Retro Yearly List #18 [1992: Mortal Kombat]

Right, when it comes to MK, I have to pay attention to how much nostalgia factor I'm putting in my reviews since it should be one of my favorite franchises of all time.

MK1 was one of my most played cartridges back on SNES times, for my journey here I decided to go with the Arcade version, and I just learned that the port is extremely underwhelming, the lack of blood and censored fatalities take out basically what makes those titles shine. I remember well the first time I got access to internet and all the inputs, and tried to perform the fatalities on my SNES, then I hit Johnny Cage's and was like... W%F was that ?

Talking about the original version, it's pretty good, even though the game was a banger for me in the old times, now I can see the effects of time on the first title.
Gameplay is pretty stiff and slow, and sometimes bugs will occur, you can't combo more than 2 moves here and even that is not that easy to do. Sometimes even special moves will fail to be cast, but fatalities inputs are ok here.

The graphics.. you know, it's a unique style, it blew our child minds when we first saw it, I would say it aged well.
The sound is nostalgic, but like any MK game, it just do its job, which adds to the mystic and shaolin atmosphere
of the time, I also miss that a lot on the recent titles.

The lore here tells the basics of a massive universe that will be formed in the future, it works for the game, already giving the characters personality and personal goals, and their endings are also alright. (Shout out to Raiden's ending epic last catchphrase: "Have a nice day")

Reptile as secret character was a great addition, although seemed to be a pretty rushed feature, it was nice to have something to have kids discussing about and trying to trigger the hidden battle, that's a pretty missed culture on modern gaming.

Difficulty will get on your nerves a lot of times, opponents will instantly unfairly react to your inputs, and oddly, this will happen at random times, regardless of the selected difficulty, but I cannot complain that much, knowing what awaits me at the next adventure.

Falar sobre esse jogo é difícil pra mim, foi meu primeiro Mortal Kombat e me diverti bastante com ele. Lembro de pegar o disco do Playstation 2 e em sua capa estava escrito ''Mortal Kombat Deception'', mas quando eu abria o game, era o primeiro Mortal Kombat (fiquei um bom tempo achando que era o Deception). O jogo é curto, possui apenas 7 personagens jogáveis, mas me diverti bastante com ele mesmo assim, os bonecos que eu mais gostava de jogar eram Johnny Cage e Sub-Zero, mas me divertia com o elenco inteiro, a trilha sonora desse Mortal Kombat é incrível, pois tem um toque oriental que acabou se perdendo ao longo da franquia. Os gráficos em 1992 deviam ser bem impressionantes devido ao fato de usarem atores reais para fazer o elenco, a jogabilidade para os dias atuais é tosca, mas pra época devia ser algo além de seu tempo. No geral, acho um bom jogo, só que só acho que vale a pena jogar se você for um fã da franquia e está com curiosidade de saber como essa saga violenta e cheia de fatalities começou.

It was never going to be a Street Fighter 2 beater, that much was obvious. We always considered it the substitute, for when our first choice of fighting game was missing. But that doesn't mean it isn't worth playing. Mortal Kombat is a fantastic game that requires a level of perseverance beyond the casual, and with its iconic visuals and sound, it's always a draw at arcades. Unfortunately its difficulty is completely broken, with the enemy always several frames ahead in terms of counter-attacking, so without resorting to trickery and exploiting the CPU the player is doomed to fall before the end, and for that alone I chose to go with four stars instead of five.

The characters are mostly brilliant looking, with the exception of the bytes-saving obvious palette swapped ninjas. In fact the "digitised" actors have themselves gone on to achieve as much notoriety as their colourful representations. Bouyed by the endless sequels, there probably isn't a gamer out there that doesn't recognise Scorpion or his show-stopping call to prayer.

Speaking of. Each Kombatant has a series of charming moves culminating in a gruesome finisher that some might argue is the main attraction of the game. I trust I don't need to go into the history and repercussions of Midway's decision, only that in hindsight it all really does seem like a big fuss over nothing. Then again, maybe this was the genie and bottle moment, with every game that followed being offered a sense of freedom to be gratuitous and violent, free of committee interference. Should we be thankful and bow down to MK and this watershed moment? I think so. If the game didn't stand up, stand the test of time, if it was a Custer's Revenge, or Chiller say, we could point at the moment gaming faltered on the edge of an abyss, but thankfully it does play well, even thirty years later.

Pura nostalgia.
Creo que igualmente habiendo jugado todos los de esa época en el SEGA, es el peorcito

Pure nostalgia.
I think that even having played all those from that time on SEGA, he is the worst

The Original Mortal Kombat

Created by a team of 4 people: Ed Boon, Dan Forden (The Toasty Guy), John Tobias, and John Vogel. The popularity of Street Fighter II inspired this young group of friends to create their first fighting game.

Originally intended to be a Jean-Claude Van Damme's Bloodsport game, it went on to be something completely different when their deal fell through.

They ended up making a game loosely based on a bunch of movies that they liked, which resulted in a game filled with a lot of blood, violence, martial arts, and humor.

Mortal Kombat would bring to the table a lot of things that changed the gaming world forever, one of those things being the creation of the ESRB Rating System due to the violence being considered extreme at the time.

Mortal Kombat was the first fighting game to use digitalized sprites and high-quality voices, and the first fighting game to have a secret character (Reptile).

The gameplay however, isn't as interesting and charming as the rest of the game. Gameplay is very simple, and somewhat clunky, movement is slow, and damage scaling did not exist yet, since it was not intended for MK to have combos at all. They even went as far as to have system that pushes you away from your opponent in case you manage to combo them too long.

What a dogshit fucking video game. Every single viable "kombo" consists of just jump kicking into whatever special move can somehow followup the falling down animation, except for Scorpion and Sub-Zero's kombos that consist of the brilliant "stun the player and then uppercut" game plan. Oh, and I should mention projectiles don't trade in this game, so some projectiles are just objectively better in zoning fights which results in Scorpion being considered a clear worst character by a lot of players. Amazing.

The AI gets to do a good amount of exclusive stuff like throwing players in the middle of their recovery animations and sometimes the player must just pray to RNGesus Goro decides to not break the game's rules. The arcade mode really set up the most insufferable AI of any mainstream fighting game to come in MK2 and that's just obnoxious to look back at in hindsight.

Also good lord, the player must block to perform some fatalities, which means some characters simply cannot fight Reptile.

Despite the rage over its content, each character only has a single fatality and some are hardly even violent, especially in the SNES port where Kano rips out one's sweat glands instead of their heart. Hell, I'm pretty sure Liu Kang's fatality doesn't even kill the other player. Only one stage contains a stage fatality and it consists of uppercutting somebody down a pit.

This game is so fucking trashy the player can just mash jab for an unsightly animation to take off half the other player's health bar in a matter of 2 seconds, but also it can be blocked 1 hit in so it's not even reliable to jab without getting punished. There also isn't a proper low punch since attempting to perform one just uppercuts instead.

In fact all the animations in the game are janky as fuck. Why does Johnny Cage's knocked down animation look like he was shoved a bit? Why does Shang Tsung's flight look so stiff? Why is Scorpion just Sub-Zero but yellow? Why does every character have the exact same attacks minus a special move or 2 when they're martial artists from different backgrounds with different stances? And why is Raiden's name pronounced RAY-den while I'm at it?

The fact of the matter is, this game came out the same year as actually good fighting games I can still go back to today like
Nekketsu Fighting Legend and that's just embarrassing given the difference in popularity.