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The Mortal Kombat Backlash


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I hope I don't come across too much as an MK fan boi :(

 

But anyway, I gave my youth to MK. I loved it. Something just struck me about it...

 

MK1 was a great success. So was MK2. MK3 and UMK3 didn't do as well as the others, but it technically still did well - reviews of it were good, conversions were good, it sold alot of copies and so on. Up until around then, Midway could do no wrong...

 

and then...

 

well, it was like, all of a sudden, overnight even, reviewers and critics started bagging MK. It really pissed me off to see reviewers, who a few months or a year ago, were hailing MK as one of the best fighting game series ever, to slag it off. Critics went from praising it to putting the series down. They went from saying it was a great fighting game to saying it was a stupid fighting game with gratuitous violence and lots of blood. It literally happened overnight.

 

I remember me, still a MK fanboy even though I didn't think MK3 was crash hot, get extremely angry when I read stuff like this. How could reviewers and critics turn their back on the series so quickly? How dare they! It was like, WTF???

 

So I'm wondering what you thought of this, and what you think caused it, and what were the reasons. Was it just a string of not-so-very-good games (MK3, Mythologies: Sub Zero, Special Forces, MK4), or was it something else? It has taken until the release of MK 5, roughly 10 years since MK3 came out, for MK to become popular again.

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Was it just a string of not-so-very-good games (MK3, Mythologies: Sub Zero, Special Forces, MK4), or was it something else? It has taken until the release of MK 5, roughly 10 years since MK3 came out, for MK to become popular again.

yep I think that was it. and you gotta remember the press can get jaded and burned out just like us. and a large part of the gaming population are sheep, who go along with whatever they are told is cool and uncool.

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It was a bad string of games, but it's not really the press' fault. MK3 was bad, and MK4 was horrible. That only stood out because MK 1 and 2 were so brilliant in terms of atmosphere, storyline, graphics etc etc. They couldn't really top the standards they set for themselves, and so lost the plot completely.

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I think people mainly played that game for the gore factor.  These days, it takes more than brutal graphics and gory fatalities for a game to succeed.

yeah a fighting game needs bouncy boobs to succeed nowadays [/sarcasm]

 

every game's got a gimmick.

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The downfall started with MK3 and its been falling ever since. It's not healthy for a franchise to have 2 good games and the rest crap. But maybe it will be easier for them to out do themselves...

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For the record. MK3 sucked because the console ports litterly killed it. Play the Arcade version on MAME and you'll know why.

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well i don't care what they think cuz it up to me or you to really judge the game.

 

mk3 i didn't really like at the arcades but it was fun for a while. i do agree that the consoles ports were poor but that was the best they can do for 16-bit consoles (i even remember that genesis and snes umk3's had missing characters just to fit the game) but ps1 did get a decent port of mk3 tho it sucked for shang sung tranformations but pretty damn good. best version of all console wise to me was umk3 for saturn.

 

mk4 was blah and it had decent ports to consoles and then with dc's version even beating the arcade still didn't help the game itself.

 

as for the other console only mk games, they sucked.

 

right now my biggest hope is that midway treasures vol.2 (ps2/xbox) will have perfect ports of mk1-3. mame i love but hate the crackling sound.

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Well after you look past all the violence and gore you can see how Sluggish and clunky the control’s and game play is for MK. It lacks depth and a fluid feel that games like DOA 3 and VF have. I mean it pretty much peaked at MK2. After that there is no excuse for how it plays still. But MK deadly alliance got decent reviews and sold real well right?

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