Mortal Kombat

I was never much good at arcade fighting games, or in fact any game that didn’t involve repeatedly guiding a cute cartoon animal or egg across floating platforms from left to right, but Midway’s ‘Mortal Kombat’ series unusually captivated me when it was obtained for my much-loved Amiga 1200 in the mid-90s. Designed as an arcade competitor to Capcom’s ‘Street Fighter’ in a similar way to the Mario and Sonic rivalry of home video game consoles, Mortal Kombat relied on extreme violence and purported realism to win over simple-minded arcade junkies and young gore-obsessed freaks playing reclusively in their home at 32 Ashley Meadow, Haslington, Cheshire (or, you know, ...  Read the complete review

Originally released in the early 90s as an arcade machine and then ported across to numerous home computers/consoles, Mortal Combat is a decidedly dark and gory oriental-themed fighting game in the style of Streetfighter 2. The game has numerous well-developed characters to choose from, including the ninja Sub-Zero, shades-wearing film star Johnny Cage, female martial artist Sonja and the mysterious, big straw-hat-wearing Raiden, a character with the ablity to charge his opponents with jolts of electricity who is borrowed wholesale from Director John Carpenter's classic 80s action film 'Big Trouble In Little China'. In fact, the whole game retains the sinister yet ...  Read the complete review

Mortal Kombat first ripped the head off the gruesome corpse of a kiddy hobby in 1992 when this hit the arcades if murderous and controversial fashion. Fighting games themselves werent a new thing, the had been around since way back in the 1980s but they were all tame in comparison to what Ed Boon and John Tobias were to give us. To game was set with the idea to compete with the Street Fighter game as Midways answer to Capcom. Though it used a significantly different button layout it was always obvious that the two would be compared. Though the controls for MK were simple the Mega Drive version did lose some of the Arcade machines features due to technical ...  Read the complete review

I remember when this game first came out in the 1990's it caused a lot of controversy with its violence. It is a 2D beat-em-up featuring characters digitized from real people. It is quite a simple game and only features 7 playable characters ranging from standard martial artists right through to ninjas and even a god. The main draw of Mortal Kombat is its fatalities. The characters each have a fatality or death move. When you beat your opponent on his second round they'll stand stunned for about 10 seconds and the words finish him will flash up on the screen and from here you can perform a combination of button presses to finish your opponent ...  Read the complete review