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 :)

Chp 645. Throwback Thursday #1 - Hostel Parties

One of the fondest memories I had as a child was growing up in a boarding school and having a "hostel party" with my friends.

This was before my Montfort School days. Back in 1989, I joined St. Thomas Boys School at Khidderpore, back then Calcutta, and yeah it was actually a very memorable time. Montfort School taught me discipline and the rigors of a residential boarding school, but St. Thomas was where I experienced life at its full brim :)

Our STBS hostel had three floors. The ground floor was (ironically) called middle dormitory, which was for students from class 5-6 till 9-10, the middle floor was called senior dorm where class 10-12 students stayed, and the top floor was called junior dorm which was occupied by all the younger students below class 5-6. I had to put hyphenated figures because there were aberrations here and there, which I think were based on maturity and preference.

I was in the top-most junior dormitory.

We had wardens overlooking each dormitory. For us, there was Aunty Riche, Middle dorm had Aunty Hale, and Senior dorm had Aunty Goodall. I may get a few names or spellings wrong as this happened more than 25 years ago.

Now, here's what our dormitories were like back then. Unlike Montfort School or other hostels that I have seen till now, there were no "personal cupboards" next to our beds. Instead, there was this vast empty hall with beds placed next to each other, and we had our trunks under our beds while our lockers were at a different location (we called it the locker room).

Hence those of us who were scared of "ghosts" could easily push our beds next to our neighbor's bed once the hostel lights were switched off (and I confess I did that many times!).

Back then, my Mizo amigos at junior dormitory were Rothangpuia, Zothangliana, and the two brothers Joseph and Hmingtea. The five of us had nicknames for each other. I was "thick lips", RTPa was "round legs", Anggu was "haddi", Joseph was "kir bep" and Hmingtea was "four eyes". We drew this "super hero" who had a round wheels for legs, extremely skinny, curly haired, super large eyes with an equally super large lips, and we really loved that :)

My cousins, the twins u Dinga and u Zara, and Sangtea were also in the same hostel but in different dormitories. I will never forget that night I was bullied by a Manipuri senior (I think his name was Jagdish Sigham) and my cousin came to my defense and fought with him, except I really can't remember now whether that was u Dinga or u Zara! :D Twins are so confusing sometimes :P All I remembered was, pow pow pow and there they were on the floor punching and pounding each other until a Prefect came and stopped the fight. I love you my cousins. :)

Coming back to this topic, we would have "hostel parties" occasionally. I googled "hostel parties" for reference and this was one of the many images I immediately got.

[image source – Google image search Hostel Parties]

Urrmmm… yeah… this wasn't how our hostel parties were. :D

Back in STBS, hostel parties were times when we were allowed to eat snacks inside our dormitories late in the night. It happened only in the weekends, and it was something we always looked forward to. This is another image I finally found on google image search, and this one is much closer to what I’m talking about.

[image source – Google image search Indian school hostels]

I had to use google image because I don’t have a single photo of my STBS days! :(

In fact, the image below that my friend RTPa had uploaded to his Facebook album is the only image of me during my entire four years stint at St. Thomas. So sad :(

And so during such hostel parties, all of us would sit on the floor together with our respective group of friends. A towel is laid at the center of the group, and every member of that group would bring out an item from their respective tuck box to contribute to the "feast".

Now and then our warden Aunty Riche would come out of her room (with her long cane) to make sure nobody was eating on their bed or that people weren’t making unnecessary loud noise or mess.

There were also certain people who would roam around from one group to the other asking for "contributions". RTPa and Anggu-a did that many times :D They would both carry this towel, holding it on either ends, and move from one group to the other where the other boys would put in a handful of biscuits or chips etc. and eventually they would have enough food to feast on :D

The most popular items in our hostel parties were "muris" and "chanachurs". You gotta love Kolkata for the street food. Nothing in this Universe can beat the awesomeness of puchhkas, jhaal muris and bhel puris. Other Indian cities may have their own versions or even call it by different names like paani puri or golgappa, but they’re never as awesome as the Kolkata versions. Muri (puffed rice) is a very common snack back in STBS hostel, along with different varieties of chanachur.

Recently, I came across a sponsored ad on Facebook. It was this new website called Place Of Origin. What caught my eye immediately was the word "Mukharochak". That was the name of a very popular brand when I was STBS hostel that sold different assortments of snacks like chanachurs and muris (pretty much like how "Haldirams" is synonymous with sweets and bhujiyas).

I went to the website immediately, and drooled at the options of food available for order - Papri chanachur, Mirchi chanachur, Khatta-mitha chanachur, Masala muri, Kabuli chana, Chaal bhaja, Chira bhaja, Nimki, Chowkhas, they had it all!!!

I placed an order immediately.

In less than a week, my order reached Pune.

Woohoooo!

As I sat their enjoying the awesome snacks, it was STBS hostel party all over again. In my head, I could hear the echo of a thousand laughter, of us being kids again, running across the dormitory or sitting around a towel filled with such snacks and hogging them down and having the best time of our life.

Sigh, such wonderful memories.

The Nimki also tasted exactly like how my dear departed dad used to make when I was a kid. I would watch him roll and flatten the base, and he would let me cut it in the diamond shape before frying them. Over here, they call it Namkeen. And no, it is not the same. Nimki till I die.

I’ll definitely be ordering a few more stuff from Place of Origin. I also saw a similar sponsored Facebook ad on my timeline again, this time leading to a similar (competing) website called Flavors of my City featuring Mukharochak and a few more brands. I’ll definitely give that a shot as well. I know I’m seeing all these ads on my timeline because of my browsing behavior, and while many people complain about invasion of privacy, I really don’t mind man. It’s much better than seeing completely unrelated ads that I have no interest in.

And so, this is my #ThrowbackThursday post for this week.

Until the next throwback, cheers y’all.