The 50 Craziest Video Game Fatalities

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Here's an article I recently co-wrote for Complex-mag.com. Check it out here.

The Klone Wars: The 10 Most Blatant "Mortal Kombat" Rip-Offs Ever

Find the article at its original site here at Complex-mag.com: http://www.complex.com/video-games/2011/04/10-mortal-kombat-rip-offs

(Image taken from: Complex-mag.com)

Mortal Kombat, while now on life-support (Prove me wrong, Ed Boon, prove me wrong), was once a dominant force in the arcades and on the home consoles. Could there be any more proof of this than the commercial for Mortal Monday?



But when the arcades died down, so did much of Mortal Kombat’s steam, with a lot of the later 3D releases pretty much all looking the same for some reason, even when they had Sub-Zero beating the shit out of Batman.

That said, with an all new Mortal Kombat coming out this Tuesday that’s looking to bring the franchise back to its gory days, the series that almost single-handedly brought upon the creation of the ESRB is looking to become legendary again.
But this article ain’t about that.

This article is about some of the klones that Mortal Kombat spawned along the way. Some of them were decent, but most of them deserved to be burned by Scorpion’s flaming skull fatality. Toasty!

BloodStorm

Remember that gag game on The Simpsons called Bone Storm that was meant to be a parody of Mortal Kombat? Well BloodStorm pretty much was that game. A semi follow-up to Time Killers, which actually came out the same year as the first MK, BloodStorm was a herky-jerky mess that actually did have a few cool features in it, most notably, the ability to acquire certain techniques from your opponent once you defeated them. That said, the game’s characters were less than memorable. Anybody remember Hellhound? How about Mirage? Anybody? Didn’t think so.



Primal Rage

While not a direct rip-off of Mortal Kombat—um, hello, monkeys that fart poison gas here, people—the element of gore that was taken straight from MK was definitely there. The advent of the fatality was one of the key features that MK brought to the arcades, and Primal Rage had some of the most brutal seen at the time. And they were performed by dinosaurs and monkeys, no less. The only problem? You had to pretty much hold down every single button on the cabinet and do some crazy joystick motions just to pull them off. In other words, the controls sucked ass. T-Rex ass. Is there any other ass that sucks more?



Street Fighter: The Movie

Yeah, even Capcom was on MK’s jock at one point. This game, which used real live actors for the roles of the characters instead of animated sprites, definitely doesn’t look like any of its predecessors or successors, and that’s a good thing. How many other games do we need with the Muscles from Brussels himself, playing all-American Guile or Australian pop sensation, Kylie Minogue, playing Cammy? I’m going to go with none. Besides looking like a failed MK side project, the game doesn’t even play well, with the controls coming off as stiff rather than fluid. Capcom made a rule of banning any following SF titles to have motion capture characters in them, and thank God for that. The only thing missing from this game was Ryu ripping Sagat apart with a shoryuken. Actually, that would have been pretty awesome. How come they didn’t include that in the game?



Way of the Warrior

Way of the Warrior, like most of the MK clones on this list, was laughably bad. But a part of me thinks that it was at least intentional for this title. Or at least, I hope it was, because any game that started off with a talking skull with a mouth that wouldn’t stop chattering and said, “Find the way, noble challenger. Find the way of the waaaarrior,” had to have been putting us on. Once the actual game started up though, the laughter stopped as the gameplay was beyond atrocious, even back then, and even for a 3DO title. Well, at least the soundtrack by White Zombie was killer. Not $700 killer, mind you, but killer nonetheless. It almost made up for the shoddy motion captured samurais and Bruce Lee rip-offs imitating Marky Mark with their victory poses. Almost, I said.



Eternal Champions

Eternal Champions, at the time at least, was actually one of the more successful MK clones, and probably because it picked only the best elements of the franchise to ape. Stage fatalities? Check. A rich mythology? Check? Pretty memorable characters? Check again. The only thing it was missing was blood by the boat loads, but this interesting title made up for it by adding two parts Street Fighter along with its Mortal Kombat, making it a strange hybrid between the two series. The only thing that sucked was the difficulty. To this day I still haven’t beaten it and I probably never will.



Kasumi Ninja

Many of the games on this list that imitated MK added their own little flair to them to separate them from the house that Goro built. But not Kasumi Ninja, one of the worst Jaguar games ever released in a sea of awful Jaguar games. How much of a clone was it? So much so, that it probably should have just been called “Here’s yer Mortal Kombat rip-off right here, mister!” The moves are pretty much identical, with uppercuts and sweep kicks, and the gore is all there, too, though, about ten times less gratifying and ten times more yawn inducing. And while I know I’m not the first person to mention this, just about the only thing good about this game was that it had a Scotsman who would lift his kilt and shoot fireballs from his junk. Well, that’s at least one thing that Mortal Kombat never attempted.



Thrill Kill

Thrill Kill was badass, man. How badass was it? So badass, that it was never released and was turned into a fighting game with the Wu-tang Clan instead, which later became known as Wu-tang: Shaolin Style. Looking to capitalize off of Mortal Kombat’s brutality, Thrill Kill was actually unique in that it one-upped MK in the gore department, and the characters in this game were all insane, like Cleetus, a redneck cannibal, and The Imp, who supported himself with stilts in battle. It also enabled four players to tear each other apart at one time. Still, if Mortal Kombat had never been created, a game like Thrill Kill would never have been conceived of, making it a definite Mortal Kombat clone. It was a clever one, most certainly, but a MK clone, nonetheless.



War Gods

War Gods has an interesting history behind it in that it was actually created by Midway itself, the same company that Mortal Kombat came from. Some people say that the game was solely created to test out a 3D environment in a fighting game for their upcoming MK4 release, but that’s probably just rubbish. The truth of the matter is, Mortal Kombat made a shit ton of money and it looked like a new franchise could be born from it, but War Gods was just not that franchise, as it had some of the wonkiest 3D ever this side of Battle Arena Toshinden. The fatalities in this game weren’t even impressive, and in a game meaning to harness some of MK’s fire MK, the fatalities were everything. War Gods should have been sacrificed.



Mace: The Dark Age

Mace: The Dark Age was another Midway title that didn’t stretch the boundaries enough to be considered much more than a copycat clone of MK. The gameplay was beyond generic, and the game didn’t even try that hard to mask itself as anything more than a riproff. For example, instead of “Finish him!” at the end of battles, the announcer said “Execute him!” instead, which was pretty much the exact same thing. It was a weapons based fighter though, so it had that going for it. If anything, it was like a more brutal version of Soul Edge, but Soul Edge was at least coherent, while Mace: The Dark Age was like its drunken step-brother that nobody ever wanted to be around. There’s a reason that you don’t remember Mace: The Dark Age, you know.



Killer Instinct

Killer Instinct is probably the only game on this list that is far enough removed from MK that one might not even consider it to be a clone at all. But it was. Rare was smart to make combos the key highlight of the game, but they also just had to add those stage deaths and fatalities in there that were so popular at the time, didn’t they? While its influence is definitely far-reaching—the massive combos of the Capcom vs. series have this title to thank for its success—KI was still an MK clone, albeit, one with definite panache. And if you disagree with me, I’ma have to hit you with an Ultra, ultra, ultra, ultra…

Which Was More Important to the History of Gaming, Street Fighter II or Mortal Kombat II?

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(Image taken from: consoleclassix.com)

There’s no denying it. Back in the 90s, you were either a street fighter, or a mortal kombatant (Or a primal rager, or an Iron Fist warrior, or a man with a killer instinct, but that was a bit later). Across the arcade, you would hear, “Hadouken” followed by, “Get over here!” all the time, almost as if Ryu and Scorpion were fighting against each other.

Now, you could have liked both back then, there’s no saying that. But when it all came down to it and your quarters were lined up on the casing between the joystick cabinet and the screen, you either had more of them lined up for Street Fighter II or Mortal Kombat II, and had plenty of inflammatory remarks to explain why you were for either.

“Yo, Street Fighter is more complex. The characters are cooler and more balanced.”

“Yeah, but there’s no blood in Street fighter. And in real life, there’s blood. And hey, look, Liu Kang just turned into a dragon! A DRAGON! Street Fighter ain’t shit, man.”

It made for some pretty interesting discussions for boys who probably had more zits on their face than sperm cells in their scrotum at the time.

But now, in 2011, the dust has long settled and both series are vastly divided. The Street Fighter name still has clout, while the Mortal Kombat series is struggling to stay relevant. The winner today of which game was more successful is clearly Street Fighter.

But which game was more important?

Both games reinvented what video games were meant to look like, and they also both changed the market of the home console, revealing what would and would not be tolerated when it came to a home port. But again, which was more important? I analyze the two below. Read.

Street Fighter II

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I was definitely a Street Fighter back in the day, defending it to anybody who dared question its greatness, and for good reason. If you look back, there were far more innovations from Street Fighter that were carried over into other fighting games than MK. For example, if you pick up a fighting game today without reading the instructions, just watch how fast you’ll try to do some of the moves with quarter circles or holding back two seconds and pressing forward and then punch. You know where you got that from? Street Fighter, baby, Street fighter. The play mechanics washed over into every other fighting game in the market both at the time and even today, and it solidified how a fighting game should be played, whether it was 2D or 3D.



It also paved the way for how fighting games could be seen in competitive play. Racking up combos was the way you showed off how skilled you were. And its many incarnations (Championship Edition, Turbo, Super, Super Turbo) showed just how little you could tweak a game engine and milk it for all its worth, which weighs heavily on the downloadable concept today. People are willing to stick with a good thing if you just sprinkle in a few extra bells and whistles. Street Fighter paved the way for that. By making idiots like myself shell out for every new edition, they proved that people would continue to pay, just because we wanted to play the game faster and with M. Bison.

In the end, Street Fighter revolutionized fighting games and made them what they are today. And Street Fighter's still going strong. Many people think that Super Street Fighter 4 was the best fighting game of last year. And really, the series is pretty much keeping the genre alive. For quite some time, fighters looked to be on their way out with the death of the arcade. So if you like the fighting genre at all, then you have this stalwart series to thank. No question about it. Now, let's all say it together: "HA-DOU-KEN!"

Mortal Kombat II

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Washington D.C.’s worst nightmare (Next to Doom, apparently), Mortal Kombat made everybody’s eyes bulge out when they first saw a man’s heart get ripped right out of another man’s chest. People also marveled at how realistic the character’s looked. These weren’t cartoons, baby. These were the real deal.

That said, the series had a rocky start when it first came home to consoles.



The SNES version was an utter joke with all the blood and the cool fatalities removed. And the Genesis version had the blood, but you could only get it through a code (A,B,A,C,A,B,B! I still got it).

It was all made up for though with MK2, which stormed the home consoles as bloody as it was in the arcade, with the SNES version almost being a perfect port. People were aghast at how ballsy Nintendo suddenly got. Here was a company that had given the world Super Mario Bros., and now, they were saturating their console with BLOOD?! Were they insane? No, not at all, as business matters over parental concerns every time. And it proved that money trounces over morals (Or fear). It also proved that people WANTED to see these kinds of adult themes at home in their video games. Add to the fact that the MK franchise also had the first video game to movie transition that actually worked (For the time), and you had a series that was even more expansive than Street Fighter. It extended to both music and film.

That said, the series sucks now, and there aren’t any more copy cat clones of the franchise. It’s practically on life support. The new game looks promising, but I don’t think anybody’s really going to get their hopes up. The franchise has run its course, and it's time for it to just stand there wobbling, just waiting for the sky to get dark so somebody can offer the required coup de grace.

Fatality.


The Verdict—Mortal Kombat II

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While the series is moribund, nobody can deny that without it forcing its way onto the home consoles, the thought of video games being just for kids probably would have persisted until this very day. Street Fighter II definitely shaped and modeled the fighting genre in this country, but that’s a genre that isn’t as popular as it once was back in the 90s. This is 2011, and there’s no question where the future in gaming lies and has been for quite some time now: MMORPG’s, and First-person shooters. People want to play against each other across the world and in giant groups. And more power to them. Gaming is bigger than the arcades now. They expand across the entire world.

But you know what has persisted? Adult-themes and gore in gaming, and Mortal Kombat is the forefather of all of that. Sure, the PC had its fair share, but the PC still doesn’t dominate the stage of gaming like the Wii or the PS3 does, even with WOW or Starcraft 2. I'm talking major scope here. When the general public thinks of video games, they still think of the home consoles, and Mortal Kombat II is the game that actually made them relevant beyond just gamers back then. They were made relevant to the people in Washington, who wanted to storm the arcades and pull all the little kids out of there.

But those little kids grew up and didn’t want to give up video games. That said, they couldn’t very well just continue playing hop and bop games with cheery backgrounds and smiling suns in adulthood. Girlfriends and wives wouldn't allow it. The games would have to be played in secrecy.

But games where we get to beat up hookers and chainsaw others in the face? Well, that's pretty grown up, and MK paved the way for that. Without MK, there would be no Grand Theft Auto. At least not for several years later than it came out. Violence and gore and sex were all bound to come to gamers eventually, but MK sped up that process and proved that it could be profitable, and it’s for that reason that MK was more important to gaming than Street fighter II. And for that, I only have one word.