Mortal Kombat: Brawler gaming's quintessential gorefest

This month sees the release of the tenth (yes tenth) major Mortal Kombat reboot, Mortal Kombat X. Along with my favourite X-ray bone crunching moves, NetherRealm is promoting new features, such as some bound-to-shock brand new fatalities and, wait for it... LESS flesh on display for the female characters. With these enticements …

[Code Monkey]

I liked Jonnhy Cage's do-the-splits-gonad-punch the best.

[Thecowking]

It was called the package check.

I still have the T-shirt that came with my master system version of Mortal Kombat.

I might dig it and said console out tonight and have a bit of a retro gaming fest.

[Anonymous Coward]

Master System? Do you mean Genesis?

What the editor left out was that this was the first internet based PvP game for home consoles (SNES), which wasn't anything to shake a stick at....ever. You could even trash talk via im/email!!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/XBAND

[Fibbles]

There was a Master System port of MK1, though I think the Mega Drive (Genesis) version was released first.

[Johnny Canuck]

I remember the first time I saw Mortal Kombat in the arcade. I was walking through with a friend and just happened to glance over at a crowd around one of the games just as Sub Zero pulled the spine out of his opponent. The image was so shocking (for the time) that for some reason I burst out laughing. Then I watched, mesmerized, for a good 45 minutes as the players performed fatality after fatality. How they got so good so fast is beyond me. Anybody ever hear of planting expert players in an arcade to drum up interest in a game?

[Anonymous Coward]

>Antique Code Show

For a game that came out while I was in college? Sigh.

[Michael Wojcik]

Antique

Well, "antique" simply means "old", and in some domains the threshold is generally set pretty low. Car collectors usually treat 25 years as the minimum age for an "antique", for example.

MK hasn't made it to that quarter-century mark yet, but even a couple of decades is a long time in video-game terms. 1992 also saw the release of Wolfenstein 3D, for example, which I'm sure many people would consider "antique" these days.

And the ACS column has included stories on the 20th anniversary of Myst and the 15th of Goldeneye.

[mr. deadlift]

those were the days

i remember my introduction to MK on a sega mega drive - from memory the defaults were on (down up left left A right down for the cheat menu) and there was no blood, i did however manage to get Liu Kang to do something strange.

While the opponent was wobbling around and I mashing aimlessly he did a strange move and finished the opponent off. Those big red words appears on the screen, i had no idea what had occured at the time.

Ah memories, golden.

I must admit i'll be an MK fan till i leave the earth, i was not a fan of the 3d ventures in an attempt to emulate Tekken, which i consider to be a superior beat em up to MK.

however the niche it fills, it's almost impossible to express. which is why - as the author points out - i too am a little excited about the up coming release also, MKX.

[Anonymous Coward]

I was never any good at it.

I could type faster than my 1200 baud modem could transmit, and I could write sentences on the leader board in Hard Drivin', but I could never beat any of the opponents in Mortal Kombat....

[Anonymous Coward]

Digitised graphics- So of their time

While I can understand Street Fighter still being around, it's strange to think that a game I always perceived as an attempt to cash in (by adding lots of 14-year-old-pleasing gore and digitised graphics to the formula) is still going as a "franchise" beyond the expected couple of sequels at the time.

Digitised graphics were one of those things that sounded like a good idea in the late-80s/early-90s, but they always looked a bit brittle, unrealistic, cheap and kitsch in practice. Street Fighter II's graphics didn't have that problem because they were drawn (i.e. stylised) anyway, so the brain wasn't expecting them to move or have the fluidity of actual real-life footage.

Looking at them again, MK 1's graphics probably weren't the worst example of digitisation by a long way, but they still don't hold up as well as SF2's.

[DaneB]

GET OVER HERE!