Finish Him By Chris Moxon

I love fighting games, I'm not great at the genre, but I enjoy the time I invest in them. In the last three years the fighting genre has been rejuvenated with the success of Street Fighter IV. Since then, a handful of old franchises have been resurrected or rebooted, the most recent being Marvel VS Capcom 3, while two other well decorated franchises did what most dreamed about and combined forces ( Street Fighter X Tekken and Tekken X Street Fighter). In general these past few years have been more than wonderful for this once faded genre, but amongst these great times, there is only one game that I roll my eyes at with every itteration and scoff whenever it's mentioned; that game is Mortal Kombat.

Last year a trailer for the new Mortal Kombat was shown and since then I've asked myself a question over and over again. "Why does this reboot bother me, out of all theother fighting games that have been released in the last couple of years, why does this one bug me the most? Unfortunately, I couldn't articulate or organize a reasonable argument to match my overwhelming irritation for the series and then I heard Jack Devries, an editor for IGN say something on a podcast and it clicked. "When it comes down to it Mortal Kombat is a gimmick fighter." It all made sense. Take away the blood and fatalities and what a person was left with was a really bad fighting game. I suddenly remembered why I never quite grasped the idea that MK was fun. The animation was like the fighting, stiff. The button combinations to perform a set of combos/ fatalities were ludicrous at times, which resulted in me becoming fusterated and a desire to never touch another installment again. In the end it was never worth it.

To me Mk has always been a "me too" series, a B movie of fighter. It played the way it looked, cheap and from MK 4 on it only solidifies my claim. While the Street Fighter series was evolving to to benefit their players with more options, MK instead gave players more gimmicks. An example of this is in Street Fighter III introduced the "Parry System" and MK64 gave you a weapon. Super Street Fighter II Turbo gave their players more characters to master tighter controls and several speed settings, MK 2 introduced "friendship" and "babalities." While one was about performance and thinking ahead to the tournament players the other, as stated before was about gimmicks. with every itteration that MK introduced, the ideas and quality became increasingly laughable, the most recent being MK vs DC, which left the DC heroes without fatalities, sub-par controls and once again character animations were stiff. Have other fighting game stooped to laughable concepts. Yes, the Tekken series had a guy who had a head of a tiger, you could choose to fight as a panda bear or as a wooden figure, but the fighting mechanics were solid, they never strayed away from what made the series great and it was a game about skill and not about ripping a man's spine out. The graphics for the rebooted MK look great and the fighting looks promising, but to sum up the series a phrase comes to mind. "You can put lipstick on a pig to make it look pretty, but it's still a pig."