost always predictably jumps. CPU Ryu, ehonda deejay and zangief are almost always fun/challenging to play against. With a powerful character like ken or guile its an extra challenge to get 100% perfects (I've done it with ken and guile, maybe vega or sagat too I forget).

I used to play SF2 special champ edition (megadrive) and try to win the game on max skill without losing a round...managed it with 8/12 toons iirc. Pretty patterns always there (for you and the cpu), but obviously hard to get right every time. And finishing it on max skill at all was a challenge with some characters.

(and Ryu was predictable as hell in SF2...did he move off the spot and throw anything other than a fireball without you hitting him? Zangief ofc just did the opposite...not very bright eh? :p)

[Scet]

I've played at least a couple games from each fighting series and can say I really hated every one except maybe Soul Calibur. The problem is I don't see these games being about fighting, because every time I played it was just about who could memorize how to spam projectiles(yeah it wasn't me). I wanted to fight(fists, feet, hand-weapons), but instead my opponent(human or AI) would just jump around on the other side of the screen throwing fireballs. There's about as much fighting in a game like that as there is in Doom deathmatch.

[geo]

I'm replaying Shaolin Monks again. Its laughable, tedios and the plot and dialog are non sensical. There's no tight alliances... everyone seems to turn on one another. The dialog is so bad I wonder how an American team could've written it.

Even the simplest fights take too long. Every fight seems to be a chore, which is why there are so many death traps to throw enemies into. The fatalities take so long that its a chore to use them.

[Clonehunter]

The PS2 games do have pretty bad dialogue, some of the worst actually. Ugh, and the voice acting is terrible in most cases. Kejenko 1 or whatever in Deception sounds like the guy from Goodefellows, well, a bad impersonation.

[geo]

Its Shujinko and yeah that dialog was bad. At least they got some comic book writer making their screenplays now.

Nothing sums up how stupid the dialog is like in Shaolin Monks, when Baraka uses his arm swords to GO THROUGH A HEAD & HEART of a monk. Then Baraka tosses the monk like 100 feet to Liu Kang.... who then says... are you okay? Wow. This is like cartoon violence! A sword jams through someone's head and out the back... do you need to ask if they're okay? They should've said, you'll pay for killing my breatheran you mutant savage.

Another thing is how other characters just swoop in after a bossfight and kill the boss, taking your glory.

I could imagine a lil Toasty Dan coming on screen and being hilarious, but I couldn't imagine Liu or Kung saying such things.

[Snakes]

geo said:

Nothing sums up how stupid the dialog is like in Shaolin Monks, when Baraka uses his arm swords to GO THROUGH A HEAD & HEART of a monk. Then Baraka tosses the monk like 100 feet to Liu Kang.... who then says... TOASTY!

... or at least that's what he should have said.

[lazygecko]

Can't appreciate the old ones. I liked them back in the day of course, but playing them again now without the shock factor I find them borderline unplayable. Feel pretty much the same way about any early 90's fighter apart from SF2.

[kristus]

I've only ever played the PC versions of MK. MK1 2 3 and 4. I used to play MK1 a lot back in the day with my friend. The sound was buggy though. So it would crash fairly frequently if you ran with it on. But the sound was so important to the experience that we had to suffer the crashing.

Did also play Mk2 a bit but not as much and MK3 and 4 even less. I mostly played Tekken 3 and tag. Mostly because that was the game that was played when I visited friends who owned consoles.

[purist]

hex11 said:

I was never much into fighting games, with two notable exceptions:

Barbarian (Palace Software) - ported to many 8-bit systems
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbarian:_The_Ultimate_Warrior
I played the hell of this in the 80's. It's challenging and has a wonderful atmosphere, even down to the little details like how the snakes on the side of the screen animate when someone gets hit, or the little goblin that shows up and hauls off the dead fighter's body (and he actually kicks the head like a football after someone gets decapitated). The backgrouds were exquisite at the time, and the music really had the swords & sorcery theme down. I used to sometimes load it up just to hear the music. :)

I used to love this! Mainly because you could end the fight at any point if you lobbed your opposing fighter's head off. I never understood why this mechanic was not experimented with in the MK franchise or other gore fighters following in it's wake (excluding I think Time Fighters?). It kept your opponent dangerous even when your power bar was full and his was almost gone.

When MK/MKII/MKIII came out they were my favourite games but I was about 12 when MKI was released and I've since out grown it. Also, 1 on 1 fighting games are a shadow of themselves in single player and I simply ran out of people to play against.

[gggmork]

The Ultimate DooMer said:

try to win the game on max skill without losing a round
(and Ryu was predictable as hell in SF2

Try the same thing but with all perfects (not losing any life). Super street fighter and champion edition both have slightly different CPU behavior which is fun for a change (plus its nice not having to do the boring cammy fight in champion edition). I had both versions but was referring the to super version (and more characters makes it harder to get perfects on them all, especially bison).

The other main 'fighting' game I like is all of the pre-wii punchouts, but its its own genre. Fighting harder characters has some fun deep gameplay, but like most non-moddable games it really lacks 'hell revealed' style custom enemies since its target was commercial success to a wide group of people who mostly suck at video games.

Then again I guess almost all games, aside from tetris, are 'fighting games' if punchout is included. Even mario fights goombas.