Nostalgic Critique; Mortal Kombat: Deception.

 Apparently my blog has had no love from me for almost five months. Well, it isn't like I haven't posted any reviews, I did a couple of rants on Tumblr and did one review for a Uni assignment (reviewing is surprisingly hard when you need to do something current without any swearing). And it isn't like I haven't been consuming games, TV shows or movies either. So then I guess the first thing you're thinking is a) why the hell have you not posted stuff here then? and b) then why have you not written more?

Well...for a while I was pursuing an idea to make a web series of video reviews, done in a Mighty Booshesque style but this takes an extreme amount of effort, time and love and care which I don't have at the best of times but then me and Christina broke up, again (heh), and it seems for definite this time which allowed me to really take notice just how shit my life is even with her in it and this made my depression spiral out of control (hey there fresh scars on my arms, at least without you I’m not completely alone) and I've barely got the energy to live anymore. Sounds cliche I know. And that also answers the second question as well, I guess. Normally my responses to things in my rants were always blown out of proportion to be more amusing than simply me moaning. But in my current state I just finish consuming a media text and then just kinda shrug 'meh', roll over and stare at the ceiling for another sleepless night. Further still the kinds of things I've been getting really into, like Power Rangers and Comics (hey fuck you) are such mammoth franchises that a simple depressed blogger like myself had no hope to tackle it.

So I guess third question is, then what is this? Did you just lead me into this post with hope of a new review and instead you're just gonna bitch about your life? Well, no. Well yes, I have bitched about my life but there is also a review as well (I don’t know how being in this state will compare to my ability when not in this state, who knows you might like this me more).

So, hey why an old game like MK: Deception anyway? Mainly because MK: 9 is coming out in less than two weeks (I think anyway) and it's something I'm very excited for. Deception was one of my favourite games when I was…13?! This game came out in 2004? No fucking way! But either way, I had a nostalgic experience (and a rip off title) and a preparation for a topical game I'm very much looking forwards to. So, here is the review!

Firstly Deception does something that many modern games forget about, it has a set of modes that can all be played in single player. God, to think this used to be the norm and multiplayer was an extra, what a crazy time 2004 was, wowohwow!

First, we have an Arcade Mode which is fairly typical, choose a fighter defeat a series of opponents who gradually get tougher and tougher and then button mash your frustration away as you try and cheat you way to beating the over powered annoying as shit final boss. Why fighting games always put in such an insanely annoying final boss in their arcade modes I will never know. Can't fighting game developers tell the difference between challenge and frustration? Well clearly not. Further still the fact that this format hasn't changed since 2004 is kinda worrying, but anyway.

Secondly we have Konquest Mode which is just downright fucking awful! No rant necessary, no jokes said, just plain and simple. Oh fine then! I should do my unpaid unappreciated job should I? Whatever, then. Considering how old this game is (yes I know 7 years isn't a long time at all really but when comparing it to games and their rapid growth in technological prowess it really is, we seem to achieve so much year by year now) the graphics are actually really nice and detailed, but in this mode? What the fuck happened guys? The graphics suddenly rewind about a decade and suddenly I'm playing a PS1 game. Completed with flat textures, jagged surfaces, balls (well hexagons) for hands, no detail and the kind of colours that make my eyes bleed after a small session of playing. The voice acting is awful, mouths don’t move and every character model in the whole game appears to have three movements complete with hugely invasive text conversations. Hell, if they didn't give you an incentive to play this mode, I wouldn't bother at all (I'll get to that). What is Konquest mode? Honestly, I'm not really sure what the hell you'd call it. I guess it's sort of an openworld RPG. You play a hero named Shujinko who for whatever reason (I'd say plot device but that makes even less sense) literally turns into the MK fighters he meets (the game chooses who you play as). You basically run around the different Realms, trying to find these 'Kamidogu' and doing general boring RPG sidequests. Fuck I hate how important you are. I guess this could have been pretty epic regardless of its age but the dialogue and writing are piss poor and it’s just plain bad.

Thirdly we have Chess and Puzzle Kombat. Why isn't it Khess Combat? Oh never mind. I was originally going to separate these two because they are separate modes in the game but honestly there is little reason. These are just fun little novelty games that get really fucking boring really fast. Chess Kombat is just chess with MK characters and battles, with traps and magic spells and some power squares. Okay, so it isn't really Chess then at all but it's set on a Chess Board and the characters are sort of lined out like Chess Pieces. Puzzle Kombat is just a Tetris rip off that makes little sense, even though I've played countless matches just to fill five minutes I have no idea how this game works. It isn't like getting lines from Tetris and I can't honestly work out how many of the same colour I need in a row, when I clear blocks it seems to happen at random. It also has goofy bobblehead versions of the MK characters battling at the bottom of the screen depending on your score will depend on how their fight goes, which I guess is pretty clever. Characters also have unique block clearing specials, which I guess is kinda neat as well.

Now about why Konquest mode is important? Well you see there is a thing called 'The Krypt' inside the Krypt are a load of locked well err krypts I guess, which can only be opened if you find the specific chests dotted around the Realms in Konquest mode. So not only does it force you to play that horrible, horrible game mode. But it also forces you to explore every nook and cranny of its ugly jagged PS1 landscapes, OH GOD MY EYES. Aside from that, the Krypt is a wopping piece of shit. You get Koins throughout the game for everything you do and Krypts have costs to open. Come to think of it, that premise is a little screwed up... but anyway most of the time you get bullshit like photos of people who worked on the game or concept graphics for adverts but what makes this suck even worse is, once you open the Krypt it just shuts again. So you've bought what is inside of it already, but unless you note down the name of the Krypt if you click it, you'll just buy exactly the same thing over and over again. FUCK. Did I just open the Krypt with the quality control team again? Goddammit!

Since this is a nostalgic review I guess an extra part of the review should be how exactly does a fighter from 2004 hold up today? Well at a risk of sounding like an old man I hate the direction gaming has taken since around 2006 when the current gen consoles came out. For a while gameplay was seemingly forgotten all together for the sake of making photo realistic games then when they finally remember they were making games and not animation again they just spent all their time making multiplayer games like CoD and developers had apparently completely forgotten about the two most important things about gaming. Single player and the freedom to play a game with friend who are in the same fucking room as you and haven't had to network up their consoles. Isn’t this what gaming was born on? Isn’t this what inspired Xbox Live and the PS Network? It’s funny because PS can stand for Piece of Shit, ha..ha…ha… And further still with all this online gaming culture and this strive for realism in both gameplay and graphics any fun left in gaming was replaced with frustration and boredom.  So playing a game that has different modes for single player, even if two are just novelty and one is painful, is a gift in itself. And further still Mortal Kombat has always put fun into Fighting games.  The extreme levels of gore, the multiple levels to the arenas, the arena deaths and the fatalities etc are all fantastic however... although this has nothing to do  with the games age, I remember as a kid this being a lot easier to play (irony?) but playing this now I was blown away by just how hard this game is to play. I mean sure you can pick it up and play it pretty easily but you can't do specials by accident and the advanced combos require such rapid button presses and precise movements that unless you're The Flash their actual use in combat is nearly null. This is especially frustrating when a lot of the missions from Konquest require you to do a characters whole move list to pass, including this insanely hard advanced combos. Some of them were so precise that I started to weep into a cereal box in frustration. (okay that never happened but I just wanted to make a metaphor for my sheer level of frustration).  Meaning that quickly my button mash level of ability at Fighting games soon started to bore myself as I appeared to be doing the same three attacks over and over again. And yes I know that modern fighting game 'greats' like SFIV or MvC3 (what a fucking joke that these are classed as classics of modern gaming) require that you spend no less than 8 hours of training room activity with the same character before you can even grasp the basics of the game (fun? Go away, we don't want that polluting our games) but I thought that was just because of the modern 'hardcore;' gaming mentality but it seems there is a certain level of this needed to enjoy Deception as well, sadly. There is also a little neat feature where every character has two fighting styles and one weapon, that you can switch on the fly and even switch mid combo but maybe because I’m such a basic player I found very little variation when switching styles and very little variation in the characters in general.

Erm, how to close this? Well, if you want a taste of Mortal Kombat before nine gets here then this is cheap and will be perfectly entertaining for the small gap between now and nines release. Erm yeah,.

Think About It!

-Locke.