As a film designed with the style of a " Hollywood popcorn movie," Mortal Kombat's opening was undoubtedly a success.
It doesn't need fancy visual effects or a grand narrative like Battlefield 1991.
It doesn't even need a particularly exciting atmosphere.
As an arcade game, its goal is to be memorable at first glance.
And Mortal Kombat certainly achieved that.
Who wouldn't take a second look at this thing when passing by?
How many people could remain unfazed after seeing that grotesque, transcribed live-action video?
"Mortal kombat!!!"
When another round of mindless but magically addictive previews began, Jasper finally came to his senses.
"Okay..."
Insert a coin, press the start button, and the game officially begins.
Jasper, being an arcade operator, had been exposed to all sorts of arcade games. With his experience, even without playing them, just a glance was enough for him to make a rough guess.
Take, for example, this Mortal Kombat machine right in front of us.
Its key layout isn't complicated, but it has more keys than games that only have one or two.
The overall difficulty level should be somewhere between Street Fighter and Beat Hazard.
I reckon it's similar to the gameplay logic of " The King of Fighters ".
Light punch, light kick, heavy punch, heavy kick.
There are no punches or kicks, and the button design is relatively restrained.
What's really interesting is that, unlike mainstream fighting games, its block button is a separate feature.
This is a novel approach within the fighting game genre.
It seems that Gamenova is not content with continuing to delve deeper into the current fighting game system, but is actually preparing to open up a third battlefield.
Parrying is an extremely important tactic in any fighting game.
Although Street Fighter later introduced a separate button for the blue guard system, the core back-step defense remained unchanged. The reason for this is...
It's extremely complex and cannot be explained in just a few words.
If we really want to get to the bottom of this, only Capcom, the action game giant that created Street Fighter II, the pioneer of the fighting game genre, would know the answer.
It is a combination of historical legacy issues and comprehensive design considerations. Today, with the development of Japanese fighting games, it has long since penetrated into the underlying system design of fighting games.
Positional play, or distance control, has always been a very important part of Japanese fighting games, and it's also the dividing line between beginners and experts.
In this environment that places particular emphasis on establishing a foothold, retreating and defending have become an integral part of the game.
Spatial calculations, distance control, suppressive force, and of course, the two principles of crouching and standing defense.
And the power-up type characters that have been part of the entire series since the initial design.
Looking at the "backward defense" blocking mechanism from today's perspective, it's easy to see that it has long been closely integrated with Japanese fighting games.
If changes are made, not only will players not accept them, but the game itself will also be severely affected, to the point that the entire core will need to be redesigned.
However, looking back at the 1980s, the era when the earliest Street Fighter was created, this design did indeed involve some compromise.
This is also a source of pride for Capcom as the master of action games. They turned the limitations of the era into the characteristics of the game, and then continued to cultivate and explore it, completely internalizing it into their own part. In the 1980s when it was born, arcade games were still products produced in workshops.
There are no large-scale assembly line factories, and no modern, standardized production processes.
Even now, Gamenova continues to treat this as an important project and collaborates with Sega on its development.
A standard arcade joystick already includes a directional stick and multiple buttons.
Adding a button not only requires a complete redesign of the layout, but also increases the learning curve for players due to the increased complexity of the operation.
More importantly, the frame and substrate had to be completely redesigned, which caused costs to skyrocket, completely contradicting Capcom Bitch's need to make money.
After painstaking research, Capcom Bitch realized the possibility of directional input.
It is integrated with systems such as movement, defense, and charging, rather than simply serving as an input for movement.
In this way, although the learning depth of the entire operation increases, it is much easier to get started because the layout is more intuitive.
When players feel pressured and try to retreat to avoid it, they can naturally learn to block without feeling awkward.
As for the remaining 6-key system, it can be used entirely for offensive purposes.
No matter how much a newbie messes around, there's always a chance to shine. Thus, a set of skills with an extremely high skill ceiling but a very low skill floor, easy to learn but difficult to master, was born.
It must be said that Capcom is indeed a master of action graphics, and their clever ideas regarding input logic are truly worth learning from.
Compared to a company like Konami, which is a complete scoundrel, Capcom Bitch is a game developer with many flaws and is not perfect, but it is indeed an excellent game developer.
And what about Mortal Kombat?
It's different.
It's not a "Japanese 2D fighting game" at all.
From the very beginning, it was aimed at the pure United States market.
Although the Mortal Kombat IP has become increasingly focused on competitiveness as times have changed, its positioning has been completely different from the very beginning.
This isn't a fighting simulator, but rather... a brawl simulator, or more accurately, a playable Hollywood action movie.
The concept of MK is very simple: players are essentially playing an action character.
Rather than focusing on complex intrigue and suspenseful games, it emphasizes how to get players to create more dramatic and exaggerated action scenes.
In other words... it's like personally experiencing wwf. In other words, from its inception, it wasn't aimed at those professional players who like to hone their skills and become invincible.
Instead, they are ordinary gamers who relax in the arcade, hanging out with their buddies, laughing and joking as they play a few rounds.
If you lose, you either switch characters or simply switch machines to play something else.
For them, the exact number of frames in an action or the precise manipulation required in a particular scene is irrelevant.
What they really care about is...
"I just pulled out a hidden Finishing Move and blew your head off! That was so cool!"
As a game that promotes close-quarters, bloody melee combat, the designers certainly don't want players to fight timidly and hesitantly.
Not at least not now.
The addition of the block button not only aligns with the United States philosophy of simplicity and ruthlessness in abandoning red tape, but also simplifies complex spatial maneuvering.
It can defend in place without polluting the input buffer pool.
Mortal Kombat doesn't proceed with the cautious, tentative approach of Street Fighter.
If you seize the opportunity, it'll be a bloody beating; if a single combo doesn't take away most of your health, you're considered to have underperformed. "Hmm... a completely opposite control design language."
Jasper pondered silently, already forming a general first impression in his mind.
[Arcade Mode] and [Two-Player Battle] are standard features.
In addition, there are the equally self-explanatory [coop] mode and [survival] mode.
Considering that he only intended to test the machine, Jasper didn't activate the story mode and simply chose a 1v1 AI match.
While the character selection interface isn't particularly stunning, it's still quite commendable.
The mottled stone-like background pattern, paired with the dragon emblem branded at the top, truly evokes a sense of mysterious Eastern power.
The entire UI system was designed by Gamenova and Lucas Arts, and its coordination is excellent.
Actually, if you're going to be a bit more fundamentalist, the UI of the original Mortal Kombat... was very green-skinned.
The content is crude and crude, with a large amount of real-life depictions mixed with cheap composite CG and low-resolution 2D pixel background images.
Not only does it lack consistency, it also looks very cheap.
It looks like something a group of enthusiasts took in their own backyard.