Chp 646. Throwback Thursday #2 - Mortal Kombat

Today's Throwback Thursday is dedicated to Mortal Kombaaaaaat :D

I am not going to brag :P (okhay fiiine I'm gonna brag a bit here) but back in Engineering college, I was an MK4 champ :D :D

MK4 - Mortal Kombat 4, was the first game from the Mortal Kombat series that came out on PC in 3D, and we were all hooked to the game. This was way back in the early 2000, so some of the popular PC games back then were AOE II, Max Payne and Diablo II.

At our PSG Tech hostel, we would have this occasional MK4 tournaments. All my friends would select their favorite fighter and tried to master its moves. Raiden and Liu Kang were the majority's favorites because you know, easy combo spam (F-F-HK for Liu Kang's "Flying Kick" and F-F-LK for Raiden's "Torpedo"). I on the other hand, decided to master all of them!

For the tournaments, we played the "Vs. Endurance" mode, where both players played every character of the game until the last one (Johnny Cage) was beaten. Since I was trying to learn the combos of every fighter, initially, I got my ass kicked many times by my friends who had mastered one or two characters.

But I kept practicing and practicing. Sometimes I would wake up early in the morning and run around the hostel field listening to "Eye of the tiger" while practicing my MK4 combo moves with my fingers in the air :P

Soon, by around third year in college, I had mastered the Special Moves combos of each and every single character in MK4, including a few fatality combos and Jax's 5 Multi-Slam combo. After that I was unstoppable. Nobody in hostel could beat me in "Vs Endurance" anymore.

I even took part in a small local tournament hosted by a cyber café slash gaming parlour near our college, and I won the tournament easily, beating around 20 other contestants. The grand prize was 50 hours of free browsing time :D Sadly, I was no longer allowed to take part in the next tournaments after that :D

I guess other people heard of my petty fame, and students from adjoining colleges like CIT, GCT and PSGCAS actually travelled all the way to my PSG Tech hostel room to challenge me for a "Vs. Endurance" match. And they would always return disappointedly :D

I still remember some of them coming to my hostel room with their own keyboards. A two-player MK4 match was played on the same keyboard, so if you were playing on a cheap or inferior keyboard, you could actually press all the keys to freeze the ongoing match, a cheap tactic that shameless people use in order run down the time if they had more health :)

Mastering MK4 wasn't just about learning all the special combo moves, it was about quick finger reflexes, anticipating your opponent's moves, knowing the right combo to play and which combo to use to counter your opponent's combo. It was more about playing a mind game with your opponent.

Unlike the later MK games and other fighting games, there was no such thing as a power or stamina meter for MK4, so the fighting was pretty much straightforward. I have played a lot of different games in my lifetime, but MK4 really holds a special place in my heart because it was the one game nobody could beat me at.

More than 15 years later, I am now working in this awesome gaming company where we also have a lot of recreational activities to do when we are feeling stressed out, like a TT table, dart board, mini basketball ring etc along with an Xbox. And the most popular game we play on that Xbox is Mortal Kombat XL.

sighhh… so many memories it brought back.

MK XL is nothing but MK X with two DLC character and costume packs.

Of course the graphics and animations are way more awesome than MK4 (lelz) and I haven’t played on a console since my Nintendo Samurai days in the 90's, so it took me some time to get used to it. A lot of my colleagues use the joystick instead of direction keys to move but I find that very difficult to use.

Currently, my favorite characters from Mortal Kombat XL is Quan Chi. He is so dark, I love his portal attacks and curses :D My favorite special move of his is of course his "Sky Drop", though I must admit, it is not as dramatic as it was in MK4, where he would actually stomp his opponent repeatedly :D That was hilarious. The only way to counter that in MK4 was to block or use Fujin's "Whirlwind Spin" / Sonya's "Bicycle Kick".

But I like him here as well.

And so, just two days ago, I got an alert notification from one of my wishlist games on Steam. And guess which one it was?

Yup, Mortal Kombat XL.

My aim is to download it and practice at home so I can kick everybody's ass in office :D

The current cost of Mortal Kombat X is Rs. 1179, Kombat Pack 1 costs Rs. 729 and Kombat Pack 2 costs Rs. Rs. 565. So all three of them are almost Rs. 2500.

Guess how much I bought it for?

Haha, just Rs. 424 :D

That's more than an 80% discount.

Time to kick start this monster now.

Cheers y'all :)