Mortal Kombat 1 (XII)

Spirit Bomb - Interestingly, I can't think of any other big western fighting game in recent times - the last Killer Instinct was ten years ago and Skullgirls is more of an indie game and (seems to be) on the casual side. It's funny how a well established genre like this doesn't have more western releases.

Heh yeah, americans love fighting and violence, but we can't seem to make any decent fighting games. Not sure why. One theory of mine is the lack of good pixel artists in america during the 90s, when the fighting game craze was at its peak. All of the big 2D american fighters in the 4th gen (i.e. Mortal Kombat) used digitized graphics, which is a terrible choice if you want to make the game a tournament fighter, since it basically means you'll have to code the gameplay around the graphics rather than simply building everything from the ground up from scratch, aka "free handing". Even those digitized Street Fighter games (there were at least two of them) were both considered inferior to Street Fighter 2, which already felt clunky and outdated by the 5th gen owing to a lack of pixel space, so as a result nobody played them competitively. Or even casually for that matter.

I mean, I absolutely love the look of american fighters like Clay Fighter and Primal Rage, but I don't think these games would hold up beyond casual play.

Even when fighting games entered 3D I've noticed that american fighters still continued to struggle. American junk like Criticom are regarded as being not just some of the worst fighting games ever made, but some of the worst games of the entire 5th gen.

To be fair, it's not like Europe is that much better in regards to fighters, regardless of whether we're talking about modern day gaming or retro gaming. I can think of Killer Instinct and that's about it. I'm personally not that interested in trying it, since it's just a MK derivative that also suffers from digitized graphics. It's a shame that rare decided to go this route since there sprite work on Super Battletoads (AKA Battletoads arcade) was so good that it looked like something by Irem or Konami, so clearly they could have made beautiful sprite-based fighters if they really wanted too.

I think another big problem with western fighters in addition to the digitized graphics is the lack of comic book artists working on them. All of the big 2D Japanese fighters by companies like Capcom and SNK as well as some of the 3D fighters like Soul Calibur were known to have extremely talented manga artists like Shinkiro designing (at the very least) the characters and the promotional artwork. American comic books were still hugely popular during the 90s, so the fact that western developers never thought to tap into the talents of 90s comic book giants like Todd Mcfarlane, Mark Schultz or Steve Rude was a HUGE missed opportunity. I think that kind of sums up my complaint of the lack of direction here: japenese fighters are aimed at comic book fans, whereas western fighters like Mortal Kombat are made without any real inspiration and seem to just be fodder for the masses of teenagers and pre-teens who grew up on low-grade slasher flicks like Friday the 13th and crave sleezy torture porn, which would explain why MK was such a commercial hit. These Mortal Kombat games really aren't made for sophisticated adults like you or me.

Stratogustav while not an outspoken comic book fan seems to have an appreciation for the manga artwork featured in SNK and Capcom games, but at the same time doesn't seem crazy about the slasher film genre, so I'm not sure how he developed such an obsession with a fighting series (Mortal Kombat) that's about as far removed from japenese fighters as absolutely possible. It seems odd that anyone who loves japenese fighters like KoF so much would swoon so hard for tasteless western fighters like Mortal Kombat. I say this because usually people either love one or the other. Back in the day all the american nationalists were raving non-stop about either MK or Duke Nukem (or both) and most of these ugly, oversized dudes never touched those intricate, sprite-based japenese fighters. I've worked with and went to school with these people all-american dudes so believe me when I know what I'm talking about.

I thought this interview was pretty cool.  I wish he had to eat all of the wings, though.  He only did 5!