MORTAL KOMBAT

What would a fighting game revival be without Mortal Kombat?

Mortal Kombat was like the more brutal, older cousin of the other fighting game franchises that all burst on the scene in the early 1990s, and the one that drew a lot more attention (a lot of it being negative). Boasting a simplistic fighting engine and digitized actors instead of hand-drawn sprites, Mortal Kombat appealed to the growing fans of the genre that liked things a little more realistic (at least when it came to most of their characters) and things a lot more gorey. The sheer idea of being able to finish off your opponent with a killing blow of some sort or another wasn’t only unique, it was fitting. How many martial arts films has there been where in a tournament like structure, there were killing blows delivered? Probably hundreds, but the two I’m thinking right off the top of my head seem to have influenced not only Mortal Kombat but almost every fighting game that was ever released: Enter the Dragon starring Bruce Lee, and Bloodsport starring Jean-Claude Van Damme. It just made sense.

Mortal Kombat has gone through its own battles as well. Not just within the game, but externally as well. After three strong efforts, especially on the arcade scene, there was a drastic shift in how video games were being made. Two-dimensional games were on the outs, and three-dimensional games were coming in. Suddenly, the two-dimensional fighters had to worry about a new source of competition and that competition kicked them in the ass something fierce. 3D graphics seemed to come out of nowhere and the direction of video game was heavily influenced by the home console market rather than the arcade market with the release of Sony’s PlayStation and Sega’s Saturn. Games like Resident Evil and Tomb Raider were pushing the games into different directions that previous consoles weren’t capable of, and fighting games were being driven in the same direction thanks to Sega’s Virtua Fighter and Namco’s TEKKEN. Mortal Kombat jumped into the transition with both feet and landed harshly with the fourth effort in the Mortal Kombat series and its updated follow up, Mortal Kombat Gold. The characters, their fighting styles, and even the fatalities didn’t transition to the three-dimensional playing field all that well.

Then the arcades dried up in the States. You’d be challenged if you were asked to find an arcade around here that wasn’t struggling to stay afloat and had enough new games coming in to keep costumers happy. Following the demise of the arcade scene we had a five year draught of anything and everything Mortal Kombat.

The fifth entry in the series, Deadly Alliance, was released to consoles only – a first in the lifespan of Mortal Kombat, not including the mishmash game that was Mortal Kombat Trilogy – and offered another attempt at making the transition from the two-dimensional playing field to a three-dimensional one. Deadly Alliance offered a lot in terms of playability and entertainment, but it, too, failed to capture the feel, vibe and atmosphere that had been already created by the original three games. What it did offer was a rather interesting storyline that meshed the frail plots of the fourth game with the somewhat decent plots of the first three. It was almost a revival of the franchise, but even as playing it I felt as though the game wasn’t finished; that this was a rushed effort on the part of Ed Boon and his team.

Deception was released two years later, and while it added a lot of polish on the Deadly Alliance engine, it still suffered from the same rushed feel that Deadly Alliance had. It wasn’t what it could have been, though it did offer an excellent attempt at a fighting game styled RPG that also worked as a tutorial for how to play the game. But it offered a lot of lackluster visuals at the same time. Gone were the interesting, yet gorey fatalities from the previous entries, replaced with very disappointing results (at least none of them were as laughable as Quan Chi’s neck-stretch fatality from Deadly Alliance, though). It seemed that the fans of creativity weren’t waving in the direction of the flames that lit the fire underneath Mortal Kombat’s designers.

Armageddon was the last effort of the last generation of consoles (Nintendo’s GameCube, Sony’s PlayStation 2, and Microsoft’s Xbox). It offered a somewhat decent storyline and a fun go-cart racing game inspired by Mario Cart, but it lacked in any sort of revision of the already established fighting engine that premiered in Deadly Alliance. It was once again cluttered with a lot of palate swapping motion capture, unfitting martial arts, and no depth to be offered in terms of the fighting engine, combo system, and recognition. The characters had the same special moves that they always had, but without any concrete grounding in a specific martial art, they could have been anyone at any time. That was one of my biggest complaints about the second set of games Boon and company had delivered, the console only games. A character might fight one way one game, and then his martial art was changed in the next game and nothing seemed concrete.

The last game could have been the death knell for Mortal Kombat: an attempt to cross over with another company that has only had a passing attempt in the fighting game genre similar to the crossover games that Capcom had done in the past. But while Marvel’s flamboyant characters seem to mesh rather well with Capcom’s characters, the DC characters seemed drastically out of place going toe-to-toe with the more brutal and homicidal characters of Mortal Kombat. Everything that Mortal Kombat was known for had taken a back seat simply to showcase a bunch of DC’s aging characters’ martial arts skill sets.

It wasn’t the death knell for Mortal Kombat, however. In 2008, Capcom broke an almost ten year length of silence in the fighting game genre by releasing Street Fighter IV to arcades in Japan (and some select ones in the States, if they could afford the cabinet). In 2009, Capcom released it on the home consoles, and the fighting game genre seemed to breath a new air of life into its decaying lungs that were being propped up by Namco and some efforts that most folks never looked at from SNK. The new air of life brought with it a second issue of Street Fighter IV in Super Street Fighter IV; brought with it the long awaited Tekken 6; brought with it a brand new King of Fighters XII, with an entirely new set of hand-drawn sprites, but lacked an involving single player experience; brought with it a new franchise called BlazBlue; and brought with it a slew of announcements for new games.

A new Mortal Kombat was one of those announcements. After the release of Mortal Kombat vs. DCU there were rumors going about that Ed Boon and company were already at work at a new installment for the series and that it would be taking Mortal Kombat back to its dark, gore-splattered roots. Then Midway fell apart and Mortal Kombat came under the ownership of Warner Bros., who also happens to own DC Comics. I know that I, personally, was scared that we’d more than likely see another crossover game between the heroes of the DC Universe and the fighters of Mortal Kombat than a proper Mortal Kombat game. But the rumors persisted.

A week before E3 2010 came about a video clip hit the web featuring the Mortal Kombat characters in a possible movie-like inspiration that seemed to be a reboot of the entire franchise. That heated up the buzz for Mortal Kombat going into E3 and while the video itself turned out to be nothing more than one filmmaker’s pitch to Warner Bros. for a potential film, the excitement it generated didn’t calm down once the newly announced NetherRealm Studios unveiled the newest installment of the Mortal Kombat franchise that was exactly on par to what Ed Boon had been stating it would be. It was dark, it was brutal, and it, too, seemed to be a reboot for the franchise.

In the few months since E3, lots of new information has been provided to us from NetherRealm in regards to their Mortal Kombat game. The first and foremost thing is that this game is not being rushed, unlike the previous installments. According to Ed Boon, Midway had rushed the Mortal Kombat games in and out of production, which is why they felt unfinished and ultimately unpolished. This game is not being handled that way, and Warner Bros. has given the team the time to make the game they’re satisfied with.

What do we know about the new Mortal Kombat game?

First, the studio listened to the fans and seemingly took another play out of Capcom’s playbook. Two-dimensional fighting games have yet to make the transition to a full three-dimensional playing field without there being a lot of wear and tear on the characters and the universe they operate in. The last four Mortal Kombat games and the Street Fighter EX series stand out as the most notable efforts. This new Mortal Kombat will boast three-dimensional graphics but, like its rival before it in Street Fighter IV, will operate on a two-dimensional playing field. This frees up the processors, as quoted by Hans Lo, to give us more detailed backgrounds and character designs; as well as providing us with a very amped up game play that’s been missing since Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3. I’m not sure I agree with the detailed environments and character designs as several other fighting games that do operate in a three-dimensional playing field offer some of the more elaborately detailed stages and characters in fighting games, both of which come from Namco in Soul Calibur and Tekken. But he’s a game designer, and I’m just a game player, so he’s words trounce my beliefs. The amped up game play, however, can be seen in the few bits of game play footage that we’ve seen so far. This is a very fast fighting game, and it reminds me very much of a combination between Mortal Kombat II’s more free-flowing combat system matched with the insane speed of Mortal Kombat 3.

The button mapping is a bit different from the rest of the Mortal Kombat games. Instead of the traditional high-low punch/high-lo kick mapping that we got in the first three games, and then whatever it was that was used in the last four or five, NetherRealm Studios has borrowed a play out of Namco’s playbook and has given us four attack buttons, one for each limb a la Tekken. I saw borrow instead of “steal” or any other inappropriate terms because that’s what happens in the fighting game genre: studios borrow elements from other fighting games be it a block button, attack movements, or in game elements like hidden characters – an element that began with Mortal Kombat. It’s a simple effort of evolution through inspiration. After all, every fighting game has the forward/down/down-forward plus attack button movement of the Shoryuken.

They’ve also implemented a new super-meter of sorts that fills up when attacks are connected (probably by you and your opponent as is with most fighting games) that offers the chance for super-attacks (similar to Street Fighter IV’s EX moves), combo breakers which has been a staple of the MK series since Mortal Kombat 3 if I remember correctly, and a newly added “X-Ray” combat system that looks absolutely amazing. It actually reminds me of the opening promo real for UFC Unleashed, a program on Spike TV dedicated to displaying the more memorable fights from the Ultimate Fighting Championship. In that promo real, however, when some of the punches and kicks connect on an opponent, it shows an X-Ray view of the fighter being kicked or punched and what it might look like on the inside. I thought that this feature might actually show up in one of THQ’s UFC-based games, but it looks like NetherRealm jumped at it first, and it seems more appropriate for a Mortal Kombat game. When put into effect, the camera zooms in and offers a break in the fast paced hectic nature of the fights and shows an internal view of what you’re doing to your opponent. The X-Ray view shows bones being broken or even shattered and internal organs collapsing or being punctured or rupturing and all that gore-driven goodness. This, and the subsequent fatalities to come, is one of the features I’m looking forward to seeing the most.

The gore itself is also making a huge comeback in this Mortal Kombat effort as you will see real time damage on the character’s bodies and faces (much more elaborately so than previous efforts) and blood will splatter onto you from your opponent and decorate the stages and darken over with time as the blood coagulates. This devotion to gruesome details is what originally got me to pay attention to Mortal Kombat and it’s almost a shame that it took them this long to really elaborate on it or pay attention to it; but it’s also ultimately satisfying.

The plot of the game – yes, I’m one of those fighting game players that pays attention to the plots of the games – is also rather interesting in a total reboot sort of way. Apparently, at some point in a yet-to-be-determined future Shao Kahn is seconds away from killing the Thunder God, Raiden. In retaliation, Raiden sends a brainmail message back in time to a somewhat younger version of himself (the same version that appears in the original Mortal Kombat game), thus changing the outcome of everything that happened through those first three games. Does Scorpion kill Sub-Zero? Does Liu Kang win the tournament of the first game? That weird comic book styled retcon opens up a lot of possibilities for the plot to trample through, and that almost has me just as excited as the game play and gore does. Boon has been quoted as saying he wants roughly twenty-six characters in the final edition of the game, with potentially more being developed post-release and offered as DLC in the future. So far the known characters are: Cyrax, Johnny Cage, Kitana, Kung Lao, Mileena, Nightwolf, Reptile, Scorpion, Sektor, and Sub-Zero. Raiden and Shao Kahn made appearances in the game’s announcement trailer, but there’s nothing here nor there about their inclusion in the final game. As expected, however, I’m sure there will be several hidden characters decorated throughout the game as is the usual for Mortal Kombat, as well as a monstrous boss and/or sub-boss character. Boon has already stated that this Mortal Kombat will have more unlockables than previous games, and will actually put the rest to shame. It will also have the Krypt, which has served as the base for the unlockable content since Deadly Alliance, and it will have an elaborate and sophisticated unlocking system.

And before I stop talking and just post the trailer from E3, I have to say one of the things they’ve talked about recently that I really like is that they’re leaving open hooks in the programming to further tweak the characters in their online mechanics to balance them out post-release without the need of downloading a patch here and there. This is what has been missing from the online fighting game scene since it was born. This insures that Mortal Kombat won’t have a Sagat-like character from Street Fighter IV who proved to be very powerful in online play, and Capcom couldn’t tweak him without releasing a whole new game (of course that whole new game was worth the purchase, but you get my point I hope).