Someone once described me as the only person on Earth who likes playing 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:fighting games alone. I’m certain this isn’t true. There are probably a lot of🎉 us. The problem is that none of those people want to meet each other. Why would we? We like playing fighting games alone, in the dark, while considering just how much time🌺 we have left in our lives. Having another person there to hangout or - god forbid - talk would only ruin the sweet ennui of existence.
And you know what? 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Mortal Kombat 1 understands that. The story mode in Mortal Kombat 1 isn&rsquo🌞;t intended to be a cheap tutorial to teach you the ropes for multiplayer. It’s an actual story th🦩at’s actually fun featuring characters I actually want to see interact. Along with modes like Invasions and Towers, Mortal Kombat 1 feels like a complete game without needing to play against other people. I can just enjoy myself and still feel like I’ve had the complete experience.
I’m not saying I hate playing against other people. Don’t get me wrong. I’ve put my quarter on an arcade machine just like any other person boﷺrn between 1975 and 1990. Although once at the Coral Square Mall, a kid jumped the front of the line, stole all the quarters peop💧le had put on Mortal Kombat 2 to “get next,” and ran out of the arcade. Sorry, South Florida; that arcade doesn’t exist anymore. I think it’s, like, a food court thing now. Nobody knows.
But I don’t play fighting games to get good or to test my mettle against children who will absolutely ruin me in an online match. I play fighting games because I enjoy making characters do karate kicks and throw fireballs. Pew pew! I’m the same way with first-person shooters: I want to go boom boom against big bads, not spend three hours creating a 🍌loadout so I can get yelled at by strangers on my team. Actually, now that I think about it, this might apply to my entire li🅷fe. God, I’m lonely.
Mortal Kombat 1’s story - and, to be fair, the stories in the previous three 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Mortal Kombat games - is an action movie. Sure, it’s a corny action movie. But that’s because it’s a martial arts story. It’s hard♔ to make fire god Liu Kang’s Earthrealm champions defeating Outworld into high drama. Most of the words in that last sentence alone disqualify it from being weighed seriously. Then again, some of gaming’s most beloved stories are “guy st🌊ops zombies from doing a thing,” so who are we to judge?
If anything, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:NetherRealm Studios (yes, you have to capitalize the middle of NetherRealm) has specialized in making its games fun for people who don’t want to queue up for a match against someone named Tradscorpion69. The 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Injustice series and recent Mortal Kombats go beyond the fighting part and give us all a narrative reason to be there. Which is funny, be๊cause the original Mortal Kombat had pretty loose canon cribbed from a thousand sources. Now it’s probably one of the more consistent, better-told fighting game stories.
It may not be Citizen Kane, but it’s a good time. Also, pitch for a guest fighter: Charles Foster Kane. He gets mad at you for never finishing a jigsaw puzzle and beats the shit out of you with a sled for a fatality. That’s not much crazier than other things in Mortal Kombat 1. And, honest♒ly, is anyone doing anything with the Citizen Kane IP? We haven’t even had one go-kart game based on it. You know who did have a go-kart game? Mortal ****ing Kombat. I’m not joking; it’s in Armageddon.
Fortunately, other fighting games are catching on to the fact that I’m going to die at 65 when a pile of newspapers I’ve hoarded falls on me. It’s going to be a bad, long death. As I slowly die of dehydration, I’ll be able to think of every mistake I’ve ever made. Every person I’ve ever disappointed. Every love I’ve ever squandered. Which is why there’s comfort in knowing 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Street Fighter 6 had a bonkers single-player mode too. True, it encourages you to bring your💃 custom character into multiplayer. But you don’t have to! And at the very least, it’s an improvement over just fighting a couple of CPU opponents to get a short, still-picture-and-text ending. Although both Mortal Kombat 1 and Street Fighter 6 also have that.
I respect it’s not an easy balance to create a fighting game that can succeed on a multiplayer level (especially for professional players in tournaments) as well as a single-player experiencไe. I’m sure balancing characters for two humans playing against each other is different from balancing characters for one human against a computer. Probably. I don’t know. I missed the Sakurai video on this part.
But putting a good story in a fighting game doesn’t just add to the playtime; it gives players like me a reason to keep coming back. It shows us characters we aren’t that interested in and why they might be fun, new mains. It🎶 gives lonely losers like me a chance to feel like we’re martial arts masters without being ground into dust by people who ‘practiced’ and ‘know what they’re doing’. It’s significant rather than tacked-on.
Sometimes I don’t want to learn an entire 🅺system of framerates, hitboxes, and counters. Sometimes I just want to make Johnny Cage punch Sub-Zero in the balls and then, in the next cutscene, have them be allies. And I appreciate NetherRealm Studios for making that happen.
