Mortal Kombat Finished

Finally beat the game, HALLELUJAH!

Game: Mortal Kombat
Release Date: 1994 (1992 original arcade)
Platform: PC (MS-DOS)
Date Started: April 23, 2014
Date Finished: October 18, 2014

Konditions: Beat the game with every single character on medium difficulty with 4 credits available, no character switching during the game ✓ 
Beat Reptile at the bottom of the pit ✓

When I started this blog I thought things are gonna move fast and my initial plan was to beat one game per week. In the end it took me 6 months (!) to finish Mortal Kombat and that makes it one of the hardest games I ever played. There were times when I thought about quiting and moving on to something else but I didn't give up and managed to beat the game with every single character. In the first post I wrote that I was sure the difficulty options are just placebo. The truth is I was so bad at it that I couldn't tell the difference. The game kicked my ass on both easy and hard.  Now after getting a bit better, I can beat the game on medium but can't get past the pit stage on very hard,

As I first started playing Mortal Kombat, I thought I've seen everything the game has to offer within the first 2 hours (little did I know that I'll be playing it for the next 6 months). Only after some time of learning the game I discovered that there is a surprising amount of depth to it. The amount of moves and combos is larger than it seems at first sight. Graphically the game has aged better than the early 3D fighters but worse than some older 2D fighters with cartoony graphics, say Street Fighter 2. The gameplay still holds up very well. Uppercutting someone into the air or shadow kicking them across the screen feels very satisfying. Fatalities are the icing on the cake. The music and sounds are alright but nothing special. The announcer voice on the other hand is freaking epic. He's definitely up there with Quake 3 and UT announcers. All the characters in the first game are iconic, distinctive and have an unique fighting style (only Scorpion and Sub-Zero share the basic fighting style while having different specials) but they are not perfectly balanced for competitive play. The story is very basic (there is a single text screen) but every character has an introduction and an ending screen that tells his story. The best part of the game has to be the multiplayer which I unfortunately couldn't really experience. Tried to play against a friend but it wasn't fun since he barely remembered the moves while I was playing it actively so he was no match for me. Single player is frustratingly hard at times and most often you will have to fight through stages by abusing game's AI.

+ Interesting characters + Fatalities + Combos

- very hard - bad AI - Reptile isn't playable

5.5/10