Be Excellent To Each Other

...was "right bumper"?

Forget about everything else that is wrong with the game for now.

Do special moves need to be complicated?

Yes, it would have done.
Special moves are horrendously complicated nowadays, which is one reason I no longer want to play beat-em-ups, as having to go Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A to do something cool is too high a bar to entry.

Smackdown didn't suffer from having special moves mapped to a single button. Your opponent would have a very short time to counter your move, and would lead to spectacularly intense matches.

I haven't played Mortal Kombat in years. Do fatalities, as the name suggests, act as an ‘I win’ move? Are they not blockable, avoidable or counterable?

Wait...

Fatalities are after you win, during the "finish him" phase. If you don't do one, the opponent still dies.

But dies in a less spectacular way.

So, maybe 90% of people playing MK weren't able to rip someone's spine out via their head. Which I thought was the major selling point of the game itself.

Ah, that rings some bells. I think being difficult to pull off is probably a good thing in that situation, as if it was easy enough to happen after every battle, there'd be little point not having the game do it by default.

Special moves during battle depend on the game design. If they're unavoidable, make them difficult to pull off. If you can counter it reasonably easily, make the controls very simple.

That and having to buy a special pad to even get close to being able to pull off even the most prosaic moves. I acquired VF5 last year from Goozex just out of curiousity and it is as close to unplayable on the 360 pad as you can get.

I remember the only fatality I could pull off on the one-button Amiga MK was Johnny* Cage's.

> > > < Fire.

*where is Jahoney anyway?

Combos list from Tekken 4

That's why I don't bother with them anymore.

Ah, but those are combo lists, and are quite different.

Oh, right.

But are they, though? Press button, do this.

Obviously the game needs to make the better things harder somehow, and it needs some really complicated stuff for the pro players, or there's nothing for them to go for any more.

Hmm.

HMM.

I don't know about this really... surely a part of the magic of the fatality is the sense of achievement from successfully pulling it off?

That said, I've often wondered if the likes of Street Fighter II and so on would be improved by 1 button special moves, a la the iPhone version of SFIV. The skill in those games is rarely about knowing how to pull off a fireball or dragon punch, but when to do such moves.

For the record, The Joker's pistol fatality from MK vs DC is still the best Mortal Kombat fatality of the lot.

I love it though, probably because I'm oddly good at it.
My favorite character in my favorite fighting game is Long from Bloody Roar, and his combos (and the awesome way they worked) were so complicated they came with diagrams

Mortal Kombat? Meh, that takes me back.

I was always Sektor, much to the enormous annoyance of my girls. They never did work out how to deal with repeated 'teleport uppercut' moves.

As for Fatalities, I never worked out how to do a single one, which probably tells you all you need to know about how shite I actually was at the game and had to rely on a supply of 8-year olds to impress.

My problems with the MK fatalaties at the time were:
1) less the button input, more the fact you had to be standing the right distance away otherwise it dodn't work anyway.
2) The fact that back in the day (SNES, yo) i seem to recall that they didn't even tell you how to do the fatalaties in the manual, and this was pre internet for me.

I once mastered Nina's chain throw in Tekken 3. That was probably my greatest gaming achievement.

I always thought the fatalities in Wu-Tang:Taste the Pain (I think that's the right title) on the PS1 were good. No complicated button combination to memorise, just press a certain button for a certain fatality and you could unlock several per character. It was a decent game all round really.. as long as you didn't use the ridiculously-shaped bundled controller.

On the subject of Mortal Kombat, I was playing it last night on the PSP and I used the same character as I always do - Scorpion, as he has the easiest moves and I can remember his fatality (Block+Up, Up).

With the chopping and changing of games that I play, I've no chance of remembering fiddly combos and fatalities per game.

I always wanted a fighting game with real damage.
i.e. if i kick someone in the nuts they collapse on the floor and I win.

The best fighter is still "Way of the exploding fist" purely for this reason.

I remember a sword fighting game that had more real life damage from years back, now what was that called?

Yeah - I guess they came from an era (for me, at least) when games were rare and special things.
The idea that I'd own a game and not play it to death back then were properly alien.

Moonstone?

Severance? Not really real life damage as I recall but it was a great sword fighting game.

Bushido Blade?

Also, fatalities were like an achievement, and doing one was 'cool'. Having them be too simple would have defeated the point, IMO.

Defeated the point, yes, but jacked up the "HAVE YOU SEEN KANO'S FINISHING MOVE!? IT'S AWESOME" monday morning registration factor which was the only reason I played MK.

If it was PS1 then almost certainly Namco's Bushido Blade - most stuff was instant kill.

Liu Kang's MK2 fatality (dropping the MK1 arcade cabinet on his opponent) or the beaten to death with the soggy end of the dismembered arm one from MK4 were my faves.

Special moves (your basic projectiles et al) should be a little more fiddly than regular moves, that makes sense. Fatalities were always a chore (although I did make the effort to see them all). Mainly because MK1,2 and 3 were pre-internet for me and there was no way you'd ever guess the combinations (even if by some miracle you did you'd still need to be at the right range and actually pull off the combo as well).

Mapping it to a single button would kind of suck though.

My proposed solution would be that fatalities were automatically performed at the end of a bout based on your performance. Get a 'Perfect' and it'd pull off a fatality for you with your friendships, babalities and animalities being based on use of combos, time taken and whatever else.

That's the baby! Great game, impossible to control though

My money's on no. The Street Fighter moves are fairly simple as special moves go, but it's the combos that are a bugger to learn as they should be, you're chaining moves & as far as SSFIV goes there's nothing more satisfying than coming back from near defeat & juggling someone into an unavoidable ultra or super. I manage it in about 1 round out of 100 & it never stops feeling good.

Anyway, Mortal Kombat's finishing moves were mince http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bti1b77_Hjc

Haha, yeah, MK3 on the game boy - choose Sektor. Telepunch. Repeat. You'd win without fail against every single opponent on every difficulty level. Shame really, as MK2 on the game boy was a really good conversion.

Sektor Vs Sektor on my friend's mega drive invariably ended up as a homing missile/telepunch/crazy desperate backflip dance of lunacy. It was great fun.





This. The only way to even find out most of the moves in the MK games was to buy the magazine that printed them - you could spend your entire life trying to work out a single death move otherwise.

Beat 'em ups now are impenetrably dull. Give me a simple set of easily-activated moves, and make the game actually about making the right decisions at the right moment, not memorising 3,000 different combinations. Thanks.

the best thing was when Killer Instinct was released...the ultra combos were awesome.
I remember GamesMaster did a challenge on it, it was brilliant.

That's the thing, do the designers honestly expect you to work out the moves yourself? Without reading a guide or the internet?

I remember that the only reason I knew how to do Sub Zeros finisher was because I watched some guy play it to death on the arcade.

The problem with Mortal Kombat games is that the moves don't really seem natural. Street Fighters "Roll the stick a quarter way and press button" seems more instinct than "> < < > HP"

This is true, SF was always better in that regard. Shadow Fighter on the amiga was also pretty neat - I only played it via emulation, but was still able to pull off nearly every move with ease because they were simple, natural quarter-circles and 'back forward punch' affairs. They should really have gone for a multi-platform release there.

Shadow Fighter was my favourite game on my Amiga. I loved it.

Amiga Power did a competition to design a new character for it and there was 2 winners. An evil clown and a mad scientist. I would have loved to have seen them in the game.

Street Fighter 4 should fit that bill quite well.

Heh! Actually it was MK3 on the PS1 mate. Not one of us ever killed all the bosses with our five lives, even on the 'easy' pile of opponents; only ever got as far as beating Motaro on one battle, only to be defeated by millimetres on the next two. Gutted; I still don't know who or what the final boss was.

I got MK2 on the PS3 via the Sony store just before Xmas, but that's just feckin' impossible. Even GOOD gamers think so, let alone some old twatto like me, which is a real shame. Plus, apparently we're not getting MK3 for the PS3 at all, which is all a bit wank, really.

As Lace Sensor says, Combos were the best for me in Killer Instinct.

I could do regular 8 hit with Skeletor but thats about it.

This kind of stuff, I couldnt:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=spVjqBK_pVY

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=efU_EHT6Nxo&NR=1

I saw a trailer for the upcoming Mortal Kombat game the other day. Looked like a reworking of the original game which might be a good thing.

Tekken was the best fighting series ever anyway, as any fule kno.

Basically it's a gradient between two differed extremes. On one side you have games that test your ability to input a string of fix commands more accurately than your opponent. Which is pretty much all about memorisation and dedicTion rated than skill and reflexes. On the other scale there are ga
Es with a v limited amount of simple moves where the skill comes from using the right one when. And from stratergy and psychin out the other player.

They are both totally legit ways to go, but I think it's clear which I prefer. Bushido Blade, deadliest warrior and smash bros (?) are much
more interesting games than things like tekken.

I had a friend who could those unlimited 99 hit combos with the girl in Killer Instinct. She also had an amusing fatality called "The Heart Attack". She flashed her knockers at her opponent who then died of a heart attack.

Sadly, you couldn't see those marvellous pixellated breasts.

Ah, it must have been the PS1 actually yeah. Damn, I thought we were younger than that.

I had MK2 on the amiga. It was the hardest, cruellest, cheatingest bastard of a game I've ever played on any system. I had it for years and never even defeated the boss's henchman, even on the easiest setting.

Well, once I did. With sub zero (natch). I froze the fucker, lined up the final uppercut and fired. The "yah!" sound effect played... and the game crashed. My brain followed suit.

I hated that game's cheating. It was utterly disgusting.

I have many fond memories of playing Tekken 3 on a different friend's funsquare. Playing Tekken force mode and refusing to do anything but break everyone's arm until they died was hilarious, and Eddy's dance-fighting was the most fun any beat 'em up character has ever been.

It's that's how you find modern beat em ups, then you're doing it wrong. Soul Calibur may have plenty of moves to choose from, but you really, really don't need to know more than even a fraction of them

I played a fair bit of Soul ("Calibre" - Spelling Ed) 2, and after that lost interest. Beat 'em ups are fun, but beyond about 60% button mashing, 40% a few moves you remember, there's obsessively memorising which moves block high hits, medium hits, low hits, which ones are blockable, which ones you can dodge, etc. It's all just too complicated to get good at without having to study it like a language.

The correct spelling is Soul Calibur, as it's a proper noun. The game is named after the sword.

Then the sword is spelled wrong

Blame Tim Langdell.

'Sord'