By Shaun Hatton - September 17th, 2008
It’s been over a year since I first reviewed Mortal Kombat Armageddon for Wii. The review was done for a music magazine that shoehorned its game reviews into half a page of real estate, so the review was only about 30 words long. How can you review anything in 30 words? It’s certainly difficult. See, this paragraph is already longer.
At the time I wrote the review I really didn’t play the game with anything other than the Wii Remote and Nunchuck combination, which is the control scheme that series creator Ed Boon promised would have your grandmother pulling fatalities on you. Could that even be possible? Turns out it was an overstatement, as half the time I couldn’t get regular moves to execute properly. Of course, at the time the Wii was still very, very new, so I figured that some of the misfiring of the controls wasn’t due to them being programmed poorly, but that it was me who couldn’t pull them off because I wasn’t skilled enough to.
I guess, in a way, this is because I generally feel that if I can’t do something, I’m not worth a damn. Instead, I likened this to when I was first discovering fighting games. Street Fighter II was selling Super Nintendos sell left and right despite its heavy $100 CDN pricetag, and the first time I played it I was confused why the creators would have six buttons at their disposal but not assign special moves to any of them. Instead, players had to pull off a series of different combinations on the control pad and then hit a button in order to throw fireballs, do hurricane kicks, or perform other devastating attacks.
Because this was a whole new way of playing games for me, it took a while for me to get used to pulling off these moves, and indeed I will admit that I can do uppercuts for Ken and Ryu a lot easier from the right side of the screen than I can from the left. So you can see how me not being able to pull off MK Wii’s gesture-based special moves reminded me of getting my ass kicked in Street Fighter in the arcades in the early 90s.
Due to my recent revived interest in Mortal Kombat, which is spurred on by the fact that Mortal Kombat VS DC Universe will be released in November and because I associate Halloween with MK anyway, I decided to give Mortal Kombat Armageddon another go this weekend. On Friday, I played it after my guests left for the night, and stayed up ’til 3 a.m. playing it. Only this time, I used the Classic Controller. It is by far the best way to experience this game – other than with friends, that is. I spent a few hours learning different fatality steps and practiced them over and over again and now I’ve created a particularly cheesy and over-the-top finishing move that it makes some of the Friendship moves from MK2 and 3 look serious.
Armageddon can probably be had on the cheap these days, if you can find it in stores. Also, the PS2 Premium Edition includes Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3, which is another amazing title in the series. This month, Midway will be releasing Mortal Kombat Kollection, a three-disc PS2 bundle featuring MK Deception, MK Armageddon, and MK Shaolin Monks. If you’re a fan of fighters and for some reason haven’t played the last few Mortal Kombats, give them a shot – you’ll be pleasantly surprised.
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