Joystiq Top 10 of 2011: Mortal Kombat

Fighting games are pretty serious business. The community that supports the arcade and tournament scene is composed of roughly the same people it was fifteen years ago, and as a result this particular corner of the gaming kingdom has a longer lasting, more detailed memory than most of its non-competitive contemporaries. This makes fighting game players hard to impress, especially when their opinion of your legacy titles is less than stellar.

Mortal Kombat had a heavy coating of nostalgia working for it prior to its launch, but it also had to contend with the series’ long and storied history of brokenness and balance problems: Nearly every character in Mortal Kombat Trilogy had an infinite combo, for instance, which serves as a perfect example of what competitive fighting game players remembered about the franchise. Not to say that the old Mortal Kombat games weren’t fun, because they were, they just weren’t “tournament ready.”

So, when April finally rolled around and Mortal Kombat landed in disc trays around the world, that’s what everyone expected: The fun, over-the-top, painfully broken hodgepodge of violence and pseudo-Asian mythology we’ve all come to know and love over the last twenty-odd years. Little did we realize that what we were actually getting was not only the best fighting game of 2011, but one of the ten best games to come out all year.Continue reading Joystiq Top 10 of 2011: Mortal KombatJoystiq Top 10 of 2011: Mortal Kombat originally appeared on Joystiq on Sun, 01 Jan 2012 15:31:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Permalink | Email this | Comments