I haven't played any 1v1 fighting games in many years and when any of the Mortal Kombat games were released outside of the 90's I didn't really pay them any mind. That was until I found myself at a party yesterday where we were looking for games that more than one person could play.
The rules for the group was that nobody could play if they knew how to play because all of us were just going to be operating off of really old information that probably wasn't even true anymore.
Back in the days of gaming yore, fighting games were all the rage. This was 1000 years ago or so, or it might have been the 90's... one of the two. This was back in the days when arcades still existed and being good at Mortal Kombat was probably one of the best nerd skills you could possibly have.
A high-level nerd lord could come into the arcade with just a few dollars and likely sit on the machine for hours waiting for person after person to challenge them in vain. One of my best friends in high-school was like this and I guess I admired him because not only did he master a few of the characters, he mastered almost all of them and also remembered those absurdly complicated fatalities that you had a buy a book in order to find them out.
With last night's foray into MK11, none of that glory was showcased and mostly we were just hitting buttons or perhaps attempting a move that we remembered from 30 years ago. It was basically a shit show since we were about 3 or four fights in against one another before anyone figured out how to block.
I started out playing as Scorpion because that was my favorite character just like I am sure it was a lot of people's favorite character back in the day. I couldn't even remember how to throw the "get over here!" chain unfortunately and the only real offense I could generate was warping through the walls to appear behind my opponent. This didn't do me much good because once there I would normally just do a light punch or kick.
I will say this though: the graphics and brutality of this game are unreal
They are called "fatal blows" and the only reason why we learned about this is because one of the onlookers who was not playing noticed the notification at the top of the screen. I don't know what you have to do in order to fill that meter up but once you do you get to do an unblockable (I think) move that does quite a bit of damage to your opponent. It also takes control away and does a mini cutscene that shows a X-ray of sorts on the person's body that you are against. It's pretty wild and was entertaining to the onlookers for sure.
I thought it was very funny but that didn't take away from the fact that me and everyone else was basically just hitting a bunch of buttons and hoping for the best.
Long gone are the days where I am going to devote any time to actually learning how to do well at this but in the interest of making the night slightly more entertaining I may actually look up a few of the moves for one of the characters so that we can do more than just jump back and forth and accidentally throw a projectile every now and then.
I'm pretty sure that this game was part of the PS-Plus free catalogue at some point but I totally ignored it because I prefer 1-player games and almost never do online multiplayer. I definitely wouldn't do multiplayer for this game because I can only imagine how incredibly good the online players are. They would probably get angry with me for being so terrible at it.
I think that games like this can serve a real social purpose though because at the party even though not everyone there was a gamer - most of them were NOT actually - the people in attendance found it all to be quite fun even though nobody had any idea what they were doing. Some of us with 30 year old experience were able to pull off a move or two but I just found myself getting frustrated because I actually DO remember some of the moves, just not how to do them.
I really wanted to do some of Liu Kang's flying kicks but try as I may, i was just kicking wildly and mostly hitting nothing.