Why Mortal Kombat Advance is like a schoolyard brawl
Mortal Kombat Advance (2002)
Mortal Kombat Advance (2002)
It’s crazy to think about, but when I look back on my days in primary school, where kids would be roughly the ages of 8 to 13, I remember there being a brawl in the schoolyard almost every single day.
And when the scrap began, it’d always be the same story: we’d all be sitting about in the freezing cold in our respective cliques, showing each other how to trigger Missingno, or comparing Simpsons pogs which briefly made a faddy reappearance in my town. Then suddenly, from a far-flung part of the schoolyard, someone would take a joke too far or make a comment about the sexual profligacy of someone else’s mother, and the sparks would begin to fly.
Almost immediately, like a shark scenting blood, there’d be an almighty charge from every single one of the 300-strong school towards the scene of the action, all of us hoping that we’d catch a live view of a great punch, perhaps even the decisive blow.
However, we’d all inevitably end up heartbroken as a teacher, previously and haplessly brushed aside, recomposes themselves and jumps into the middle of the fray to break things up, earning widespread boos as the ruddy-red-faced pugilists are brought to justice.
And let me remind you, this happened every day almost without fail. Things got so belligerent in that school that I half-expected that even I, nature’s biggest wetty, would be the one having to brawl with young adults by the time I moved on to secondary school.
Call it base and primal, but you can imagine my disappointment when I made the step-up to a supposed secondary school of hard-knocks and saw maybe three fights in six years. Seemed to me like the all-fart-no-fecal-matter brigade found their fighting spirit waning when threats of detention and suspension and expulsion loomed.
Talk about sacrificing your principles - when did the usual suspects ever kowtow to authority like that? At what point did the tough guys all retreat to the shadows and shirk schoolyard combat? If nothing else, it cruelly deprived us of a wonderful and much-needed schoolyard distraction. By this time, you see, terribly grainy porn on Sagem phones and “funny” sound-effects including that toxic Crazy Frog had become the dominant fads.
It was never voiced, but everybody missed that wonderful half-second when you’d spot a fight boiling over in some other part of the yard, before feeling your fight-or-flight hormone kick in as you scrambled over to bag yourself a ringside seat. You’ve got to be exceptionally quick to arrive on the scene first; you may have just eaten a deliciously carby fast-food “treat”, but you’re buggered if that’s going to stop you from seeing “Mad” Mick Murphy dispensing justice and issuing slaps.
If you’re lucky, you may even be pushed into the fray and get the chance to throw or receive a straightener or two yourself before it’s all over. The fisticuffs are always cack-handed, clumsy and clunk-footed, no doubt. But it’s childish fighting, with bodies and limbs everywhere and people getting in each other’s way, and we all secretly love it.
That’s what fighting games should be all about, if you ask me. Tournament fighters? One-to-one combat, with fairness involved? Rulebooks? Who wants that? Give me a hundred-strong melee any day. Mind you, I’ll say this for Mortal Kombat Advance: I’ve never played a fighting game so realistic that even just going a few rounds with it made me feel like I’d had my head weaved into the canvas by Drederick Tatum.
Mortal Kombat Advance is a Game Boy Advance port of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3, a mid 1990s entry to the series that had simply lost far too much momentum to Street Fighter, and was trying desperately to rectify matters.
Ignorant? Narrow-minded? Trollish? Look, permit me to ask you all a question. Do any of you really enjoy Mortal Kombat that much? Now I'm saying, do you actually enjoy it, to the extent that one of its entries would be in your Top 5? I know the series had a bit of a run with the whole blood issue, in a time when soccer moms were still blissfully unaware of shooters like Doom, and that there’d be games called Grand Theft Auto and Manhunt some day.
You’d never guess it by looking, but this was a very early game in the GBA’s life. To be fair, while it may possibly be the first shocking GBA port of a SNES game, it’ll certainly not prove be the last. To be fairer still, though, a tournament fighter should’ve been a pretty difficult thing to cock up. But some part-time team out there managed it.
There’s five different difficulty levels, but I’d clued myself in beforehand and read that this game is unassailably hard no matter what. So I choked down whatever was left of my pride and went with the Easiest setting. I picked Scorpion for my tumultuous struggle to the top obviously, because for some reason Johnny Cage wasn’t available and Scorpion is one of only a handful of Kombatants worth a damn.
In my very first fight, I was placed against what looked like a palette-swapped Scorpion. No, I don’t mean Sub-Zero or Reptile; he wore exactly the same bumblebee motif as me, so there was nothing to differentiate us. Well, except the fact that he was countering every one of my basic moves with ease, and even started stringing some combos together.
I lost, of course, and in most subsequent attempts I was really losing badly. And this was even despite my time-honoured Mortal Kombat tactic of catching my opponent with the ridiculous uppercut that, when it connects, often prompts a cry of “Excellent!” from the series’ bloodthirsty commentator. But that still wasn’t enough, and I was getting chiefed time and time again by the game’s easiest foe.
But then I switched characters to Liu Kang and suddenly everything changed.
All at once, my newfound tactic of crouching and mashing the A button for all my miserable life was worth was beginning to pay dividends. The enemy Scorpion literally could not get near me. Flustered, the AI Scorpion then spammed both his screen-warp move and the classic “GET OVER HERE!” harpoon in equal measures, while my guy kept throwing feather-duster strength kicks at breakneck speed. It was a lengthy, arduous process, but it was the best way I’d found of winning.
Cheap tactics? Well, who cares? The way I see it, with only two usable face-buttons on the GBA, special moves were fully out of the question here, to say nothing of Fatalities. I haughtily brushed Scorpion aside, but not before he threw out this ridiculous looking KO animation where his lifeless body just fell backwards like a tree being chopped down. In fact, at one stage, an opponent I’d knocked down stood back up, only to immediately keel back over in the same limp fashion.
I went on to plough through about 17 palette-swaps of Scorpion and Sub-Zero. I was looking for more cool characters, but I didn’t really get any. At one stage I even overcame this real loser who was dressed up as a police officer and had stupid moves like stun-guns and baton smashes. Really?
If you happen to have a friend who’s equally as luckless as yourself, you can ruin their day by insisting that they join you in the game’s two-player mode. You’d do yourselves less long-term damage and probably have more fun by having an actual real-life scrap.
Graphically, the fighters look their usual, unfittingly real self, which means the backgrounds are left to suffer. Take a look at them under maximum brightness and contrast; I don’t think I’ve ever seen graphics so grainy. I’m pretty much a blind man, but even I know clart and clag when I see it. The game has to do a screen transition into some Fatalities, and probably for Babalities and Friendship finishers as well – I’d know for sure if either I or the Artificial “Intelligence” were able to pull them off.
As for the sound, there’s little for me to savage there. There’s music, but it hardly comes under scrutiny in a fighting game anyway – nothing’s ever gonna beat Guile’s Theme, so I suppose most fighting game composers don’t bother anymore.
It’s genuinely nice that there’s classic voices for each of the characters being selected, although the vastly repetitive grunts and robotic noises of the fighters can grate on you fairly quickly. Especially since the humans sound less like they’re emitting a cry of pain and more like they’ve just realised they’ve left their keys in the car, left the gas on or left their newborn baby on the bus.
I do vehemently think that any tournament fighter that isn’t old Street Fighter 2 is pretty much a sad waste of time, and thus it certainly doesn’t suit me at all to be looking at a game like Mortal Kombat Advance. I’m not especially qualified in these games.
But when you get a game like this that gives an absolute fistful to its genre, its franchise, the console it’s on and most importantly its buyers, I simply have to sit up and take notice. I may know nowt about fighting games, but even the die-hard Mortal Kombat fans couldn’t say that I took liberties here. This game is the schoolyard fight that ends without a punch being thrown - in other words, a con and a waste of time.
28 April 2023