Gaming Insurrection has uploaded a new Editor’s Weekly Podcast! We’re discussing two recent releases in the fighting game genre: Mortal Kombat and Marvel vs. Capcom 3. Listen using our embedded player or download it for on the go from the podcasts page.
We’re also including Episode 21 in this post because it wasn’t announced as usual. Its theme is Worst Games Ever Played. You can also listen to it here or download it from the podcasts page.
In a reversal of a published story this quarter in GI, NetherRealm Studios has announced the Mortal Kombat Arcade Kollection for later this summer.
The actual collection, a downloadable title, will feature MK1, MKII and Ultimate MK3 and will be released for the PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 and PC. Other features included are online play for the three games, leaderboards and support for Achievements and Trophies.
A tournament stick will be released. The Klassic arcade stick, from Performance Designed Products, will retail for $129.99 at GameStop and will include a download token for the collection. PDP released the companion tournament controller for the recent Mortal Kombat, the reboot of the series from NetherRealm, the new studio led by Mortal Kombat co-creator Ed Boon.
GI recently published a story in its Retro Game Corner section for 2Q2011 that focused on the rumors of an HD collection being released in the near future. The collection comes on the heels of MKII being removed from the PlayStation Network and Ultimate MK3 being removed from Xbox Live Arcade.
Welcome to First Impressions No. 3. This is a feature focusing on games that we’re trying for the first time and our immediate knee-jerk reaction. Be prepared for some interesting feedback on old and not-so-old games.﻿
In the interest of full disclosure, I will say this from the beginning: I used to be a serious Mortal Kombat enthusiast. Mortal Kombat is and was the first series I got heavily into way back when in the 1990s. If you follow GI regularly, there’s lots of references to my past with the MK series strewn over the site.
I fell in love with the series in 1993 with the release of the second game. That’s partially why there’s a tournament going on here at GI. MKII sucked me in with interesting story, characters and gameplay that I’d never really given a thought to before. I wasn’t playing Street Fighter II and it didn’t appeal to me as much. But as time progressed and I grew up, my feelings about the quality of the series diminished. The high point for me was probably MK3/Ultimate MK3/Trilogy. Afterward, nothing particularly warrants any play for me. Until now.
When I first heard about the MK reboot, I was severely skeptical. I had been burned by the awful movie sequel, and the fourth through seventh games weren’t good and had gotten away from what it meant to be Mortal Kombat. It had several objectives I felt needed to be completed for me to even begin playing it: The first was to recapture the feel of Mortal Kombat; the second was to get rid of the cartoony distractions; and the third was to update the gameplay to the level of modern-day fighting games. Mortal Kombat has had some growing pains to be sure but I’m happy to say I’m in love again.
The first thing I noticed about the game was the level of detail. MK is gorgeous. The fighters get progressively worse as they’re battered about and it’s surprisingly well done. The gore is unbelievable, and that’s saying a lot even for Mortal Kombat. It goes a long way that the originator of gore has updated in a tasteful way one of the many things that made it famous. Now, my feelings about Dan Forden’s soundtrack are still out. I haven’t heard much of anything in the game yet and since this is preliminary, I may or may not care for it. Forden is one of my favorite game music composers, having gained my ardor with Mortal Kombat II. I’m anxious to see what he came up with for the reboot in terms of new and remixed compositions.
Looking at the controls, I am impressed. As someone who has consciously avoided the series for five games, it felt like old hat to pick up the game and jump right into doing moves. No changing of moves for the sake of changing moves to be different. No random move sets that don’t make sense for characters. To put it another way, Scorpion feels like Scorpion. Kitana feels and plays like she did in Ultimate. Everything felt comfortable and fluid once I got a little used to the new timing. The mistakes of MK4, Deadly Alliance and Deception have been rectified for me. I was ready to take it back if Scorpion’s moveset had been changed again; it was that crucial that he be playable and familiar.
My biggest question about the game’s lineage was answered, however: Does Mortal Kombat recapture the feeling of old? Yes. Everything I loved about the first three games is present but updated. It’s as if Netherrealm had to throw off the shackles of Midway to make the Mortal Kombat sequel that should have been made nearly 20 years ago.
I couldn’t help but notice the combination of its past and hopeful future. The graphics are easily on par with Tekken 5/Dark Resurrection/6 – a benchmark in video game graphics, in my opinion – but still retain the MK feel. The music, from what little I’ve heard, is remixed in some places but entirely new in others. The characters are all combatants that appeared in the first three games; no one after except for Quan Chi has made appearance yet. Though I realize that it can be argued that Quan Chi was a central behind-the-scenes character of MK1 that hadn’t been realized yet. Also, the gameplay feels like Ultimate MK3 updated without a Run button.
All of this adds up to a feeling of coming home with MK. I feel this is the game that I should have been playing in 2002 when I was desperate to hang on to my nostalgic love for the series. If you’re an old-school MK player like myself, don’t hesitate to buy it. It is quite possibly one of the best reboots ever achieved in video games.
You know, it isn’t enough that arcades have fallen off the face of the earth. No, we’ve got to get personal by throwing in beautiful accessories that mimic that once-in-a-lifetime experience of going to the arcades in our homes.
You used to be able to head out to your local gathering hole of smoke-filled debauchery where young men and women used to grope machines until they had their fill. I often wondered what an arcade crime feature would play out like when I had downtime away from the games that soaked up my young imagination and spit out a seasoned gamer. Nowadays … there is no place to head out to, unless you count GameStop, and that doesn’t really count.
GameStop is a retailer, and an annoying one at that. Having spent time receiving household income from them makes my dislike meter go way up, but that’s another story for another time. What we’re here to talk about is the demise of the arcades, and why someone let this travesty occur.
If I could take a time-traveling machine back to any point in my life that has already happened, it would be to when various family members were still alive and when I was able to traverse the wild of Decker Boulevard to Aladdin’s Castle in what used to be Columbia Mall in Columbia, S.C. Today, that spot is just a memory and grease-hole food court in the chameleon Columbia Place. Some jump-off no-name restaurant that I refuse to patronize – probably a Subway – occupies the spot where my dreams of becoming a social gamer were made, where I spent far too much money and where I learned how to kill a man digitally. It was there I made the leap from kiddie to big time, from a childlike innocence of Ski-ball to simulated murder-death-kill mode with Mortal Kombat II.
I held my 11th birthday party there in 1992, and the same year attended a bubblegum blowing contest held on a Saturday afternoon. Managing to blow the equivalent of $50 in tokens on Smash TV was the highlight of my life or so I thought. It wasn’t until later in the year when I first heard the words “Finish Him!” bellowing across the room that I even noticed there were more things to do than collect tickets. Then there was Kombat. After that, there was nothing else to do but play games against sweaty, hot young men – more than enough for my pre-teen hormone-fueled mind to handle. It was a good time to be female and a teenager. There was no shortage of guys to flirt with and, despite never getting dates, I always thought of the weekends and weeknights spent crowded around MK1 and MK2 as a good time.
Once life hits you in the stomach and takes your money like a bully on the playground, you start to realize a couple of things.
First, you don’t have time to run to the arcade like you used to. There’s homework to be done, projects to take care of, significant others to pay attention to. Then, there’s jobs. And once you acquire that newfangled thing called employment, there goes any kind of free time you will ever want to have.
Second, the need to go out is replaced by the significantly improved equipment you’ve got laying around the house. Why go to the arcade and drop $5 when you have a $300 machine sitting in your living room that basically is a miniature version of that? Eventually, that machine will pay for itself and the gas money you’ve spent and the money you’ve lost getting your ass kicked by some pimply faced snot-nosed brat with the same thing in his bedroom.
Finally, I’m not getting any younger. The hand and eye coordination is nowhere near what it used to be. Thus, I’m getting old and I’m in no mood to deal with what comes with aging and losing. My expiration date came up a long time ago.
But then I say to myself, “Lyndsey, stop it. You know better and it doesn’t matter how old you are.” And then I look up, and arcades are gone. Suddenly, I remember the doors being shut across the country, the once-thriving scene of machine dens relegated to movie theaters and back-alley parlors. And there are tears in my eyes because it wasn’t supposed to come to this. It’s not supposed to end like this.
There should be a place I can take my kids and show them that mama and daddy once roamed through here, making friends and learning etiquette along the way. It’s also the place where we met, a common ground that became something special because of our shared interest. But I can’t. And I won’t because by the time they’re old enough to understand, there will be nothing left. Not a brick of memory, but just a solitary ethernet cable sitting by their crib waiting to plug in and reach out to punch someone over Xbox Live.
Gaming Insurrection is generally behind the curve when it comes to playing the latest titles, even if they are favorites.
Case in point: We just acquired Tekken 6 for Xbox 360, about a full year after it was released. I’m not traditionally a Tekken player but Associate Editor Jamie is. I owned Tekken Tag and Tekken 4 when we met and I bought Tekken 5 for him when it was released for the PS2 in 2005. You could say we love Tekken in our household.
When Tekken first hit the scene in 1994, I heartily ignored it. That was a mistake that I concede now, but I paid no attention to Namco’s signature brawler. I was heavily engrossed with Mortal Kombat and I wish I hadn’t been.
I would have learned how to play, took the time to learn to combo system and paid more attention to the storyline. Tekkne had style even back then with its blocky polygonal plastic graphics. The music wasn’t too much of anything special but it had a certain style to it that other games at the time, such as Street Fighter, were missing.
I dismissed the first game and barely acknowledged the second game until the third game came out. The only reason why I noticed Tekken 3 was because the guy I was dating at the time was into it and had to have it for his PlayStation. It was all he talked about, so I figured after two years I needed to see what the hoopla was about. I bought the game as a college freshman in 1999 and attempted to play it. I spent six months just messing around in training mode before I even made it to the arcade mode. By then, Tekken Tag had been released. It was then that I decided that I would never be a serious Tekken player. I know just enough with four or five characters to be able to bluff my way through a match and be dangerous, but nothing concrete enough to be good by any stretch of the imagination. I actually prefer to watch others play and soak up the Tekken atmosphere.
In the 10 years that I have watched the game, I’ve learned a few things. The first is that Tekken is a game about basics. That is, if you don’t have the basics down, you will never “get it.” You will never be good at the game, no matter how much you play against people or read FAQs, if you don’t understand how the series’ engine works. The second is that Tekken is a game about skill. To be truly good at it, you need to be innovative with combos and you need to have the core system down to a science. The third is if you hadn’t started with the first two games in the series, you will not do well. You need to have knowledge of the early days of Tekken or an uncanny knowledge of fighting games in general to be able to start with the series in three and after and do well at all. As I came to understand, I couldn’t just pick up three and start from there.
Despite not being able to play the game well, I do enjoy Tekken. I appreciate it for what it’s done for the genre. I think of Tekken as the forefather of style in fighting games, a series as much about how it looks and sounds as it plays. While you’ll never see me enter tournaments or do a Game Night match for any Tekken game, I do play the game from time to time. I’m actually good at the minigames, such as Tekken Beach Ball and especially Tekken Bowl. Because Tekken Force is tied into the fighting portion of the series, I tend to stay away from it in any version that it shows up. While I’m watching Tekken matches, I tend to listen to the music or pick up new details about the backgrounds that I hadn’t noticed before.
The best part of Tekken, for me so far, has been the soundtrack. I am an avid fan of the series sound direction and it’s customary for me to find the soundtrack for a new version. Chances are there is something on it that I will like. On each soundtrack I have my favorites that stick out as the “Tekken sound.” My favorite overall is Tekken Tag and Tekken 5 runs a close second. I’d be remiss in not mentioning that the Tekken 4 and 5 soundtracks grew on me after hearing them so much courtesy of the “Prince of the Iron Fist” that I live with. My partner is a Tekken player and was for some time before I met him, so Tekken gets much love in our home.
With the announcement of Tekken Tag 2 and Tekken vs. Street Fighter, you can be assured someone at Gaming Insurrection will be playing or listening to one of the best fighting game series ever made.
Tekken Tag: Unknown (arcade and home), School, Hwoarang , Jin, Staff Roll, Ogre, Character Select, Result, Continue, Yoshimitsu, Strike
The live-action Mortal Kombat trailer was sick! I was nearly moved to tears to see my favorite fighting game franchise rise from the ashes and blow minds like that. I am so impressed with everything: I loved the new backstories, the introduction to key characters from MK2 (my favorite in the series), the acting, the fight scenes … everything.
I have said since MK4 that the series really needed to move back to its roots completely to get back to the awesomeness that was MK’s early days and this looks like the way to go. Way to go MK team! Even if this is just a teaser for MK: Devastation (I don’t think it is, but there’s hope), I don’t care: It still looked awesome. The production values were high and the attention to character backgrounds was GREAT. I liked that they explained what made the characters who they were and I could easily identify who was who. I’m guessing it’s going to start with MK2, which is a good thing.
Kudos again, MK team! For the first time in a long time I’m excited about the direction of the series. For a longtime fan who disliked all later entries starting with MK4, this is a welcome return home.
The editors at Gaming Insurrection will periodically put together a video of the group gathering to play some of our favorite games for various systems. We enjoy video games and we think our readers will enjoy watching us play, too. As with our other videos, we will post the new videos here and at our YouTube channel.
In the sixth episode, Lyndsey and Jamie make their way back from a beach trip in search of arcades. The search gets mixed reviews from the editors. You can watch the episode below or on our Youtube user site: GamingInsurrection.
Gaming Insurrection is back with a new episode of the Gaming Insurrection Show. Join us as we play Marvel vs. Capcom for the Sega Dreamcast.
In this episode of the GI Show, Associate Editor Jamie Mosley and Contributing Editor Marcus Barnes have a little competition in the classic Capcom fighting game MvC. Editor Lyndsey M. Mosley provides commentary and films. You can watch the video here or on our YouTube channel.
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