N-Philes

Who do I need to slap about this?

Posted November 19th 2008 by Adam Glasgow.

Last night a friend of mine rented Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe for the PS3. We played it for a while. You'd be good to stay away from it.

Before I keep going, I want to be very clear. This isn't a nerd rant about the absurdity of Jax having any kind of real chance against Green Lantern. No, that would be too easy. Also it would be pointless, because if the game is fun, those kind of complaints are nothing but Kevin Smith style conversations nerds have in small groups between fansubbed episodes of Naruto.

The problem with Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe is that it sucks. It feels clunky, the animations are as flat as they were in the first MK on the SNES, the move sets are terrible and require irritatingly long button press combos to execute and there are noticeably fewer characters than there were in the last Mortal Kombat game. But at least it's Mortal Kombat, right? The series has never been known for being good, but being ridiculous. Crazy gore, cool finishing moves. It's not about being GOOD, it's about being entertaining! In this respect, at least, MKvDC wins! Right?

Wrong. To make the game more marketable to kids (I guess they think there are a lot of Captain Marvel fans under the age of 15?), all that's been scaled down to keep the rating at "T." There's a lot less blood and nothing that most would consider gore. The fatalities are lame as hell, and heroes don't even have fatalities, since that would mean they would kill their opponent. They have "heroic brutalities," where they do things like hammer punching their opponents into the ground for a while. It's all so uninteresting that it isn't even worth looking up how to pull the fatalities/heroic brutalities off to see what they're like. The best "finishing move" you can do while playing this game is shutting off your system.

What I completely don't get, is how the reception for the game has been so positive. Every review I've read makes me wonder if perhaps they're all playing a completely different game from the one I experienced. And reviews like this seem to borderline on paid-for handjobs.

Seriously what the hell is going on here?

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