So if you don't have the game yet, or you're ready to do some early holiday shopping, check out the store to get the game for GameCube, PlayStation 2, or X-Box.
A newly repackaged version of MKDA reflecting this status is already available for PS2 and X-Box for the low price of 19.99 and can be purchased now. The GameCube version will be available for the same price before the end of the month.
Congratulations, Midway! And thanks to all you Mortal Kombat fans for making this possible. Read the whole story here at UltimateGamez.com - and a special thanks to reader Frost4584 for the good news.
Once you knew what you were doing with the gameplay, it essentially wasn't that difficult to play through the regular fights and endurance matches, but once you got to Goro, if you tried adopting the same strategies you were used to using you would be in for a rather nasty shock. Goro was very strong, inflicting some crazy damage with just a single hit, and the damage you actually inflicted on him was reduced to a fraction of the damage those moves would have made on a normal opponent. He had some very strong moves himself and if he managed to pin you into the corner the match was all but over. His downfall was that he did fall into some predictable patterns, and if you learned what they were, you had an upper hand in the fight.The portion of the article involving the Mortal Kombat bosses can be found here. To read the article in its entirety, click here.
Then you were in for a rude awakening. Feeling pretty confident after beating Goro, you moved on to face Shang Tsung, and you had your backside handed to you on a silver platter. Shang Tsung was even tougher than Goro. He moved extremely fast, and his fireball attacks did insane damage, even if you blocked them. Added to this he had the ability to morph into any character (even Goro) that he felt like, and he did it with such great timing and so quickly that it was all but impossible to predict what he was going to do. Your attacks (when you actually managed to land some) did reduced damage like they did on Goro, but Shang didn't have any particular attack patterns you could try and exploit. If you managed to beat him, you truly were the Mortal Kombat Champion.
Ask any avid player of Mortal Kombat, and he or she will tell you that Goro was a decisively different fighter from anyone else in the game. For all intents and purposes, pretty much all of the normal CPU fights in MK weren't terribly hard once you got the hang of the basic strategies and you learned all the usual cheap moves, such as constantly sweeping an opponent and repeatedly uppercutting them, which worked like a charm basically all of the time. Against Goro, however, any player who enacted these cheap tactics was in for a rude awakening. Goro simply wasn't having any of that, and when you attempted to use them, he'd just pick you up and pummel you into easy submission.To read the entry for Goro in its entirety, click here.
To be fair, Goro would usually just pummel you into easy submission regardless of tactics. He was psychotically overpowered and able to eat away huge chunks of your life meter without even breaking a pixelated sweat. Aggressive tactics of any kind on your behalf usually resulted in the loss of a quarter and another couple of minutes of your life down the drain. Beating Goro required a whole lot of patience, and just a bit of luck to boot. Generally, the best strategy involved quick air strikes and then immediate attacks as he attempted to get back up, since he was unable to block while doing so. You had to be precise in your timing, however, because if he got up before you managed to pull off the attack, the match was pretty much over. However, if you were able to stay far enough away from him to avoid being grabbed, and could dodge his projectile attacks, after a few tries, you could pretty well take him down.
If you had to trace the debate on excessive violence in video games back to a single game, that game would be Mortal Kombat. Midway's absurdly bloody fighter took arcades by storm in 1992, with its graphic depictions of character-inflicted carnage that included decapitated heads, eviscerated hearts, and buckets of spilled blood. Problem was, Mortal Kombat wasn't exactly the best fighting game. The mechanics were simple and the fighting wooden; sometimes, you felt like the whole game was just a vehicle for the gore. Midway fixed that problem, scarcely a year later, with the aptly titled follow-up: Mortal Kombat II. The sequel balked at the senators, parents' groups, and media watchdogs who had condemned the first game by upping the gore factor considerably. But more importantly, the second installment also brought Mortal Kombat into its own as a fighting series.To read GameSpot's article, entitled "The First Fighting Game That Let You Just Be Friends", in its entirety, click here. We at MK5.ORG send our congratulations to Midway and the Mortal Kombat development team on this achievement!
Considering how quickly Mortal Kombat II came out after its predecessor, Midway went well above expectations with its creativity and, frankly, the sheer amount of stuff that it put into the game. While Mortal Kombat took place on Earth in a series of bland, gray stone temples, the sequel moved to the twisted, bizarrely colorful Outworld. The varied and strange backgrounds there gave the game a real unique visual character. MKII nearly doubled the number of available player characters as well, and all of the characters had plenty of new and useful moves. The plot involved the Earth warriors from the first game, who were transported to Outworld to fight against Shao Kahn, the oppressive master of the first game's boss, Shang Tsung. In an amusing twist, the shape-shifting Shang Tsung became a playable character, with all of his transformation powers intact. You could actually use him to turn into any other fighter in the game, making him a real Swiss army knife of a character.
