Tag: midway games

Mortal Kombat HD Continuation

TiberiusLeave a comment

The continuation of a legacy

The final part of this Legacy Video Game Trilogy concludes with a hard reboot that still has the sensibilities to pay homage to the most awkward yet charmingly nostalgic part of its existence. So to recap: MK Deadly Alliance gave us an ungodly pairing in the two sorcerers Quan Chi and Shang Tsung, whose combined strength and abilities gave them the leverage to revive the Dragon King’s Army and wreak havoc on all the realms, without Shao Kahn f[screams]king them over or Liu Kang stopping them.

Not without Raiden’s intervention and before I continue on that, I had time to watch some MK 4 endings and in both Raiden’s and Fujin’s endings, Raiden accepts ascension to the position of Elder God while Fujin replaces him as Protector of Earthrealm. Raiden chose him as a successor and Fujin accepted it. But in Deadly Alliance, Fujin doesn’t appear until 2006’s Armageddon. Plot-hole? Not so. On the production side of things, the devs didn’t think Fujin had the recognition and popularity as the Thunder God so they put him back in this game in arguably one of his better looks.

Canonically, 7 feet tall.

Lore-wise, the death of Liu Kang made all the difference. Fujin hasn’t been demoted by way of a performance review; it’s just that Raiden’s attachment to half of his Shaolin Monk disciples influenced his decision to step down and see the fall of the Deadly Alliance personally. I don’t completely see this as an official source, since it came from r/MortalKombat and I wasn’t there when they were developing the game for release in 2002, but I’m glad I did.

Anyway, Raiden saw to it personally to essentially raise a militia of Earth’s best allies and defenders to destroy the Deadly Alliance. They failed, so much so that nearly all of them had become sacrifices for the undead army. Come Deception time, Raiden stood as the final bastion between freedom and conquest. At his defeat, the partnership between Quan Chi and Shang Tsung effectively evaporated and with the holder of Shinnok’s amulet (namely Quan Chi) being the one who can control the army, the two fight in Shang Tsung’s palace… and are immediately greeted by Onaga himself, coming to reclaim his rightful army that he knew was in the hands of the sorcerers.

The wiki explains that the Amulet has control over the army somehow (Boon and Tobias must’ve skipped that step), but its power and influence are superseded by Onaga’s heart. So you know you’re f[metal clanking]ked when the undead soldiers you painstakingly spent so much time and effort to revive, bow to their original master and not you. That reminds me of a Martin Mystery episode where an evil wizard attempts to revive Qin Shi Huang and the terracotta army only to realize that Emperor Qin was the furthest thing from a stable ruler and that in the show the terracotta army was created to keep the old emperor from getting out.

Misplaced balance of power and all that, Quan Chi, Shang Tsung, and Raiden temporarily work together to destroy Onaga, but two sorcerers and a temporary Elder God aren’t enough to destroy Onaga. Raiden’s last ditch effort doesn’t even dent him and worse he has the Kamidogu and Shinnok’s Amulet. He doesn’t need that for the army, but he does need it to merge the Kamidogu into one and morph into the One Being from which the realms were created. Oof, heavy stuff, huh?

By Armageddon time, it’s become apparent that the warriors in the realms are too aware of the forces that created them, and the Elder Gods consult with Argus and Delia, the Protectors of Edenia, to seek a solution so that none can threaten existence again. Argus suggested death, Delia suggested annulment, and so millennia ago, they created the firespawn Blaze so that his death in Mortal Kombat could bring about one of these outcomes, but a cascading effect seen over the course of the games led to an unintended outcome: even distribution of power. Not to mention, part of this plan was a quest which would test which of Argus’ and Delia’s sons, Taven and Daegon, would handily succeed them. The rules of primogeniture determined Taven the successor as the older brother, but Blaze was kidnapped and enslaved by Onaga’s holy men to guard the last dragon egg.

Blaze kept constant mental contact with their guardian dragons, Orin and Caro, but when he was kidnapped, that contact was lost and Caro mistakenly revived Daegon earlier than expected, kicking off much of the plot of the 3D era of games. At this revelation, Taven’s quest morphed from competition to a race to become the successor of Argus, seeing as the alternative was the Edenian equivalent of Shao Kahn. And they already had that… in the form of Shao Kahn!

Some of the endings, once again, connect as Taven is rewarded while Daegon is punished in Daegon’s ending. Raiden’s is a culmination of what he endured from Deadly Alliance to this, and Shao Kahn’s ending flows nearly seamlessly into the intro for Mortal Kombat 9. Rather than Taven become a full-god and see the failure of the quest, Shao Kahn ascended to the top of the Pyramid of Argus to defeat Blaze. In Armageddon, it was shown that Dark Raiden struck a deal with Outworld to spare Earthrealm if Raiden stopped Taven and Daegon from completing their quest. Something Light Raiden would NEVER do, even in desperation.

The opening cinematic of MK9 shows that this didn’t pan out as he’d hoped, seeing as Shao Kahn unsurprisingly reneged on that deal and used his newfound godhood to pummel Raiden before Raiden used his last moments to relay a message to his past self. The overarching crux of the message being “don’t become me,” but the most important one being “He must win,” where Past Raiden spends the game finding out who “he” refers to.

Thus, this game in the HD timeline redoes the first three MK games. The first third of the game is a near-mirror of the previous 1992 one, even with Sub-Zero’s death at Scorpion’s hands. And like the original it ends with Liu Kang’s victory in Mortal Kombat, but the intended outcome worsens the damage in Raiden’s amulet. It cracked when Raiden received the original “he must win” message and the course of the game shows it getting worse and worse.

The second third of the game is essentially a different Mortal Kombat II, and much so. Shang Tsung still got reduced to that of a fighter like in the original, but rather than it being simply a punishment for failure, the sorcerer convinced Shao Kahn to move the tournament to Outworld and fight on their terms. Raiden obviously said no, but this was less of an agreement between equals and more of a demand from a tyrant who forced his hand by unleashing Baraka’s Tarkatan horde on the Wu Shi Academy.

And that game is fantastic if you ignore its writing.

Forced to compete now on Shao Kahn’s terms, Raiden and the gaggle of Earthrealm warriors he’s recruited go to Outworld but also to investigate the real source of the cracks in the amulet and discover why Raiden’s efforts are failing fate. One of several notable changes here is that instead of Smoke becoming a cyborg like before, that becomes the fate of the new Sub-Zero Kuai Liang. If you recall, in the old timeline, Noob and Sub-Zero were brothers. Noob the more ruthless of the two when he was Grandmaster seeing as he led the charge against the Shirai Ryu and slaughtered them wholesale, but was further blamed for the murder of Scorpion’s family.

This didn’t change in the new timeline and Noob (originally Bi-Han) is still brutal, and is still innocent of the death of Harumi and Satoshi Hasashi. Nevertheless, Quan Chi pulling the strings from the sidelines once again birthed Noob Saibot and, in this timeline, Cyber Sub-Zero. Meanwhile, the tournament in Outworld commences and if you’ve ever played the original MKII and made it that far, you’ll notice that Kano and Sonya Blade are shackled in the background of the arena. This time around, Kano has no reason to be Shao Kahn’s prisoner since he’d sold him the Black Dragon’s service and arsenal, and Sonya was freed by Johnny Cage, Raiden, and Jax. Kitana, though, getting ideas from the Thunder God, investigated Shang Tsung’s flesh pits to discover her hybrid clone Mileena. With Kitana being the last remnant of Edenia’s ruling family, Shao Kahn’s plan in this and the other timeline was to replace Kitana with a loyal daughter.

Shao Kahn loses his Outworld tournament, but the future remains unchanged largely because of Quan Chi and his hidden agenda seeing as he hastens Shao Kahn’s recovery, revives and essentially reprograms Sindel to be evil, and kicked off an invasion of Earthrealm itself. Previously, Shao Kahn could never do this due to Sindel’s ward keeping him from setting foot there, but her revival and Quan Chi’s spell over her psyche making her more receptive to Shao Kahn’s tactics, lifts that barrier.

Raiden recruits even more warriors to defend Earth and repel the invasion, but finds failure after failure in the last third of this game’s glorified HD remake of Mortal Kombat 3. Kabal joins up, Cyber Sub-Zero is reprogrammed, Noob Saibot is defeated, but Raiden’s attempts at repelling Shao Kahn’s advances fail each time. Finally, he goes straight to the Elder Gods themselves who prove equally worthless in this timeline, barely batting an eye at Shao Kahn’s atrocities quoting: “Invasion itself is not a transgression, it is the merger of realms that is proscribed.” A distinction without a difference fallacy that the almighty Elder Gods fail to see themselves. Sort of like granting rights based not on race but on wealth.

In the time it took for the Elder Gods to heroically sit it out until the eleventh hour, Sindel herself decimated the defenders in no time, even her daughter. Johnny and Sonya got through with only bruises and so Earth’s final defenders were reduced to a four-man team, very much to Liu Kang’s growing resentment at Raiden’s ad hoc decision making.

Remember how I said, Light Raiden would never strike a deal with Shao Kahn to spare Earth? Well, those words are looking mighty delicious right about now as it seems that he’s about to bargain for Quan Chi’s participation to stop Shao Kahn, offering his soul and those of the fallen. But Quan Chi being a necromancer, he already has their souls in possession and after battling their revenants, Raiden realizes once again at the apex of destruction that evil needs to get within a stone’s throw of victory before the Elder Gods show themselves. “He must win” meant Shao Kahn merging the realms illegally. Mortal Kombat being the magical arbitration to decide this, violating it through conquest finally gets the Elder Gods to pass judgment and punishment.

This comes with protest from Liu Kang, who falls for the same pitfalls, as the original Raiden and doggedly vows to stand against Shao Kahn even in futilely. It costs him his life and true to his vision, Raiden does allow Shao Kahn to enter Earthrealm undeterred, feigning submission in an effort to get the Elder Gods to act, though not without taking his hits. Fans have called out Raiden for this foolishness, but across the game it shows how much he’s being put to the test. You can’t pass malice onto him for trying so hard to keep everyone alive and Earthrealm undamaged by Shao Kahn’s poison.

The pyrrhic victory gives us a glimpse into what comes in the next game. Mortal Kombat X (technically Roman numeral for 10) immediately follows the post-invasion chaos of Shao Kahn’s entry into Earthrealm. With Shinnok and Quan Chi leading coordinated attacks, Johnny, Sonya, and Kenshi (who made a glorious comeback in the new timeline even for a guest appearance in the last game) lead the charge from the ground while Raiden and Fujin intercept Quan Chi and Shinnok at the Sky Tower, home of Earth’s energy forces in the form of the Jinsei chamber.

They even meet the remnant versions of friends long passed, under the service of Quan Chi. With Shinnok now freed from the Netherrealm and facing the Earthrealm forces personally, like the other games we reach the apex of near destruction, but in a deus ex machina twist, Johnny Cage follows up from his character arc in the last game and becomes the unlikely hero we didn’t know we needed.

Yeah, one thing you’ll notice over the course of just MK9 is that while Johnny understands the gravity of the situation before him, writing it off as but a simple competition, his tone and attitude changes with each chapter. Meanwhile, Liu Kang is the one who grows further disillusioned and rightfully so. Witnessed the death of his best friend, tended to his wounded comrades, saw the Elder Gods sit by and let s[neighs]t unfold in unflattering ways, and he was witness to Master Raiden reach desperate levels to save Earth. I can’t say whether he would’ve had the same reaction in the original timeline if he lived to see it all since Shang Tsung killed him in Deadly Alliance. But if Taven’s reaction in Armageddon’s Konquest mode is any indicator, Dark Raiden was brilliant in how unexpected it was at the time, and it was after the sixth main installment where Raiden went off the deep end. Does he show up again here outside of a flashback? We’re getting to that.

After his defeat at Johnny’s hands, Shinnok is sealed within his own talisman, begging the question somewhat of why he’d have it, but going by the rules of a gun, it’s not designed to have any loyalty. The amulet is also incapable of being destroyed, so the most they can do is closely guard it round the clock, which they continually do for the next 25 years, after which the remaining combatants have moved on with their lives and the like.

Trauma bonding pushed Johnny and Sonya close enough to marry, reproduce, and divorce in that time frame over which we learn that their daughter, Cassie, has felt stuck between two worlds: Hollywood brat or military brat? Which seems like a really unique childhood to have though not necessarily envy. One lifestyle has you hounded by paparazzi for room temperature IQ tabloids, and the other has you moving at the same time as your parents depending on the needs of the branch of service, provided the marriage is strong enough to get through the military.

Then again, Jax’s daughter may have the comparatively more enviable of these two. Jacqui Briggs isn’t explicitly stated to be a military brat herself, but she more than likely has the hallmarks of one if we dissect the finer details. Unlike Cassie, Jacqui’s mother is simply an unseen NPC who most likely passed away long before the start of the game. For Jax, he, Scorpion, and Sub-Zero were the revenants who helped to defend Quan Chi’s lair during a raid by the Special Forces. In that particular mission, Johnny nearly died, but Sonya beat the piss outta Quan Chi while Raiden reversed the spell that would’ve created remnant Johnny Cage. Quan Chi’s defeat brought Jax, Scorpion, and Sub-Zero back to life and already this quasi-Mortal Kombat 4 is markedly different from the original in more ways than simply graphics.

Kenshi himself had a son named Takeda, and from the Kung family comes Lao’s cousin, Kung Jin. The MK kids are meant to be the new bloods though the fan reception was mixed to put it lightly. They’re tasked with assuring all of Earthrealm’s bonds and alliances and aiding Kotal Kahn, the new ruler and admittedly usurper of Outworld causing a civil war between himself and those loyal to Mileena who was chosen to succeed Shao Kahn after the Elder Gods ate him.

I personally like his portrayal and physical appearance, being Aztec inspired. Character-wise, he’s not a conqueror like Shao Kahn or power-hungry like Onaga. To use real political terms, he gives me “populist, isolationist” vibes. That said, he doesn’t really do away with Shao Kahn’s old policies like the liberal use of execution. He also keeps his own cabinet of characters old and new. The civil war between him and Mileena revealed everyone’s true colors. Without his original masters, Ermac defected. As did Reptile, suggesting he never respected Mileena very much as a construct of Edenian flesh and Tarkatan blood. The ones willing to serve Mileena as Kahnum of Outworld boil down to Tanya, who returns (yay!), Baraka, who doesn’t (boo!), Rain who isn’t DLC this time around *throws controller into next week*, and Kano, who’s loyalty is for rent. He’s still a treacherous money-hungry thug, but I doubt he’s as foolish as last time, even after a quarter-century sending Black Dragon-brand brutality to both sides to come out on top regardless… like Simeon Weisz in Lord of War.

Maybe I should review movies again, I’ve been watching a handful of them as of late.

I like the intricacies of this civil war so far, but they’re better experienced than explained, especially seeing as Kotal wins out over Mileena and immediately turns on the Kombat Kids for the greater good in his words. Between scares and enemy espionage, Kotal Kahn concluded that Earthrealm can’t be trusted to safeguard the amulet so it’s in the best interest of Outworld and the rest of existence if Outworld held onto it until Raiden could set his priorities straight.

Meanwhile, one of Kotal’s most trusted, D’Vorah, a Kytinn bug woman is revealed to be a disciple of Quan Chi and servant of Shinnok. Sonya resorts to bringing Jax out of retirement as a means to get Earth’s defenders back into the light and out from Netherrealm’s influence. This goes on for the last quarter of the game, though with significant trouble in the way. Jax helps apprehend Quan Chi, but this is short-lived when Scorpion learns from Sub-Zero that the mastermind behind his agony came from within the Lin Kuei. Seeing as the original Sub-Zero was also a victim, the trend of “inside job conspiracies” reappears in this game to haunt Hanzo Hasashi ’til the end of days.

Ever played the GTA IV mission where you bust out one of Derrick’s old friends only to blow his brains out? Similar thing here, Scorpion breaks into a military prison to kill Quan Chi who uses his last breath to summon Shinnok behind enemy lines. With D’Vorah’s aid, they invade the sky temple again, trap Raiden and infect the Jinsei chamber, with less effort than the initial invasion 25 years ago. And since Shinnok is a petty little bitch, he imprisons Johnny too. As Dark Shinnok, the fallen Elder God becomes Raiden’s worst nightmare.

At this point, the Kombat Kids have broken out of imprisonment and returned to Earth right as this all unfolds and stand as the last beacon of hope for Earth, a role Raiden played in Deception before turning dark himself.

Every time Mortal Kombat gets Dark Raiden, they chicken out before they can use him. The most action he gets is his own ending in Armageddon where he obliterates all realms except Earth to destroy all outside threats to Earth. MK X teased him at the end with a stern warning to the Netherrealm under new leadership to not even think about trying anything or they’ll share Shinnok’s fate.

Dark Raiden is a major part of the first two chapters or so of MK 11, but thanks to time travel shenanigans, he’s written out before he can exercise the fullest extent of his wrath. The mission from MK X is more or less complete with Shinnok defeated though I doubt Raiden was forthcoming with his fate. Not to mention, the villain this time around is the titan Kronika who masters an hourglass that writes the fates of all. I’m pretty sure I’ve played this trope before.

Time travel shenanigans aside, MK 11 takes away the heavy lifting Raiden would’ve done to protect Earthrealm by simply bringing everyone back from when they were at their best. This game does have a DLC arc that’s best explored away from the main series even though it flows into 2023’s M1K soft reboot. Re-touched upon in this game, Kronika not only manipulated events, but claims responsibility for driving a wedge in between Raiden and Liu Kang. Timeline after timeline, their power combined has shown to be a threat to Kronika. Using this to his advantage, Raiden stops fighting Liu Kang and they merge to form Fire God Liu Kang who was last seen in that god-awful Mythologies spin-off. Depending on the player, the game can end with human Raiden aiding Liu Kang as he remakes reality, or with Kitana long after she wins big as the new Kahnum of Outworld when a career-ending injury removes Kotal Kahn from power.

I’m not certain on whether M1K is the beginning of a new arc in the Mortal Kombat franchise. It’s the first one for the 2020s and has a hell of a lot of callbacks which thoroughly entertained the legacy fan in me. I’ve seen full gameplay of it, but haven’t experienced the rest of the game for myself yet, so I’ll cap this long post with my thoughts on the HD continuation. It almost follows the beats of the original series but diverges beginning in the third arc of MK9 and doesn’t look back in the rearview mirror. Shinnok still makes his comeback in this timeline’s answer to MK4, but doesn’t fall victim to Quan Chi’s machinations. Quan Chi isn’t even acknowledged as the true mastermind and even when they do treat him as such, the focus goes toward Shinnok who manipulated events from the start. So he’s no different from Armageddon’s Konquest mode, the point of divergence being that Daegon is the one who serves him instead of Quan Chi… or rather he plays them both. Honestly, MK’s biggest flaw is having loyal characters serving untrustworthy villains. Say what you want about Deadly Alliance, but Quan Chi and Shang Tsung understand fully that the partnership is purely transactional.

The villains this time around are aware of this aspect though seem to be blind to Quan Chi’s reach and influence. Not that he’s the most powerful villain or remains so for long as Kronika beats him to the punch in MK 11. It ultimately screwed over the revenants still under Quan Chi’s influence at the time of his death, but I say its for the best that he wasn’t alive to witness Kronika emerge from her chamber. Besides, the revenants can be restored after consultation with the Elder Gods, as long as they don’t take it literally.

All in all, this era in Mortal Kombat history gets a lot of praise in the beginning followed by loads of critique over what should’ve been done by whom during XYZ. All well and good, but it suffers from the same problem exhibited by the God of War series in that the games of the past are written off as weird and off-putting. But as a defender of this era of Mortal Kombat, flawed or not, this was a necessary step toward greatness, and the only regret(s) are that Shaolin Monks hasn’t been rewritten and remastered and we haven’t seen anything in the form of Chess Kombat, Motor Kombat or Puzzle Kombat in the last 20 years. I would gladly do embarrassing things to see this in the modern day again.

The Suffering: A Forgotten Horror TPS

TiberiusLeave a comment

Even Midway can take a break from fighting games

What I’m about to bring you is a video game series that is completely out of season and extraordinary mainly because of the team that developed it: The Suffering and its sequel Ties That Bind.

Yeah, I wasn’t kidding about it being a Midway game.

Released in 2004, The Suffering is set on a former POW island, now a regular civilian-operated prison under the control of the Maryland state prison system, and one with a nasty history. Think of the reputation of Andersonville prison camp or a few historical British or continental European prisons; the age-old “scrubbing a turd doesn’t make it not a turd” approach to refurbishing a place as accursed as this.

The protagonist is Torque and he’s on death row for brutally murdering his wife and two sons. Just one problem, he can’t recall ever doing such a thing, but not much can be done as he’s set to walk the green mile… or he would be if s[metal clanging]t didn’t turn sideways. Not ten minutes into his cell with fellow death row inmates–an Aryan Nations member, a pedophile, and a man convicted of an unspecified heinous crime (for giggles, let’s say he’s perma-banned from 15 states)–the prison island releases the Devil’s cologne and a legion of monsters, possibly created from the mummified remains of those who were executed return to exact their revenge on everything and everyone on the island, because no one can have s[gunshots]t in Baltimore. Not even The Wire.

These supernatural hybrid undead creatures hastily held together by nails, duct tape, and rusty scalpels prances about killing anything that breathes, doesn’t even have to move. The first victims are the prison guards, whom we see in the game don’t have the prisoners’ best interests at heart. Even those with a slated release date get stepped on. Next are the prisoners, and all of Torque’s cellies get sashimied. The rest of the prisoners aren’t as lucky but with law and order sliced and stabbed and even shot at, there’s a chance for the inmates to make their escape and Torque is of the same mindset, though he also spends his escape piecing together the course of events that put him on death row.

The horror elements of the game do wonders for the action and action is how the game was advertised. Critics at the time tried to compare it to Silent Hill or Resident Evil and the Wikipedia page states that that doesn’t work because the game is more “action-horror” than “survival-horror.” I’m not above making the comparison considering the game sets itself up for it, releasing at or around the same time as some of these; then again, the game’s reputation and comparison to other games weren’t why I chose to emulate it.

Its sequel, Ties That Bind, has a demo in the game Mortal Kombat: Shaolin Monks, following on from Deception’s Area 51 demo.

Maybe I’ll emulate this one. Maybe not. Who knows?

The game’s designer, Richard Rouse III, made it clear as crystal in interviews that survival isn’t the focus of the game. Action is, since Torque, despite being a silent protagonist, feels like a twisted version of Ashley J. Williams from the Evil Dead movies. I haven’t finished the first game and I’ve only played the demo for the sequel (many years ago, I might add so what I’m about to say next may be inaccurate), but I believe both games give you a variety of weapons to use. So far, I’ve got a shiv and a revolver in my current run through of the first game. Different weapons will work on different enemies and truth be told, looking at the enemy variety necessitates a semi-strategic approach.

The lore plays a huge part in the enemies that pop up. Contributing to this carnval of carnage and misery, the fictional history of the prison reveals a diverse range of creative execution methods from hanging to firing squad to even lethal injection. The enemies’ appearance is a reflection of many of these and I’ve found that fighting them with the most applicable weapons in accordance to how they died. The ones who died by firing squad are weakest against a gun. What kind? The revolver you pick up off a prison guard is sufficient enough. Sorta like how in Max Payne 1 every cutscene shows Max with his work weapon, even if you shot everyone with the Dual Ingrams.

Interestingly enough, Torque shares the same healing method as Max Payne, the painkiller.

The game also features a moral choice system that gives way to three openings, each influenced by player actions and a trio of spirits who haunt the prison. The three Ghosts of Prison’s Past are a doctor named Killjoy, a former executioner named Hermes Haight, and an executed prisoner named Horace Gauge. Killjoy ran the insane asylum in the 1920s and naturally his ghost wants to comb through Torque’s quirks, discover why he does what he does. Hermes the executioner has killed a handful of inmates in his nearly 30 years at the prison before taking his last victim: himself. To him, Torque is gonna free the beast and he is gonna like it! Lastly, Horace, is himself a prisoner who was also put to death for killing his lover during a conjugal visit, something he blamed on the evil atmosphere of the island. He maintained the regret and professed his innocence up until boarding the Ol’ Sparky Express, and from beyond the grave he believes he has a kinship with Torque, spending his afterlife convincing Torque that he’s not a bad guy. All three work together to influence Torque from within his mind and even drive him to transform into a grotesque Lovecraftian creature, though this transformation is wholly psychological.

The themes exhibited by these three ghosts harkens to a brief health lesson I got from my high school English class on personality traits as explained by famous psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud: the id, the ego, and the superego. The shortest explanation of that is the id is the force behind your desires, no matter how wicked; the superego is the force that houses your principles, even the naïve thoughts you had as a child; and the ego where reality keeps these ambitions and ideals in your head where they belong. Gauge is the closest to the superego, Hermes is the literal id, and Dr. Killjoy is the ego.

Not a bad video game overall, it did a lot of neat things, some new things and even makes good use of its moral choice system. It screws with canon a little though I’ve yet to discover by how much come the second game. Now that all the good is out the way, let’s discuss the bad.

The 2000s weren’t a good era for Midway. The YouTube channel Matt McMuscles explains in his Wha Happun? series that the good idea fairy invaded the Midway offices and greenlit yearly releases, ramping up in 2004 with this game and Mortal Kombat: Deception and ending around 2008 when the bankruptcy rumors were turning into reality. Here’s a video he did on The Suffering:

Channel: Matt McMuscles

Focusing on Midway’s darling franchise of Mortal Kombat, the magnum opus became a cultural phenomenon in the early 1990s when those arcade cabinets were first hooked up and internal troubles had been slowly boiling since at least 1997 when MK4 didn’t live up to it’s proposed potential. Coupled with that specific game’s subpar induction of 3D technology and it would take a while for Midway to recover from such an embarrassment. Failed spinoffs from Ed Boon and John Tobias’ side, the company drowning in debt to pay off pre-existing debt, and a few small gems buried under layers of s[cow moos]t, it was reported that Midway’s prestige as one of the Top 5 video game developers in 2000 dropped to Top 20 in just a few years. But as we know, it came back like a phoenix with help from Warner Bros. and is f[pimp slap]king with timelines once again.

The anonymous editors of the Wikipedia page for the 1992 game must not have been happy to specify which game having been rebooted a second time.

For what it’s worth, The Suffering is a victim of time, in that better timing could’ve helped it escape cult status, same for the second game. Executive shenanigans also hurt it severely as a yearly release was Midway’s answer to its financial woes. The “Band-Aid on a gunshot wound” approach to solving the issue, and one that if rumors are true, are looking to roost in Ubisoft’s nest. Whether that’s a good or bad thing is up to you–I haven’t played a Ubisoft game in years and I know I’m sleeping on a library of peak.

Let’s rewrite history a bit: The Suffering releases to such fanfare in 2004 and gets a sequel in 2005. Does it escape cult status? From within Midway, sure. From within the horror genre, not really. It would still have to fight against Konami, Capcom, and Tecmo’s Fatal Frame for attention, and what Raccoon City, New England and Project Zero do that The Suffering didn’t (or probably couldn’t) was have a voiced protagonist. This is what tears me up a bit; on the one hand, a silent protagonist can have character without a tongue, if analyses of Claude from GTA III can attest, but on the other hand, the era the game released in would’ve had more reverence for a protagonist who can voice their opinions. Midway may not have been as ambitious with casting at the time like RockStar was, but even an up and coming voice actor with an impressive range or future could’ve done wonders to guide us further into Torque’s mind.

Don’t get me wrong, I like that the lore of the island speaks for the game itself, but a silent protagonist with a backstory this heavy sells itself so depressingly short that it would need to wait some time before it can ride anything worth its salt at Disney World or Six Flags.

You could argue that it would rob the game of the mystery of the fate of Torque’s family, but it’s not like we’ve never had amnesiac protagonists before and a lot of them are pretty bad ass. Lest we forget:

And his animated forms have always had a beautifully raspy voice to carry those raw, unfiltered emotions. Sure, the cartoons have to be censored because the real Wolverine reeks of other people’s blood, but I’ll take the sacrifice for peak storytelling.

We don’t necessarily need a remake of The Suffering, but a game that does something similar or perfects what it did could be bless us in the future.

If I have time to do so, before the New Year, I’ll do something I’ve never done before and breakdown a 3×3 of my favorite anime characters. I’m still on leave as of writing so I’ll have time to push that out and even a New Year’s Day review of this blog. Anime was king for me this year.

Forgotten Mortal Kombat Plot Points that Had Potential

Tiberius1 Comment

With more time and care, these could’ve helped the old games

This post was originally supposed to be about different archetypes in anime, though I’m delaying that to sometime in December as I don’t yet have enough research to discuss those in full detail. This week, however, I’ll bring up something that has crossed my mind before, but not with enough frequency to expand upon: forgotten plot points from the 3D Mortal Kombat universe.

The original idea came from a MojoPlays video that I couldn’t f[head rip]king find until a few minutes before writing this because I misremembered the title. Abandoned Story Threads instead of Forgotten Plot Points; potato, potahto. Either way, the video can be viewed on the MojoPlays channel through the link below.

Credit: MojoPlays

The gist of the video is that throughout the series, the Mortal Kombat games have introduced plot points that were about to heat up only for the devs to go in a different direction. With over 30 years out on the market, you’ve got your pick of the litter to choose from. For this week, it’s the 3D games from MK Deadly Alliance to Armageddon. Here’s the f[scream of pain]king short version: starting with Deadly Alliance, Quan Chi escaped from a fiery ass-whoopin’ at Scorpion’s hands, discovering the Dragon King’s “undefeatable” army in the process and bringing these mummified warriors to Shang Tsung where they formed a bond based on ignorance.

Context:

Channel: Kamidogu

After the Deadly Alliance is formed, they remove all obstacles that would block them from ruling all existence. Not happy sucking up to Shao Kahn for millennia, they kill him in his throne room then make their way to the Wu Shi Academy where Shang Tsung finally gets to consume the soul of the greatest warrior in Mortal Kombat History: The Great Kung Lao I mean, Liu Kang!

OGs can’t be beat!

So with Liu Kang and Shao Kahn dead, they operate a tournament under false pretenses in Outworld and use the defeated to return the mummified army to life with the goal of marching on Earthrealm with malicious intent. Raiden saw this from the heavens and organized the remaining warriors across the realms to stop them. Fun fact, you can find archived websites and forums debating the plot points of then-upcoming games, like this website MKSecrets.net, which for some reason still looks like it was made in 2001 even though it has details on MK1 (2023)… I thought that was most Japanese websites…?

Anyway, MK: Deception picks up from the premise of Deadly Alliance only the sorcerers were too powerful for all of the warriors (could’ve probably sent them all as a group, but MK9 proves that that wouldn’t have helped much) and so at his wits end, Raiden challenges them himself. Not even a thunder god could defeat the sorcerers and realizing that their goals were nearly complete, what was left was the amulet Quan Chi stole from Shinnok in MK4. He hangs onto it defeating Shang Tsung in the process, only to have Onaga reborn (hinted at from Reptile’s ending in the last game) and return to reclaim the army that the sorcerers so generously returned to life with the souls of conquered fighters.

All three men realize that danger was marching towards them and while they managed to temporarily hold them back, Raiden uses a last ditch attack on the Dragon King. It failed to even scratch him and he grabs a hold of the amulet which will be needed to form the six Kamidogu into a single entity.

Channel: MKIceAndFire

As for how Onaga acquired the Kamidogu, well it involved tricking a young boy named Shujinko and leading him across reality by the nose for 40 years. If this game were canon, that would’ve come back to bite Onaga in the ass, only for Shujinko’s efforts to go unrecognized as redemption and still get punished by a Dark Raiden. This will become important later.

Shaolin Monks was a bit of a beat ’em up remake of MKII (kinda) and I’d already talked about that before, so we’re skipping it considering it has nothing to do with the 3D trilogy anyway.

Armageddon was supposed to cap it all off and the more I’ve thought about it, the more it felt like a final send off before Midway got the crappy ideas out of the way in time to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2010.

Let’s not be too harsh though, it did help pave the way for the Injustice line.

Story-wise, the protector god of Edenia, Argus, is made aware that between the actions of the sorcerers and Shujinko being duped for that long, the warriors of the realms were learning more about the construction of the realms than the Elder Gods would be comfortable with and proposed to Argus to come up with a solution. He suggested total annihilation to protect the realms from their own residents, but his wife Delia suggested depowering them all since there were many heroes who fought tooth and nail to defend the realms from evil, not the least of which was Shao Kahn and Shinnok (whom we learn later was banished to the Netherrealm for eternity for treachery, leaving Quan Chi to do the heavy lifting through the Brotherhood of Shadow).

They’re granted the power to do this and choose to do so by making a competition of things for their sons Taven and Daegon. If things went to plan, the two men would engage in a friendly competition, grab their weapons and armor and race to defeat their mother’s firespawn (half-brother?) Blaze to achieve full godhood as both of them are demigods. In reality, the two brothers, under the watchful eye of a pair of dragons, Orin and Caro, are set on a different path. Caro, who was the guardian dragon of Daegon, lost contact with Blaze believing it to be an early sign to set him on his path. Instead, Daegon forms the Red Dragon clan in Caro’s name and signs off on unethical science experiments for the purpose of choking existence into coughing Blaze up. The way its presented makes me think of Unit 731 in Manchuria and its surgeon general Shiro Ishii. If you don’t know, look it up at your own peril.

This makes Daegon the antagonist of the Konquest mode and through no fault of his own Taven loses sight of the purpose of his quest. And his frustration and confusion at this whole course of events is best reflected at the several times he’s questioned and even considered abandoning ship. The quest stopped being fun for him as he lost the things he cherished. Blaze appeared at the end to catch him up to at least what the true purpose of the quest was and Taven is a hero if we compare him to the Ancient Greek model similar to Perseus or Theseus. Self-serving at times, but the guy still knows the difference between good and evil. Daegon’s descent into evil seems random until he learned that he was supposed to lose the quest and decided to take matters into his own hands, hence the birth of the Red Dragon.

Dropped and abandoned plot points are still a problem for the series as it’s developed a reputation for introducing points and leaving them to collect dust. We barely get five minutes with the concept before the devs (read: Ed Boon and John Tobias) moved onto something else. You could say the fandom is also to blame for this as dedicated fans have asked (demanded) the team to release canonically deceased characters as DLC, but staying with the 3D games where the problem expanded, there’s more to say about it during this era than anywhere else in the series.

Starting with Deadly Alliance, Shao Kahn was established to be killed in the intro to this game, with Deception and Shujinko’s story acting as a prequel taking place some years before the events of Deadly Alliance where it all converges. Shujinko himself was invited twice by the White Lotus Society and later by Shang Tsung himself to represent Earthrealm in the tournament but couldn’t attend for different reasons. The White Lotus got tired of waiting for him to power up (never mind that the tournament is hosted every 50 years) and due to his cleansing journey with Nightwolf, he had to go back to the Netherrealm to gather more hatred, from none other than the ghost of Hanzo Hasashi.

This part doesn’t necessarily screw around with the timeline as egregiously as following plot points, but Armageddon is where it all breaks down. Canonically dead characters are resurrected off-screen and based on what we know we can connect the dots, but often the devs are a bit cagey when it comes to showing how, who and/or why characters are returned to life. The 2011 continuity shows that Quan Chi has brought Noob and Sindel back to life and claimed the souls of those killed by Sindel herself in the eleventh hour, but it’s not shown whether he brought Shao Kahn back to life or if he did why he’d do so, or even why the rest of the villains would agree to this arrangement.

Channel: BruskPoet

I’m not saying this moment in the story is bad, I like it a lot. But the nonexistent explanation for how all this can come to be is what sours me on it somewhat. I’d say there’s no care for a consistent timeline especially in a fighting game (something that doesn’t escape Tekken), but I think it’s more along the lines of the devs wanting their personal favorites to shine brighter than the others, which is why the franchise works better as video games and toy lines than it does movies.

Most of the time…

For what it’s worth, the characters have been mostly consistent with a few touch ups here and there, but if you ask people like The4thSnake, there’s a lot under the hood that could use some light to heavy rewiring from individual characters to whole ass f[swords clashing]king plot points, like what I’ve been writing about here. I’m a bit torn personally, because it brings a charm not found in other series, but this many plot holes treats the timeline like a redheaded step child. Doesn’t stop people from trying, as I’ve stated before, I rewrote MK: Shaolin Monks myself like it was Dragon Ball as that was what I was watching at the time.

Why bother with the 3D games, though? Well, of all the plot points introduced and left by the wayside, the 3D games did it the most and the worst of any other era, which seems to be the result of developmental inconsistencies prior to release on store shelves. It certainly hasn’t stopped people from trying though and it likely will keep going for as long as there is a Mortal Kombat to fix. Nothing too serious at this point, but it’s both fun to expand on what was and offer critique for one of the series most tumultuous times in its history.

Mortal Kombat 1

TiberiusLeave a comment

Another entry to the king of blood and guts

About two weeks ago, a teaser was released for the next installment in the Mortal Kombat franchise slated for released in September of this year. The gist of the teaser was that post MK 11 Aftermath, there’s a new timeline and therefore a new god because Kronika and her merry band of lackeys have been defeated or written out of history as to not muck anything up like they did the first time.

In spite of what I wrote above, the announcement doesn’t reveal much, though it still requires a general knowledge of the plot line of the games from 1992 to the 3D era of the 2000s for why it was soundly rebooted in 2011 and the timeline post-2011, both of which I think I can safely say I have knowledge in.

To set a primer, Ed Boon and John Tobias began working on a fighting video game with digitized sprites for the actors in 1991 for arcades. A small team of programmers, actors with an intermediate or advanced knowledge of martial arts, and a marketing team brought the dream to light, but with a twist: blood. Unlike other video games like Final Fight or Streets of Rage or more appropriately Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat got grizzlier with the inclusion of blood and the option to kill the opponent in the ring by dismemberment

In the era where video games were the same as children’s toys, Mortal Kombat and Night Trap, a video game released the same year as MK, were the subject of intense political debate over what is appropriate for a child to see in fictional media. You and I both know that try as one may, there’s no realistic way to imitate the exaggerated violence seen in a video game, but nevertheless the extremeness in the game led to the creation of the Entertainment Software Rating Board or ESRB.

The ESRB is responsible for the guidelines for parents when it comes to purchasing video games for their kids. When it was created, most adults rarely played video games, or aged out of it with time (not including parents), and were likely to be unaware of what was in the game. But with a specific letter marking on the cover of the box, a parent can best determine what their child can play on paper. In my experience, it takes a trusting or admittedly negligent adult to let their child get away with playing something like GTA or Call of Duty, a problem that persists even now.

Still, whatever would come out of these government hearings on interactive entertainment wouldn’t matter much to gamers and arcade goers of the time. The controversy and the marketing worked wonders that Ed Boon and Midway Games could make more sequels in the 1990s and eventually get the games on home consoles when Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance was given its’ own spotlight during E3 2002.

As for the plot of the Midway Games, the evil emperor of Outworld Shao Kahn has absorbed another realm into his empire and has his sights trained on Earthrealm. The Elder Gods put their foot down and give the realm a chance to fight back through a tournament. Over the course of a millennium, 10 consecutive tournaments are meant to take place with the last one determining the fate of the realm. Shao Kahn’s representative on earth is a sorcerer named Shang Tsung who has the power to take souls and replenish his youth. Basically, he’s immortal, and every time a fighter dies in the tournament he takes their souls, though he has different methods of stealing souls if he wants to (and he always does). The tournaments are spread out over the course of fifty years, which means theoretically someone can fight in two tournaments if they’re healthy and lucky enough to live to be that old.

MK 1992 begins at the 10th tournament, and the final boss of the game is Shang Tsung who additionally can shapeshift. I have fond memories of this levitating old man transforming into the sub-boss Goro while I was playing the game in the Midway Arcade Treasures collection.

But when he does lose, the character Ed Boon et al determines to be the default protagonist, Bruce Lee clone number 1009 Liu Kang is chosen to be the champion of Mortal Kombat. At the same time, Shang Tsung is reprimanded and demoted by Shao Kahn who decides to take matters into his own hands and becomes the final boss of 1993’s Mortal Kombat II, complete with a larger cadre of characters representing Outworld and Earthrealm.

History repeats itself and the heroes soundly defeat Shao Kahn, but the power hungry emperor isn’t done yet. By 1995’s Mortal Kombat 3, the man is desperate to have Earthrealm in his expansion pack, and at the risk of sounding like a cheerleader for several historical conquerors, Shao Kahn could’ve studied the techniques of Alexander the Great, Napoleon, and militarily Adolf Hitler to learn why throwing your men at the frontlines like this doesn’t work or what worked for the defenders at the expense of the invaders, but then again, Shao Kahn has almost always been a one-track conqueror. Even a little bit of credit is too much for a character like him.

By 1997, Mortal Kombat 4 played with 3D graphics to give us another cast of ne’er-do-wells to fight. Shinnok, and his protégé Quan Chi. I admit that my exposure to MK4 is limited with the exception of some of the character endings making it to MK: Deadly Alliance’s krypt as unlockables, but one that I remember was that if playing as Quan Chi, the sorcerer betrays Shinnok and everyone else to hold infinite power. In another ending, the character Baraka takes serious issue with this and attempts to kill the sorcerer who just so happens to have necromantic powers and becomes another skeleton in Quan Chi’s graveyard, funny enough.

Quan Chi himself was written as the source of Scorpion’s woes. For the longest time, it was believed that the rivalry between himself and Sub-Zero was due to Sub-Zero’s clan of Lin Kuei warriors exterminating him, his clan the Shirai Ryu, and his family, when in MK4 it was revealed that the Lin Kuei never went after Scorpion’s wife and son. That was Quan Chi’s doing, and when the dunderhead revealed his hand in an attempt to be rid of his lapdog by transporting him to the Netherrealm, Scorpion grabbed the sorcerer at the last minute to exercise his misdirected vengeance on the sorcerer, leading into Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance.

Released in November 2002, Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance did 3D much better than its predecessor and had more room to expand on existing mythology thanks to cutscenes and extra content in the game’s krypt. With a payment of a specific amount of koins, different stuff can be unlocked from pre-production art to full characters and their alternate costumes to movies and interviews with the staff and many more.

Plot-wise, the game includes an introductory movie narrated by the thunder god Raiden to a gaggle of Earthrealm warriors whom he plans to lead in a coming battle. Quan Chi survived Scorpion’s onslaught in the Netherrealm and escaped into a hidden tomb containing the mummified remains of Outworld’s ancient dragon king. To make matters worse, he teamed up with Shang Tsung and the two sought to remove the obstacles in their way to power.

By Mortal Kombat’s rules, Shao Kahn was revived which teaches you all you need to know about how seriously death is taken in this universe. It’s not like in Naruto where a reanimation jutsu can revive a character by way of a sacrifice; most of the time, characters tend to Kratos their way back into the world of the living because “I decide when I die!”

Anyway, the Deadly Alliance takes out Shao Kahn and in a ballsy move for a creative in any industry, they take out Liu Kang himself. The champion of Mortal Kombat is killed and his and other dead warriors’ souls are used to revive the mummifed army of the dragon king. If they succeed, Outworld and eventually Earthrealm will fall at their hands.

Raiden had previously ascended to the position of Elder God, but the chaos and peril unfolding in the realms coupled with the Elder Gods’ inaction to it all motivated him to relinquish this position and take charge personally. Almost every warrior died or defected to the side of evil and 2004’s Mortal Kombat: Deception begins with a new narrator.

In Deception, the Konquest mode takes the player through the past of Shujinko and his journey to recover the Kamidogu, or godly tools, to be transported to the Elder Gods. This lifelong journey introduces Shujinko and puts him at different points in the Mortal Kombat timeline. As a matter of fact, he helped Scorpion find Quan Chi in the Netherrealm and was one of the first to learn of Liu Kang’s death with further developments pulling the two in different directions with a significant point of divergence. I wrote above that most of the warriors representing the good guys died or defected, but in Shujinko’s case, spoiler alert, he’d been an unknowing tool of a greater evil, worse than anything the Deadly Alliance could ever conceive and had been hard at work performing this evil for decades until the big reveal at the end of MK: Deception’s Konquest mode.

Before Shujinko defeated his enigmatic puppeteer, Onaga had marched into Outworld to take back his army and empire by force. Raiden and the Deadly Alliance knew the dangers that would come with an Onaga victory and sought to stop it, even to the point of self-destruction (which happens to be one of Raiden’s fatalities in Deception), but it proved fruitless when Onaga was revealed to be the sole survivor when the blast eliminated everything… or so it would seem. Raiden also lived, but was so corrupted by mortals messing with reality that he set out on a new mission to strike back pre-emptively.

Following Shujinko’s victory against the dragon king, Raiden appeared before him as punishment for allowing Onaga to even get as far as he did. The intentions of either didn’t matter to the immediate consequences, nor was it important to the corrupted thunder god that he rectified his mistake. Raiden wanted blood reparations and Shujinko wouldn’t be the only one to face this wrath.

Speaking of messing with reality, Mortal Kombat: Armageddon was the first time that it would happen in the MK universe and owing to its name, Armageddon was what was at stake at the time. Every fighter in Mortal Kombat history (including maligned characters) fought each other in the realm of Edenia, in a large crater where a pyramid dedicated the realm’s protector god Argus would later rise housing a fire spawn creature named Blaze. At Blaze’s death, the victor would set off a reaction with one of two outcomes: annulment of all abilities or total extermination.

In this game’s Konquest mode, the creators of the quest Argus and his wife, sorceress Delia, designed the quest with a winner in mind, their eldest son Taven. If things went right, he and his brother Daegon would engage in a quest sold to them as a friendly competition where they’d acquire weapons and armor to defeat Blaze and become full gods instead of the demigods they are now. Thing is, they intended for Taven to win it all, but when Daegon was awoken earlier than expected, he found out about this and went on a third, unpredictable path; he founded the Red Dragon clan and spent the last few centuries finding Blaze who it’s revealed was kidnapped and hypnotized to watch over the last dragon egg in MK: Deception. Bad sense of direction? Incompetence? Bull manure? Well, it’s convenient either way that in Armageddon’s Konquest mode Daegon’s clan had better luck ambushing his own brother than he did in finding the main element in the quest.

I made this meme just now. I’m probably wrong about Daegon’s efforts here, but with what I learned this late into the 3D era, it’s still a bit weird that he put more of his time in trying to kill his brother than in finding Blaze first. It makes it even weirder knowing how technologically advance the Red Dragon clan was to perform human experiments on their own members attempting to turn them into hybrid dragons like Reptile.

Anyway, Taven fights his way to Edenia intending to defeat Daegon out of necessity before being persuaded by Blaze himself to finish the quest. At the end of this, we can conclude that Taven became a god as intended and one of the adverse affects of the quest was that instead of death or depowering, everyone got stronger and the realms remained in peril, for which Taven would have to serve as the bulwark against extinction. And so the 3D era ends in a bit of a whimper.

The developer side had several troubles to deal with themselves. Mortal Kombat successfully franchised to get an animation and toy line ups and comics, but spin-off games were Midway’s Achilles’ heel. 2000 saw the release of Mortal Kombat: Special Forces, a game that Ed Boon wants everyone to forget.

If the co-creator won’t aid the game, why would anyone else, right? Before that, 1997 also saw the release of Mortal Kombat: Mythologies which was meant to tell the stories of individual characters beginning with the one who appears in every installment: Sub Zero, but the controls, graphics, and full AMV cutscenes saw hardly any returns on investment and so they didn’t bother with another spin-off until Mortal Kombat: Shaolin Monks in 2005, a game with excellent beat ’em up mechanics even if the roster is quite small. A sequel to this called Mortal Kombat: Fire and Ice was in pre-production, but the only traces of its existence come in the form of concept art before the project was canned between 2006 and 2010 when Midway’s assets were sold to Warner Bros. following a Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

By 2011, Ed Boon and co. started again under the new studio NetherRealm Studios and redid much of the story of the first three games in Mortal Kombat 2011, colloquially known as MK9. By the end of the game, Shao Kahn was soundly defeated and in the immediate aftermath, Quan Chi and Shinnok redo this timeline’s events of MK4, but with a twist. 25 years and the old generation of characters had had children of their own, many of whom joined in the fight to not only defeat evil but to contain it.

The connecting element this time around is Shinnok’s amulet which can’t be destroyed and thus needs to be heavily guarded around the clock. The problem here is that there are saboteurs around and the new leader of Outworld, Kotal Kahn, doesn’t easily trust Earthrealm. Things don’t go as bad for them until halfway through when Earthrealm chooses not to eliminate immediate threats and dangers where they spring up, even when they would all make sense.

The saboteur in question is a character named D’Vorah, who went down in history as one of the less welcome additions to the roster in recent memory. The point of divergence here is that Shang Tsung and Quan Chi don’t form the Deadly Alliance (though there’s a neat reference in MK9’s story mode). There’s also no Onaga and Blaze despite there also being references to them both. So no Deadly Alliance, and no Quan Chi to betray Shinnok. Instead, Shinnok is summoned behind enemy lines and finally for a necromancer, Quan Chi’s ability to command the dead is explored in this timeline when he has the souls of fallen heroes who dream of taking their revenge on Raiden, who still goes dark in this timeline.

The shoe’s on the other foot now with Dark Raiden taking the plunge against evil like how Shao Kahn opted to be the final boss in the other games. This time, Shinnok’s mother Kronika and his sister Cetrion rearrange the timeline to maintain the balance between light and dark, one of the most important instances being the fallout between Liu Kang and Raiden. Once they realize this on their way to stop Kronika herself with a new cadre of friends and an army to command, Raiden and Liu Kang combined to form Fire God Liu Kang which, fun fact is how MK: Mythologies ends.

This time, their fighting chances have gotten better and with Kronika’s defeat, Liu Kang has a new timeline to oversee, which is where we are. Based on what I wrote and what I know I have a few ideas of what to expect based on what happened, but there’s no guarantee everything will live up to my predictions even slightly. The Aftermath DLC in MK 11 ended with Shang Tsung’s defeat and Liu Kang starting with the ancestor of Kung Lao, the fabled Great Kung Lao who lost favor when he was defeated by Goro in the old timeline. My first and so far only prediction is that this time, Liu Kang cheers this one on and Kung Lao’s bloodline becomes venerated instead.

After that, remains to be seen. Ed Boon’s been doing this for 30 years and has a great love and respect for his own series, often dropping hints and teasers for fans on Twitter, so we can expect further updates from him in the lead up to MK 12 or Mortal Kombat 1 as it’s going to be known as.

I have opinions on sequels named the same as the original that can best be summarized in this episode of You Know What’s Bullsh-t?!

This week, I’m recommending the YouTube channel h0ser, recently rebranded as hoser.

https://www.youtube.com/@h0ser/about

The channel talks about history and geopolitics in a comedic manner, often with insert country’s most common animal here as a stand in for the nation in question, painted in the country’s flag. A buffalo for the US, a bulldog for the UK, a bear for Russia and the Soviet Union, etc. An old approach to when the channel did this through countryballs method.

Those of you who want to learn more about the world, hoser is one of many sources for that knowledge.

Racing Games

TiberiusLeave a comment

“On Speed” by Lightning McQueen

This topic has been in my notes for a few weeks, and up until recently I thought about first talking about what I love most about the racing game genre before listing off my personal best through worst. I should admit, though, that the games chosen for this were chosen partly for nostalgic reasons but also to see how well they hold up. My appreciation for racing games goes back to an old collection of Hot Wheels toys, funny enough.

There was almost no escaping these little cars. While the cars could be found in most pharmacies and dollar stores and in the bargain bin at select department stores, toy stores held the associated sets and tracks and all of them were awesome. Most often, these were battery-powered loops that propel the cars on assembled tracks that go in multiple different directions. I don’t care what anyone says; no matter your opinions on the 2008 Speed Racer movie, toy manufacturers nailed it when they gave us toys and cars based on the movie. Still got nothing on the LEGO sets, though.

I didn’t own the above set, by the way. These things were huge.

To connect the toy cars to the digital cars I raced around in on the TV, these two ran concurrent with each other. I used to collect loads of toy cars and spend a lot of time with racing games, though not to the same extent as the fighting and adventure games. Still, I spent a lot of time with racing games and so for my best through worst:

Best: Midnight Club 3: Dub Edition Remix (2005)

Mid: Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit 2 (2002)

Worst: L.A. Rush (2005)

I think this post will get quite a bit long for each of these three, and before I expand on why I put these games where I put them in lieu of probably better options, this is a personal list that I know won’t walk the same stride as others’ personal lists, I have better memories with these games (emulated or otherwise), and for the game in the Worst category, there are objectively worse games like Crazy Bus or Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing, but those were glorified tech demos that could be written off as a joke like Hong Kong 97. You’d have to put them on the same pedestal as actual games we celebrate or despise and that’s too much for those piles of crap. I don’t like to go for low-hanging fruit. Now for the list.

Midnight Club 3: Dub Edition Remix

This version of the game specifically is what I remember best as the game I finished 100% many times over, and as a personal achievement, I managed to do it on the PS2 emulator with just the keyboard. Thank god for long fingers!

The third in the Midnight Club series it follows up from its predecessors with longer races, more challenges, bigger cities, secrets and easter eggs and more. Customization options and an open world to explore let the player get creative during a race. More than once while driving through the cities, I came across these routes to find secrets or prepare to the best of my ability for a race that would most likely take a certain route.

The Dub Edition tagline for the regular and remix versions for the game stem from the game’s partnership with the car magazine Dub, who spruce up a prize car from a tournament in their style to include the Dodge Magnum, the 2006 Dodge Charger, the Chrysler 300C, the Cadillac Escalade EXT and others. The game has three scaled-down, fictionalized versions of the U.S. cities of San Diego, Atlanta, and Detroit, and the remix version includes the Tokyo Challenge. All three cities are headed by a mechanic and his auto parts garage:

San Diego’s mechanic, Oscar, heads the Six-One-Nine Customs;

Atlanta’s garage is Apone Team Racing run by the garage’s namesake,

And Vince’s garage is in Detroit. No fancy name unfortunately.

For Tokyo, Speedway is the garage there.

As you progress through the career mode, you’re told over a type of transceiver or cell phone that a new racer is in the city ready to challenge you. Racers driving a certain type of car denote a car club they belong to and upon their defeat, they send word of you to the club who invites you to partake in their races for a prize across the three cities. Additionally, tournaments can be entered for prize cars, customized by Dub or open for customization at the garage.

The customization options are quite extensive. Most likely riding the wave of the Fast and Furious franchise, nearly every car can have extensive body work done to it, essentially turning a station wagon into a supercar and earning you even more speeding tickets because none of the cars you have are street legal anymore. Imagine explaining that to the traffic cops…

The car classes and types matter mainly to the car clubs stateside, but in the remix version with Tokyo included, there are class and car type specific tournaments, and the kicker is that you don’t necessarily have to finish the American races first before flying to Japan. The first tournament you’re offered will require a vehicle class not available until you’re 4/5 done with Detroit, but the way you unlock tournaments in Tokyo is that instead of challenging individual racers, street races which are represented by red dots in the States are represented by purple diamonds, three of which unlock the next tournament. So theoretically, you can complete some races in the US, head to Japan and complete a tournament there, then come back to the US with the prize car, rinse and repeat.

Then, there’s the soundtrack, which couldn’t be anymore mid-2000s. Hip hop artists, post-grunge bands, techno bands, electro-pop; as I recall, select genres went hand-in-hand with the underground racing scene as depicted in media. I have no idea if this was representative of the lifestyle back then, but if so then that’s pretty cool. It makes the replays all the more enjoyable to watch.

The car clubs have an extra feature for certain cars. Specific types can gain one of three abilities: Zone, Agro, and Roar. Zone is a type of Max Payne-like slow motion ability that allows the Tuner cars, Exotic cars, Sports Bikes and select Luxury Sedans to weave through traffic in slow mo. This ability is earned by driving as clean as possible through the city. Agro is applicable to the rest of the Sedans and SUVs and is a type of boost that allows the driver to slam through traffic at a breakneck pace, breaking necks with all the wreckage caused by ramming other cars off the streets. Driving into other cars and causing general damage is how you earn this ability. Roar is exclusive to Muscle Cars and Choppers and it sends a blast of wind to scatter heavy traffic out of the way. Drifting and power sliding unlocks this ability. All three can be used a total of five times, and going by my playthrough of each ability, they’re not meant to be a one-size-fits-all solution when a race goes sideways. Zone helps you get through traffic, but it builds up as slow as its ability performs and a single crash can set the bar down as it accumulates. The draw of Agro ability is that you can send offending vehicles to the moon and the impact is literally diminished if you activate it on a free road. The same goes for Roar, but the consequences are doubly so if the vehicles don’t spread out how you hope. You have to think a bit more strategically before activating either of these three.

Lastly, there’s the secrets. The three U.S. cities have RockStar logos that net you extra customization options in the garage from more riders on bikes, to license plates to decals and more.

Above all, not only do I recommend it, I highly recommend you set up your controller if you go the emulation route. Contorting your fingers like miniature twister is better as a party trick than to play games. I write from experience.

Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit 2

My next words on this game specifically will surely sound a bit contradictory depending on how you see racing games. The customization options giving me a range of choices heavily influenced my rating of Midnight Club 3 despite me spending less time with it. Need for Speed has little in the way of customization, there’s no overarching plot to become a legendary racer in the underground street racing scene, and the options for cars and tracks is so limited that it’s nonexistent.

That being said, I’m still playing this game and the game modes on display do a lot to make up for what I thought was so perfect about MC3. Granted, NFS HP2 came out in Q4 2002 while MC3 was released around Spring 2005, so older racing games will feel like clean-picked skeletons compared to what would succeed them all, but judging games of this era by their own merits reveals that they’re less about style and more about substance. Midnight Club drips style, but Need for Speed before the EA corruption of the 2010s leaks substance.

Multiple game modes and challenges can be completed and the departure from other games is that there isn’t always an emphasis on getting perfect scores. Some challenges will still let you advance even if you finish in second place. As another divergent example from what’s expected of Midnight Club, transmission systems can be adjusted to suit the player depending on the car: automatic, manual, and semiautomatic transmission. The game is also designed more around skills than simply picking up and playing.

You know how Midnight Club has precise locations based on real-world cities, just scaled down massively from what residents of each would recognize of them (especially for 2005)? Well, the maps in Need for Speed are less precise and more like general amalgamations of a city in a given location. The Mediterranean coastline, the Pacific coast, Australia, the American Southwest, etc. The game also feels less like a smorgasbord of real-life cars and car concepts that with the benefit of hindsight didn’t always pan out.

This concept H3T, for instance, is different from what was sold in 2005 and ‘6, by the way. As a matter of fact, the car brands in NFS were less luxurious and well known and more specific to certain regions if not known to the wider car aficionado demographic. Opel, the now-defunct HSV, one of Ford’s foreign manufacturers, all feature in the game. The cars that you start off with tend to have a top speed of around 125 MPH with an average 0-60 acceleration rate of 5.3 seconds. The further down the line you advance, the top speed rounds to around 200 MPH with a shorter rate of acceleration. With the speeding cars comes new ways to maneuver around the tracks.

Speaking of the tracks, going back to a comment I made about the cars in MC3 losing street legality, they’d all be suited for a race track like how they’re all designed in this game. The tracks within NFS Hot Pursuit all have secret pathways and shortcuts to take but depending on the version you have it may be somewhat different. I emulated the PS2 version and pirated the PC version and the menu selection screens are all different; the PS2 version seemed to be the snazziest of all the available versions, whereas the PC, Xbox, and GameCube layouts are all the same.

Skills play a role in more than just driving and handling. The Hot Pursuit game modes where cops are placed at different points along the track can add an extra layer of difficulty to the challenge and you’ll normally only have that split-second to decide how to avoid them. NFS has a reset button for when you screw up during the race, but in my experience it there are less opportunities to use it during Hot Pursuit mode because the police will catch up to you and ticket you. So best to save those for when you’re out of sight of the police or outside Hot Pursuit mode.

The cops in this game are also aggressive. They’re not GTA-aggressive, but as I recall, in the PC version they’ll deploy helicopters the longer you resist. I know they also do that in the PS2 version though I rarely keep them around for that long to find out. This mode isn’t one sided though — there’s a mode to play as the cop and nab speeding racers as well.

I don’t know if this is true of all EA games from before or even now but their design philosophy, considering Medal of Honor, Need for Speed here, and Battlefield seemed to be based partly or wholly on gaining and refining skills than button-mashing throughout the whole play session. This isn’t a philosophy that’ll resonate with everyone and EA has since divorced themselves from this for darker desires in recent memory, but as I said with Midnight Club 3, find a way to play it and see the game for yourself. It might be too your taste if Midnight Club proves too flashy.

L.A. Rush:

This game is why this blog topic exists. It’s because I hate this game so much that I decided to write this week’s topic. Thing is, for years, I’d never had the words to illustrate my gripes with this game until recently. The YouTube channel BlueTag did the digging and the review on what this game has to offer because I knew damn well I wasn’t gonna put this tripe in my emulator, so here’s the corresponding video.

To spoil the video a bit, this game was developed by Midway Games’ British branch in Newcastle, the same Midway Games that flooded arcades from the 1980s until their 2010 bankruptcy, gave us Mortal Kombat and the subsequent ESRB rating system, and surprise sleepers like SpyHunter and Stranglehold. According to BlueTag, the finer details surrounding development are lost to history, but the game’s inner workings hint at a severe lack of communication between internal departments.

The physics engine is incredibly flimsy for a racing game let alone driving. Slip a finger on the accelerator and the car will hit the nearest wall at Mach 4, with reciprocal results. Forget tanks for cars that could take a beating; this game cinematically emphasizes the damage that comes with totaling the car when this happens.

Funny enough, the main protagonist is supposed to have a fleet of cars, but there’s only one that features prominently in the game at the beginning. L.A. Rush is another game sponsored by a major car promoter, this time MTV’s Pimp My Ride with Xzibit and Lil Jon in tow, but unlike Dub, Pimp My Ride doesn’t have much to offer. Or rather, the Dub team will let you win cars done by them where as PMR often upgrades your ride without you seeing the bodywork or messing around with it until it’s finished. You also stand to lose half your cash to a ride whose paintjob is a surprise until the end.

Speaking of money, you have to pay an entry fee to compete in a race and if you mess up and want to start over and do better, you can’t restart the race from the menu. You have to back out and come back in and pay the entry fee again. Like the other games, cops also play a role in this game but considering the consequences in the other games, this is simultaneously a worse and lax punishment at the same time: it’s lax because you bribe the cops to get them to back off, but it’s worse because you lose money on entry fees anyway so this is another way to lose your money.

Cutscenes meanwhile show the protagonist, whose name I never registered, I think his name was T or something, having already achieved street racer heaven. Then the bad guy shows up, promising to take your stuff which he does. After a few weeks, your cars are all confiscated including the jet black Hummer you rock up to the mansion in, leaving you with a suburban sedan that you have to use to get your cars back, often while under pursuit, and with the crappy physics and whatnot, this is more of a chore than anything.

As for the map, I’m not a native Angeleno, but I’ve heard from the Wikipedia article, that a section of L.A., namely the Valley was absent. Seems weird to put in, but in a racing game a map and layout can make or break a race if not the whole game and what I presume to be a notable location within the L.A. region was done a disservice by its omission. If this is the case, then whatever could’ve been done with the Valley may have killed further interest.

All things considered, if eight year old me was smart enough to see the problems with this back then it should be a warning to how unplayable a game could be, especially the PC port which I learned was worse off than the console version. If you have that Tibetan Buddhist level of patience, give it a go. If not, watch the gameplay and prepare yourself for outdated, cringey dialog, even for a game from the mid-2000s.

Before I move on to the YouTube recommendations, I want to mention a last minute game I also played on the PS2 back in the day, but have fewer moments with: Gran Turismo 4.

My memories with this are hazy as of now, but if I get the chance to emulate and play it, I’ll surely put my thoughts in, no questions asked.

Now for the channel recommendation: Rev says desu. This channel is a commentary channel on mostly anime and anime news and often features the wrong opinions to laugh at and lambast from some of the worst people to speak on a given matter on Twitter. Originally shortform in length, Rev has gotten around to longer videos for more to discuss. Wherever you start, if you like his content be sure to subscribe to him, he makes videos regularly.

https://www.youtube.com/@Revsaysdesu