Review: MORTAL KOMBAT (2011)

Mortal Kombat
"The fighting game they give you in heaven as an intermission between the first 36 virgins and the second 36."
**** +1/2 out of 5


Before we begin...

"Nothing beat hearing this in the arcade, because you knew someone was about to get their ass kicked." - Random Youtube Comment Guy

There's a part in MORTAL KOMBAT'S story mode, right at the beginning, where Affliction-wearing douchebag moviestar Johnny Cage asks tall, blonde, possibly nordic Sonya Blade out on a date. When she says no, Johnny Cage starts a fight with her, and you have to win the fight, as Cage, to move on in the story mode.

Over the course of the story mode, Sonya Blade then warms up to Johnny Cage to the point where they're probably doing it off-screen when they're not fighting ninjas and monsters and sorcerers.

This is actually one of the less ridiculous things this game does, and if you got some sort of problem with a game universe like this existing, you should really get out now and fuck off back to Farmville.

See, there was a time when video games didn't try to be movies, or the game of chess, and gamers didn't try to be sociologists, and if you dared to suggest that a game had to have 90 minutes worth of cutscenes or that a fighting game had to be sensitive to women or minorities re: character designs, you'd be laughed out of the arcade like the ig'nit putz you are.

MORTAL KOMBAT is a return to that time, a simpler time, a better time. A time when ten different ninjas (who were all the same character model except with a color swap) was all we needed to have a good time. A time when the female ninjas were sexualized - I mean really, really, ridiculously sexualized with their tits hanging out and their mouths covered which is the way GAWD intended - and nobody bitched, or brought up the words "male gaze" (lol) with regards to the fact that each and every female character in the game fought for their lives, fought to da nub in super high heels (it was more like, "holy shit, that bitch totally put that shoe through that other bitch's throat, fucking AWESOME!").

Technically, this is the 9th game in the series proper (we ignore the "Mythologies" offshoot here, despite the fact that Sub-Zero and Shaolin Monks were Most Awesome), but it is not called Mortal Kombat 9. It is simply called MORTAL KOMBAT, ALL KAPS MOTHERFUKA! The website for the game is THEMORTALKOMBAT.COM, and there is a pretty good reason for this aside from standard reboot bullshit: MORTAL KOMBAT is the game the original developers would have made back in the day if they had been permitted by the times. It was never MK that lacked vision, you understand, it was the technology.

A bit of background before the gushing starts is in order: Mortal Kombat (talkin' bout the series as a whole at the moment, so we don't have to use ALL KAPS) started life as Midway's cash in on the Street Fighter II craze. The series endured because it was a fighting game like Street Fighter, except you could rip someone's heart out if you won the match. Each game became progressively more ridiculous, until the developers started throwing in go-kart and bejeweled minigames. That kind of killed the franchise, and so a reboot was necessary.

Here we are.

The absolute best thing that MORTAL KOMBAT brings to the table is the introduction of the X-Ray move. A major stumbling block a lot of people have with fighting games is the memorization and execution of movesets. As a result, you'll run into a lot of situations where people will poo poo the entire genre because they can't get their guy to do any crazy shit. Enter the X-Ray move. If the X-Ray move had been invented 10 or 15 years ago, the fighting game might be as popular in 2011 as the first person shooter. The X-Ray move in MORTAL KOMBAT is like a smartbomb for your enemy's face - press R2 + L2 at once whenever the meter is full, and KABOOOOOOOOOOOM, teeth get knocked out, skulls get clocked and cracked, organs get grabbed and squashed, ribs get broken, eyes get gauged with daggers, shit gets REAL, dig?

You don't have to be an arcade-dwelling weirdo to play and enjoy MORTAL KOMBAT. You can pause at any time and check the moves. They're so awesome, you'll *want* to put in the work to memorize them, except it won't be difficult, because most of the special attacks in MORTAL KOMBAT are as easy as down-back something or down-forward something, with back-back something thrown in every once and a while.

MORTAL KOMBAT plays smoother than something that's really, really smooth. Don't be afraid of it, it's just here to love you, baby.

Following are but a few examples of why MORTAL KOMBAT kicks so much ass. This will get, as Booker might say, "A bit jizzy."

When you play as Quan Chi, the sorcerer, you will find that your powers are largely psychic based. It would not do for a man of Quan Chi's stature to sully himself with the uncouth work of hand-delivering a smackdown, so when Quan Chi goes into X-Ray mode, the other player literally goes into a trance and is made to snap his own neck.

Sindel has this X-Ray move where she kicks the other combatant right in the business with her stiletto boot that must have like a 20 inch heel, it's that ridiculous. Then she snaps your leg in half, because it's like, "you can't have/make babies, you might as well not be able to walk, either." MORTAL KOMBAT understands that overkill is the soundest of all logic.

Stryker has a projectile move where he literally fires his gun as fast as you can keep hitting back-forward-square. If you can manage to do this nonstop for an entire round, by the end, the opponent's face will be entirely soaked with blood. There will be a big red lump where his noggin used to be. Stryker has another move where he throws a grenade at your face and it explodes all KAPOW. Stryker's X-Ray move has him blinding the other Kombatant with a flashlight, cracking their skull with said flashlight after they fall to their knees, breaking their throat with a baton, and tazering them in the neck chub.

Stryker's standard fatality is him pulling out a gun and blowing your fucking head off, and the blow repeats itself one, two, three times (from as many angles) just in case you weren't paying attention.

Remember how Stryker was a pudgy cop with a Gayest Purple Under Armour shirt and a backward baseball cap in (Ultimate) Mortal Kombat 3? In MORTAL KOMBAT, Stryker is a hard, bad motherfucker, and he don't take no mess. Officer Curtis Stryker is pretty much a metaphor for MORTAL KOMBAT as a game. Understand that if you had told me that I would ever compare something to Curtis Stryker as a *compliment,* I would have kicked you in the face and then kicked you again when you stooped down to pick up your teeth.

Is MORTAL KOMBAT "the best fighting game ever?" I don't know. If we make such a claim, there will be some ignorant putz to disagree, probably some guy who fancies himself a scientist for analyzing Japanese sperglords play Street Fighter on Youtube. I don't know if Street Fighter or Virtua Fighter (Gag, Cough, Wheeze) are "deeper" games, but this much is certain: MORTAL KOMBAT is the Most Awesome fighting game of all time.

We're not particularly religious folks on this end, but don't let something as triflin' as your pesky atheism keep you from presently understanding the fact that MORTAL KOMBAT is the fighting game they give you in heaven as an intermission between the first 36 virgins and the second 36. The deeper implication here is that those final 36 wenches must really be something spectacular in the sack, like some kind of crazy supermodel-pornstar-gymnast hybrid demigods with the skill of Aphrodite herself, because otherwise the departed would probably opt out of the last three dozen orgasms and just keep on playing MORTAL KOMBAT until the end of days.

Honestly, if you wanted to play MORTAL KOMBAT until Meggido, you probably could get away with it, because there's a ton of content on this disc. There's a standard arcade mode, and there's online play, but there's also story mode. Story mode in MORTAL KOMBAT is the best thing I have ever seen in a fighting game. Instead of ruining our childhoods with a retcon, MORTAL KOMBAT does that alternate-timeline thing that Star Trek did. Basically, at the end of the last MK game, the canonical ending is the one where Shao Kahn killed everybody and the bad guy won. In MORTAL KOMBAT 2011, Raiden uses the last of his energy to send a message back to his past self in order to try and change the future. Story Mode follows with a combined retelling of the first 3 MK games, except it's all WHIZ BANG POW. There are CG cutscenes in MORTAL KOMBAT, to give story mode context. Story mode in MORTAL KOMBAT feels exactly like an X-Men comic serial, except spines get ripped out and assholes get gored.

MORTAL KOMBAT is a gift to our collective inner 13 year old boy. More than that, MORTAL KOMBAT enables, loves, and nurtures our inner 13 year old boy, in a way that our own mothers never could. MORTAL KOMBAT preserves our inner 13 year old boy, in the way that pectin might keep a fine jam or jelly. I've come to terms with the fact that I was a pretty big loser as a kid, and I didn't shed my virginity until later on in life. Point being, I'm pretty sure that if BULLETSTORM!!!!!!!!!!! and MORTAL KOMBAT 2011 had been released ten years earlier, I wouldn't have seen a girl's bits up close for at least 2 extra years, if ever.

As mentioned, MORTAL KOMBAT has other stuff going on, too. A lot of it. During the game, you earn KOINS. You spend these KOINS at the KRYPT. The Krypt has over 300 items for you to unlock from treasure chests, except the treasure chests are all prisoners and corpses, and when you buy the thing at that particular spot, something nasty happens. So if I pay 1500 Koins to get Scorpion's alternate fatality, it's not like some gay Zelda shit where the green elf man opens the box and a stupid ring tone plays and holds up a potion. It's more like I pay the Koins, and then a man is ripped apart into four quarters, or an iron maiden closes, or a bloated body is picked open by crows, or sludge is force fed into a hanging man's throat until his gut explodes, etc. Then a little message pops up to inform me that I have a new thing to play around with. Did I mention there are over 300 of these?

I would love nothing more than to give MORTAL KOMBAT a perfect score of 5/5. I can't do that, the best I can do is 4.5 out of 5, because MORTAL KOMBAT follows this shit industry trend of forcing those who buy used copies to pay 10 bucks to enable online play. That's why MORTAL KOMBAT gets 4.5, 9/10, etc. Because getting raped is enough to warrant a bit of a dock on the rapist, however otherwise charming he might be.

(Giving MORTAL KOMBAT a 4.5 or comparing MORTAL KOMBAT to an actual rapist who engages in actual rapes are both ridiculous symbolic protests, like suing Microsoft for a buck. In a world where industry executives could take the cashdick out their mouths for half a second, MORTAL KOMBAT would have a 5/5. My pet peeve aside, you should probably buy MORTAL KOMBAT at any price, because I'm really just on some irrelevant bullshit here, and you've paid $60 for games that weren't 25% as good as MORTAL KOMBAT, not even 15%.)

MORTAL KOMBAT is every Saturday morning you ever spent in front of the rotbox wearing your pajamas and eating sugary cereal, and all it will take for you to relive that joy is 60 American Dollars. With Duke and Rage on the way (and Bulletstorm already in the can), MORTAL KOMBAT might not be the MOST AWESOME game of 2011, but it will undoubtedly be in the top 10, maybe even the top 5.