/vr/ - Retro Games

>>5319102
when they moved from digitized live action graphics I lost interest

>>5319102
It was kinda like one of the first party games. As opposed to Street Fighter which is mechanically deep and has a control scheme that takes a fair amount of practice to get used to (fireball motions, shoryukens, charge moves, SPD as well as unique frame data for everyone's lights, mediums and heavies) Mortal Kombat was very streamlined and easy to learn. Everyone has very similar basic attacks and special moves are both simple to perform and similar across various characters. So someone new to MK could pick any character and quickly be teleporting around shooting fireballs or whatever. Woe be to a newbie SF player who thinks wrestlers are cool and wants to start playing Zangief.

That combined with the zany Big Trouble in Little China feel to the game and it's really not surprising that it caught on the way it did. But you can also see why when the genre evolved it didn't hold up as well to serious play the way SF and others did.

>>5319102
MK just had great characters. The gameplay was never better than OK until 9.

You just had to be there.

>>5319102

Imagine going from playing games like Yie Ar Kungfu on the MSX and International Karate on the C64 to going to the big sprites of SF2, and then.. the ante got upped tenfold when they started putting ACTUAL people in the game, and like that wasn't awesome enough they could actually kill each other if you knew the SECRET CODES!

Like mentioned by the other anon, you had to be there.
it was a magical time, and instead of going on anonymous forums and seeing nothing but shitposts you'd actually have to go out and buy a gaming magazine just because it had some new screenshots!
it made everything count so much more, I stopped liking MK when MK3 threw all the mystical asian stuff out the window and went full techno monster, but I'll treasure my MK1/MK2 times forever.
Sure the games aren't deep, but the lore of the original 2 games was cool as fuck.

I miss being in High School and having those free periods inbetween classes where we'd just sit in the cafeteria and go through EGM and GamePro with my friends.

>>5319695
The game had a cool look, no doubt, but when you actually laid hands on the stick it became a stiff and constraining slapfest.

>>5319102

Its somewhere in there between the cheesy voice acting, the neon spandex and the over the top violence. You need to be able to appreciate bad taste to get Mortal Kombat.

>>5319830
IMO one of the main selling points was the ease of controls. Every character had the same set of standard moves like sweep, hook, etc. And the execution timing of specials was easier than some of the obscure shit in Street Fighter.

>>5319102
It took martial arts cinematic hyperbole, violence, and 90s cheese and prepared them into a delicious Kasserole.

>>5319830
A myth perpetuated by whiny SF fanboys who couldn't handle the heat.

>>5319102
MK4 doesn't have any of it. MK1 and 2 had this really cool dark fantasy aesthetic that put it apart from anything else. The presentation was top notch, the graphics, over the top violence, music, even the logo is spot on. Starting with 3 they lost sight of the feel of the games and didn't really get it back until the PS2 era. But the first two were just so damn cool.

Fighting games are like Shooters in that they were once the most popular genre of video game, but most people were never any good at them. No one really cared that MK2 wasn't as deep as Street Fighter 2.

I never understood fighting games in general

>>5320463
>Fighting games are like Shooters in that they were once the most popular genre of video game, but most people were never any good at them. No one really cared that MK2 wasn't as deep as Street Fighter 2.

In factit actually workedin the game's favor. Also the characters were more unique and interesting than the SF generic country themed fighters.

>>5319102
It was super violent so kids loved it for the MOM'S GONNA FREAK factor. Beyond OH MAN I HIT THE GUY AND BLOOD COMES OUT it had nothing going for it.

>>5321409
I wouldn't call Guile or Chun generic but ok.

>>5319102
Its fun.

Most fun I've had with MK was UMK3 (played snes version) and MKTrilogy on PS1

>>5319102

i will never understand motherfuckers who stretch sd content to hd and assfuck the aspect ratio

>>5319180
>when they moved from digitized live action graphics I lost interest

They lost their uniqueness the second they did that. I totally understand why they did it, but that was still a big chunk of what set the series apart.

>>5321575
>>5319180
They could have easily kept the digitized live action graphics look if they went with War Gods style texture mapping instead of the cartoony look that they used in mk4 and beyond.

>>5321706
Weren't they still using digitized photos of actors for the textures? I mean the live actors were still being credited in the game's staff roll.

>>5322273

I'm pretty sure they used photographs of many of the MK3 actors yeah, for sure that's Kerri Hoskins and John Parish as Sonya and Jax.
Funny how with MK11 they're now scanning in faces, its the logical conclusion of what they did in MK4.
Now if only someone had told them that Rhonda Rousey is not attractive.

>>5319102
>I will never understand the "magic" of Mortal Kombat.
t. roastie

>>5323845

I still wonder why they put that green layer behind the grates, Maybe to make it appear more like an underground torture chamber instead of the overworld building it gives off with the orange background?
if that's the case then why did they allow the Snes version to still use it?

>>5323715
>Now if only someone had told them that Rhonda Rousey is not attractive.

It just means she fits in the MK world.

>punch guy and huge red pixels appear
>everyone freaks out about violent videogames

>ultra realistic evisceration of life-like human characters in all sorts of brutal and edgy flavour
>nobody cares

>>5320482
90% of people who say this are babbies that don't like learning combos. Maybe that's a bit judgmental but imo fighting games are just a really intense head-to-head competition which is basically what a "game" is about, but they usually have memorable rosters and feel satisfying to master.

>>5319102
>I will never understand the "magic" of Mortal Kombat.

It would maybe help if you weren't playing one of the shittiest games in the series like MK4. I don't get Street Fighter either, but I don't try to understand it by playing SF: The Movie over and over.

>>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.

The first time goro grabs you

Being lightning spammed by the asian kid next to you at arcade

Kano sucking gigantic balls the first and last time you played him

Every fag scorpian fagging

Johnny cage being fucking great

Mk3 seemingly being insane with a giant roster and 90 finishers for each character

Tekken 2 being superior

>>5325951
>Tekken 2 being superior

Tekken was never superior to anything.

>>5325951
Ehonda 160 hit combo
Power off
Fuck you thrillho

>>5325956
>The first time goro grabs you
Chills. Also:
>When you finally beat the 2nd endurance round and Goro immediately jumps in and punches you across the stage

>>5325925
>show cleavage
>need to censor it out now

>>5319180
Same. That and blood and Gore was less compelling as I got older. As a preteen in the 90s there weren't many Uber violent games.

No one ever mentions how god damn hilarious the sound effects in 4/Gold are

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aj5J_0t3jUA

>>5319102
k... keep me posted

>>5325951
Right there with you. I taught my mom how to spam rolls and teleport kicks to cheese my friends. It was the one fatality she could do too.

Just here to remind you that reptile was 10 times cooler as the green ninja rather than a lizard man.

>>5319102
Mortal Kombat 1 and 2 are cool, but overrated, while the rest as garbage, except the Gamecube versions are OK.

>>5327496

is this an uncommon opinion? I thought everyone felt that way

>>5327496
I kinda miss that. Reptilian creature capable of shapeshifting into human form. But, you know, Midway/Netherealms couldn't keep things consistant, like Kitana. When she was introduced, she was never Shao Khan's adopted daughter but just one of his assassins, possibly kept as some conquest. And then there's Mileena, she's supposed to be dead after 2, yet she's not. Reboot comes along and she's just created instead of having been raised alongside Kitana.

>>5321706
Damn I just love how this game looks. I wish modern games could me made with this style of graphics, it reeks of that mystical "the future of graphics" the 90s were all about.

>>5319495
Truly the best home release.

>>5326561
We watched the supreme demonstration in UMK3 together. Had a lot of laughs on those, I remember the T1000 move of Jax bringing out the most laughs from her (when the body parts fall down in random order).

>>5326328
because it was kind of obvious, EUGH

>>5327717

A good port but I think I prefer the 32x or PS1 ports over the SNES. Even the saturn version was good minus they rushed it and left out a lot of the announcer stuff.

>>5319371
This, also the atmosphere and mythology was amazing in MK1 and 2 as well. MK3 turned it into a cheesy made-for-TV sci-fi flick.

>>5319102
You probably had to be a kid when you discovered it, and it would definitely help if it was during MK mania when comic books and toys and movies and cartoons and tv series and live action tours and all that were in production.

MK was the coolest of all 90s martial arts trends, because it combined it with a dark fantasy sword and sorcery feel that was also edgy, unlike Street Fighter which seemed corny in comparison. Of course, MK games themselves were not the greatest fighting games, but that didn't matter....what mattered as a kid was that you got to control your favorite character and use their super powers

>>5328431
Not necessarily, I was 18 when MK showed up and there were lots of guys older than me who played. Teenagers sure, but not a lot of little kids at least not in the arcade.

>>5328498
Yeah but were you into the "magic" of it or was it just a fun game to rip peoples heads off/a casual enough fighting game to mess with?

I might be taking OP wrong, but I think they might be curious as to why some people are so in love with it and invested in it's story and characters and whatnot, which I would mostly assume would have been kids who were really into that stuff and didn't care so much about the gameplay being top tier or anything

MK is like that girl you dated when you were 15, and you still remember all her funny quirks and how beautiful she used to look.
then you saw her walking down the street the other day with her 5 mutt children and her fat belly hanging out and you.. you go home and look at the old pics and wonder where time went.

I've never understood the Fatality system. You kill the character and yet they're still alive. Is MK some sort of purgatory?

>>5329118
Basically, Fatalities aren't canon to the lore unless explicitly deemed to be. Questioning how characters survive Fatalities is like questioning why there's two Ryus fighting.

Hell, some fighters using Fatalities are pretty Out Of Character in the grand scheme of things.

>>5328391
They fucked up the sound on the cd versions. They have all this space to stream the music, yet the go with each consoles sequence format, taking up ram space that could be used for more sfx instead of instruments. The ps1 version should've really used xa audio.

>>5328391
>saturn version was good

It is garbage. Music is trash and special moves all have to load mid battle.

It was a B movie -like game with gore that other games hadn't

>>5325925
People were retarded back then,and they are still retarded

>>5325925
>ultra realistic evisceration of life-like human characters in all sorts of brutal and edgy flavour
>nobody cares

Either the shock is gone, or they've cleaned up after real messes.

>>5319371
Deception is a great game. People ignore it because Armageddon was shit. They're making a mistake.
>>5321706
War gods is one of the worst games of all time.
>>5319180
>>5319695
>>5320263
>>5320463
>>5321575
>>5325951
>>5327502
>>5328431
>>5328904
>>5331135
Mortal Kombat 9 and X ooze personality and originality, and unlike 1-5, the gameplay is actually pretty fucking legit. It's no guilty Gear but it's still competitive, and unlike sleep fighter there's actually interesting characters with diverse movesets instead of 200 clones of the same 3 archetypes (the ryu, the charger, and the grappler). And now with 11 the graphics are really impressive.

>>5332000
Even "1 million moms" knows when throw in the fucking towel. I assume it was somewhere between Mortal Kombat 7 and Mortal Kombat 11.

>>5328904
I liken Mortal Kombat more to like an edgy mallgoth chick. Sure she's a little trashy and her weight fluctuates from year to year, but nobody looks better than her in black lipstick and a plaid skirt with leather boots.

>>5333081
9 was great, it felt like a love letter to MK with updated but not too changed gameplay. I haven't played X but it looks neat.

>>5319695
This. I’ll never forget the first time I later mortal kombat 2 in the arcade. I got the secret message from smoke & people thought I was lying about it for months.

>>5327496
Yeah. Reptile is pretty cool.
What do you think his feet smell like? ha ha

>>5333232
I loved it was really like playing Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 again plus Quan Chi even though he's a dick. The story mode was really cool and it made some pretty good changes to the timeline even though they went back on most lemon MKX.

Do you never want to see another thread trying to decrypt what makes Mortal Kombat special on this board again?

>>5325951
Sonya was basically Cynthia Rothrock.

>>5319102
That's because you're a cancerous zoomer who can't handle how EXTREME the 90's were.

>>5320482
>>5325942
Good fighting games have "kinetic controls", where special moves for the character require "winding" motions on the controller/stick, and the Character move itself that corresponds to that action involves momentum going in the same directions
Popularised by KOF and then adopted by everyone else.
Example of what I mean:
half-circle backward->forward+attack makes character do aim a blow, then lunge forward (Sol's Tyrant Rave move in GGX), or quarter-circle-backward+attack makes a character move in a way that involves backward momentum (Sol's Riot Stomp)
And so on.

This control scheme makes it much easier to "connect" with a character, since for the player it becomes easier to translate their actions into character's actions.

After you practice character moves, and what his combos/abilities are for some time, something just "clicks", and making the character do what you want becomes easy and satisfying.
After you "clicked" like that with one character, "connecting" to other character even from other games (if they have similar controls, and most of them do) becomes much simpler.

It is much easier to achieve this "connection" with a first person game, and much harder in a third-person game like fighting games are, but fighting games have much wider variety of moves you can make your characters perform, and thus the "connection" is all the more satisfying.

I must admit, I am more of a casual player and loose more often than win, but even fighting against an opponent you know you can't win is still satisfying, because the very process of fighting furiously with the character that fits you like a glove feels great.