/vr/ - Retro Games

>>9533212
>That's MK characters.
No, MK characters are from Hollywood kung fu and monster movies, with some western comic books influences.

>>7128930
Watch some 80s martial arts action movies if you want to really understand why Mortal Kombat was popular. The game was basically Bloodsport mashed up with Big Trouble in Little China, Jean-Claude Van Damme vs Bruce Lee. That and no single game at the time had so good digitized content and gore, and on top of that the gameplay was good (it was very simple to get into, even my mom could pick it up in a minute or two, we used to play MK Trilogy together).

>>5604149
It was a peak late 80s action movie plot turned into a video game, with photorealistic graphics and sound, when your typical home console was the NES and Genesis. I mean, just look at the roster: you have Bruce Lee, Jean-Claude Van Damme, and the Terminator, you have two Ninjas (one who is the Ghost Rider), you have the lightning monks from Big Trouble in Little China, and endboss is Lo Pan from that same movie.

My point is that it was RAD AS FUCK. It's like, you make an expy to every popular movie character and you put it in the same fighting game. And they all have the same base moves so even your mum can learn how to play, but they all have enough unique moves that fifteen minutes later you are shouting GET OVER HERE every time you throw a spear. Mortal Kombat was literally Smash Bros built on late 80s pop culture. Wrap your head around that.

And Street Fighter 2 was really, really awful at the time - they had the initial version with the goofy art, no selectable bosses, Guile Handcuff and other glitches, very slow speed, characters had less moves (things like Chun-Li's fireball was inspired by bootleg versions where her MP punch launched a hadoken), and the balance was so out of whack that 2 hadokens killed the enemy.

>>5540210
>>5540225
Rampage was great, but in the end it was a forgettable monster movie and not 100% accurate to the games.

Mortal Kombat was a perfect adaptation, although it had an easy jobs since the game was a videogame adaptation of generic JCVD action flicks combined with Big Trouble in Little China.

>>5398994
Pretty much this.

>>5319102
If you've lived through the late 80s action movie era, you'd recognize MK for what it was: Bruce Lee and Jean-Claude Van Damme starring in Big Trouble in Little China.

That was the original game. Then they went crazy with comic book storylines and monsters from the Outworld. It got bad when they started getting too silly and the game turned into looney tunes with blood, the series has been teetering on that edge ever since. Besides, the gore was just eye candy (until they went retarded with it), and you had a shitload of secrets and no Internet to look up those secrets on - it generated a TON of gossip.

It also had very simple controls, so every character was easy to pick up. The goal wasn't that you could spend a month learning the intricacies of the frame timing in one characters combos, it's that it was so simple that your mom could pick it up and beat you in it.

disclaimer: I actually played MK with my mom, in fact when I was in a really bad mood as a child, she was the one to suggest we play some Mortal Kombat against each other. You don't get memories like that playing Street Fighter.

>>5237963
Jap fighters focused too much on mechanics, MK focused on being Big Trouble in Little China: the Videogame.

>>5160104
>It's just two people hitting each other. That's not "fighting".

"Two people hitting each other" could sum up every single fighting game ever made.
Like it was said before, MK was considered a game that anyone could pick up easily and play.
It wasn't without high level tactics though, the simple jabs allowed for a lot of pressuring, and it was the first game to allow for juggles. It may look very basic compared to SF2, but keep in mind that all moves did chip damage, so it didn't need strategic subtlety, it favoured heavy pressuring and back-and-forth gameplay.
Then MK3 and especially UMK3 pushed the envelope with the Run button allowing for even more aggressive pressure.

>>5160696
This, MK was basically Jean-Claude Van Damme vs. Bruce Lee: The Game. It was the culmination of all the campy fighting action movies from the 80s, both the American ones and the Hongkong ones, turned into a fighting game. The final boss is Lo Pan for christ sake.

>>4614551
MK had good aesthetics and atmosphere because it was a goofy 80s mystical kung fu fighting tournament movie from Hong Kong: the Videogame. MK2 was just more of that, with a couple of weird ass mutants thrown in (not at all uncommon in movies either).
You have Bruce Lee and Jean Claude Van Damme fighting ninjas, lightning monks, terminators, and Lo Pan; then you add to that more ninjas, more female ninjas, a monk with a knife hat, Wolverine, a black boxer, and God Emperor Genghis "Shao" Khan.

MK3 tried going full cyberpunk, which didn't work as well.

But I think the main reason it didn't work was not because the setting is bad, but because they rushed the fuck out of the game and had to remove one of the main characters due to politics (Johnny Cage), and another for backstory reasons (Raiden). UMK3 is way more solid, and MKT was basically the MvsC2 of its time.

>>3687303