![]() ![]() As such, hopes were high that NetherRealm would take what they had done in Injustice and expand it with MKX. NetherRealm's next game, Injustice Gods Among Us, fared much better, and got a lot more tournament play then MK9. That game's purpose was to get back to grass roots, and did just that, but a lackluster online service and other design gripes meant the game didn't really take off in the competitive scene. ![]() The move to 3D really sucked the life out of MK for many hardcore fans, which didn't resurface until Mortal Kombat, the reboot in 2011. MK has always been a popular franchise, but the last game in the series to be taken seriously by the community was Mortal Kombat 3, and to make you all feel extra old, that game became twenty years old this past week. Now we have the second American-developed fighting game of the new generation, Mortal Kombat X, this time a big budget triple-A title with a lot to prove. Now, Killer Instinct hasn't kicked Street Fighter off it's throne or anything, but it appeared at EVO last year and has garnered a large competitive following, proving that a Western game can be taken seriously at high level play. However, this was not to be just a nostalgic fix, because the new KI turned out to not only be a lot of fun, but also incredibly well designed, and caught the attention of more then a couple of pro players. To be honest, it's most of the reason a lot of fighting game fans even bought the Xbox One. Killer Instinct, an arcade classic from the 90's and a nostalgic favourite of millennials nationwide. Why E3 2013? In Microsoft's press conference, an American-made fighter was announced to return on the Xbox One. Well, break out the Bob Dylan, because the times are a'changing, and it all started at E3 2013. As such, it's kind of become a stigma, the Japanese make the competitive games, the rest of us make silly ones to look at and say awh, at least they tried. Many American developers have tried to make fighting games that compete with Japanese games for tournament status, I mean, there's no better publicity for a fighting game then being on the main stage of EVO. Seems perfectly reasonable, but factor in that most of the world's biggest fighting game tournaments are held in the U.S., with competitors representing a multitude of countries (not officially, but certainly in spirit), mostly competing in Japanese games, and you see the issue. Regardless, these are two schools of thought employed on two sides of the map, no toes being stepped on or anything. You know, regular people who just want a fun game. ![]() Western fighters have a reputation for catering for those filthy, filthy casuals. It's not so much about the games being better, it has more to do with the fact that games like Street Fighter or the Guilty Gear series have a lot of depth to their systems and require a lot of skill to really master. This is mostly a state of circumstance, it's not a fact that Japanese fighting games are better by that nature, that's just how it's happened to be for most of gaming's history, and kudos to those Japanese developers for creating such amazing games. I'm sure most gamers among you are aware that fighting games are predominantly developed in Japan, the good ones anyway, and as such there has always been a frame of mind among players that the hardcore games are Japanese, and the Western developed games have historically not been taken as seriously. today, but fighting games, I would argue have as passionate a following as any other E-Sport. Not quite as big business as League of Legends or C.O.D. Now, fighting games have always been a main stay of competitive gaming, since long before E-Sports was even a made-up word. No, I have something else to talk about, and that is the state of competitive fighting games today, and where MKX falls into it, or rather, could. No I'm not here to review it, that's already been done by the lovely (or so I'm told, he could be evil for all I know,) Sean and can be read here. there, that's my review, we can all go home. So Mortal Kombat X is among us, and to put it short, it's very fun.
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