i don’t disagree with any of that, but i think in mk’s case i don’t see a substantial difference between how the fatalities are staged between x and xi. around a quarter of them still seem tonally jarring in their sadism
MK. X is torture porn and MK 11 is happy tree friends
do people do the fatalities during mortal kombat esports tournaments. how is that tension released afterwards. does everyone fuck at the hotel later
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the first fighting game made by people with Facebook Content Moderator Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder
yeah lol… camp… liu kang… toasty
21 savage isnt even in the fucking game
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i’ll report back after i go to evo this year
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Glad this sort of stuff still gets discussed. It’s interesting
“I’m telling you man, it’s now been six years of me, every night, posting a scary picture on my Twitter account at 10 o’clock,” says DeLeon. When I ask him if he’s sleeping better or worse in the years since he started the ritual, he answers without a moment’s hesitation. “Better, for sure. I’ve completely desensitized myself to this stuff now. I’m the proud owner of a human kidney.”
“The guys I always feel the worst for are the cinematic artists, because they have to make sure that like, each bone is cracking in a realistic way,” he says. “Even the audio guys probably have a bit of like, PTSD, because they have to spent all this time carefully picking out and putting in all these gory, juicy, crunchy, eviscerating sound effects.”
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I barely beat a guy in a KotH match and he cussed me out and quit, but I guess I got my daily for it.
not to derail, but yeah, the MK11 news of the past few weeks has really put me off from wanting to pick it up. like, it looks fun and nostalgic, but these days i just don’t have the stomach to separate out knowledge of stuff like this from my experience of a game and still enjoy it.
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MK11 is shaping up to possibly be one of the best fighters of this console generation but it’s also nice to see how much dirty laundry is coming out of its development so that its success doesn’t obscure its toll on the staff. I had completely forgotten about the Rousey thing when I had pre-ordered it on GreenManGaming (because it had like a 20 or 25 percent pre-order discount).
I also feel like more fatalities in MK11 do come off a bit goofier and ridiculous than MKX’s, which was wholly visceral and brutal, but it’s all still really graphic and detailed in a way that makes them feel more icky than necessary. In particularl it feels like they developed some certain effects (a type of blood spray, detailed eyes, and a particular splatter effect) and most fatalities are designed just to make use of and show off those specific affects. It gets eye-rolling at how samey they end or how a final hit is unnecessarily tacked on just to utilize one of those aforementioned affects. Fatalities on D’Vorah are better because she has green monster blood so it looks more fake.
I still want friendships and babailities to come back.
At tournaments for previous NRS you’d rarely even see the win screen because the games have a “restart match” option on the pause screen, so the losing player would just pause in the middle of the winning combo and restart the game. This actually became a discussion point after a while precisely because of the lack of release of tension. You never get to see the decisive blow that finishes a match because the losing player pauses and restarts, or disconnects their controller (which pauses the game).
MK11 has the same option but it has to be turned on from the Option Menu otherwise it won’t appear. I imagine tournaments are turning it on because it speeds things up.
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is thinking that excessive blood splatter and crushing squishing sinew sounds are for the most part cute and endearing and familiar actually that generational?
man
I’m becoming a crank in ways I never even worried about
pop culture still demands it, I think it’s reasonable to see a few perspective pieces about the difference in working on those assets for months and soaking in reference material
And gorehoundery is explicitly divisive; isn’t part of the thrill finding the experience that’s just a bit too uncomfortable and ‘surviving’ it? So it’s impossible to calibrate for everyone, the person who’s been in this for decades and the 11-year-old’s first fake blood experience
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I think the rousey thing probably damned them here too actually because most of the voices who I’d expect to echo support for tasteful tastelessness aren’t going to forgive one extremely bad celebrity VA
That one Sonya fatality really shocked me. The one where she breaks the other guy’s arm in half, then completely breaks his nose in, summons a turret from the sky that cuts the guy in half, and when his severed upper body crawls away shoots him in the face. The crawling away fearfully is what got me. That’s really brutal! But yeah, I’ve gotten used to it and I like that it shocked me and kinda stepped over the line. I just really like gory stuff in movies and videogames. I like to be grossed out and scared and “surviving” it.
It sometimes also really hurts when you’re at the receiving end of a fatality after a tense round. It’s insult to injury and I like how intense that feels. Makes me really salty sometimes. Not many games can do that
don’t play this trash
This is probably what my dad thought when he saw me play the first MK on the Mega Drive and I did the Liu Kang dragon fatality. But he had the decency to let me play what I wanted and trusted that I’d be okay because I was always pretty mature for my age. So, I don’t know, why are you so against cartoon violence?
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absolutely play this trash
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he was right
its absolutely importantni think to consider both perspectives but i see mk11 as becoming a new Problematic Fave that cant be talked about honestly by people; its the only fighting game.i can think about where criticism of past things seems to have been considered heavily with a story that goes out of its way to give due to some of its more marginalized characters
that’ll prpbabpy get lost in the shuffle of discussion but i’m not surprised at all. i made a Twitter Post, that the new release schedule people need to get used to is not how long before a developer annpunces pointless DLC after launch but how soon after it’s discovered the game was made under awful working conditions
imo there’s a sadistic gaze to that which isn’t there w/ scorpion blowing up into a spray of cartoon blood and like 15 rib cages in old MK games. it’s like how i can have fun watching 80s slasher movies but won’t go anywhere near the whole Saw/Hostel/etc horror subgenre.
fwiw, i think the endless gunning down of humans (who are overwhelmingly non-white) in games like uncharted & various military shooters is a lot more damaging to a player’s psyche than an ice ninja getting their head sliced in half with a hat
but yeah, bits of this make me feel v. uncomfortable
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the u.i. and sound design present such a serious frame
i can’t read any cartooniness in the new shit either
the music is not juno reactor, or the immortals, or space ghost purrp, not even dj paul
a spectrum between funny geocities .gifs or that one guro .gif with the laser machine
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