Mortal Kombat

Mortal Kombat was released at a time in which every other fighting video game was an utter rip off of Street Fighter 2. Street Fighter 2 for a long time remained the only fighting game worth having a tournament for. But then in 1992, Mortal Kombat was released. By today's standards the game lacks depth, but back then it was completely original and fresh. Never before have we seen a fighting game with such creative attacks, a block button, and balance from the fact that all characters had the exact same set of normal attacks.

I'm sure anybody who plays video games remembers the controversy that Mortal Kombat started. It was a shame that the game was so violent, because it completely distracted from what made Mortal Kombat good. There were plenty of players who liked the game because it more adult, but there were a large number of tournament players who actually enjoyed the challenge.

Today, here in the USA great games like Guilty Gear XX#R do not have an official American arcade release. Fighting games simply didn't take off too well in this country.

That really sucks ass. There was one time when I almost beat all three endurance levels and therefore get to fight Goro (something I've never done before in my life). By the time I got up to that level, it was 1 in the morning and my my thumbs were swollen from playing for so long. Needless to say, I was completely exhausted. But unfortunately, for some godforesaken reason, you can't pause the game. So I had to do the unthinkable and turn it off; terminating my chances of fighting Goro and now I have to try all over again.

Luckely in MK2, it's pretty much the same as the original except (you guessed it) you can finally pause the game and relax.

This game is very important to the evolution of video games and it has its spot in gaming history. Mortal Kombat is known for violence and this game was the most violent game back in the day. These days this game has aged pretty bad though.

The graphics still look good if you are playing the arcade version. The characters are extremely big though and take up a lot of space on the screen. They are very detailed.

The negative thing is that the speed is very slow, the fighting is very clunky, the music is annoying, the grunts are also very annoying, and fatalities are kinda difficult to perform because you have a very short amount of time to do them.

Anyways, maybe back in the day it would had been a 9/10 but now this game is a 6/10 at best.

This was one of the few games that gave the then-very-popular Street Fighter II video game some competition, and it tried to better that classic by not only including real digitised martial arts fighters, but by putting in some really gory bits.

Just punching someone's head in repeatedly causes liquid crimson to spurt from their face in ridiculously high amounts, and when you had one two bouts out of three against your opponent you had the option (if you knew how) to perform a fatality that would actually kill your opponent in some rather horrible way.

As usual with this kind of game, every single character has a special move (the best ones were Scorpion's harpoon and Sub-Zero's freezing move that froze his opponent rigid for a short time, leaving him/her open to an attack); otherwise, all characters had much the same set of punches and kicks.

While the graphic violence (which probably started the video game rating system) is amusing for a little while, it hides a less-euphoric truth; there's not really much to all of this, and once you've seen the fatalities a few times it's doubtful you'll bother much with them (or even the game) anymore.

"Mortal Kombat"("MK") and "Street Fighter"("SF") were the two biggest games on the arena of fighting-games back in the early 1990`s. Most people preferred the SF-series, but I always preferred MK because of the graphics, gameplay and not to mention the extreme violence. The first MK remains playable today and a classic, but it has been bettered by superb sequels.

8/10