12/6/2008 - Every Mortal Kombat vs DC Universe Fatality

When they said that the next Mortal Kombat game would be T-Rated, I knew that it would not be a good sign for the series. They had to make it T-Rated because of the inclusion of the DC superheroes. In a bid to outdo Marvel vs. Capcom, all Midway did was to water down their flagship fighting series and to include licensed characters that seem oddly out of place. I suppose as long as the fighting engine is solid, neutered fatalities shouldn't be an issue, but it still seems wrong:



Batman's finishing move being a swarm of bats is just lame. Shang Tsung having to morph into the opponent in order to suck his/her soul? I thought he sucked people's souls so that he could morph into them. They actually had to censor Deathstroke and The Joker's fatalities in the final version of the game as well! I guess a point blank gunshot to the head is more intense than the Jax's machine gun fatality which wasn't censored. Ugh.

Mortal Kombat II - Japanese version for the SNES

One of Nintendo's biggest missteps was the exclusion of blood on the SNES version of Mortal Kombat. After all, the original Mortal Kombat was not really known for its gameplay. Yes, it had digitized actors for its character sprites, but so did Pit Fighter at the time. Mortal Kombat was really about one thing: gruesome violence. When you see Sub-Zero rip someone's head off, know why it became one of the biggest franchises in the fighting genre. That's why it was so critical to put all the violence back into the sequel, Mortal Kombat too. It went on, of course, to be a huge seller.

You'd think then, in Japan, they would leave the violence in their version of MKII for the SNES. After all, their games are usually censored by the time they came to the States. For example, in the game Final Fight, the character of Poison became a man in the American version because her costume was too revealing (there's also an issue of whether or not she's actually a transvestite, but that's for another time). So it really surprised me to see that Japan censored Mortal Kombat II for their audience:



It kind of reminds me of how they brought Kill Bill over to cable TV by using black and white during the sword fighting scene. And green blood? What the heck?

4/20/2007 - Mortal Kombat 3: A Fatality Funny BUG

Rated R for animated violence

Ah, Mortal Kombat... the game that put excessive video game violence into the mainstream. The first Mortal Kombat wasn't really that great, but it definitely rode on the phenomenal success of Street Fighter 2. What made it stood out, of course, were the fatalities. Yes, I still remember my first decapitation as Sub-Zero.

Perhaps as a way to ward off the Jack Thompson's of the world, Mortal Kombat 2 included Friendships and Babalities along with it's more elaborate Fatalities. That was fine and dandy as it gave the game a little more variety (it probably squeezed more money out of the gamers too, as they experimented more and more with the finishing moves). But I think they took it a little too far in Mortal Kombat 3 with its Animalities. Compared to the Fatalities they weren't really memorable. And sometimes, just sometimes, you'd have bugs like this:



This is a time when the phrase "WTF" is appropriate.