S1E16 - Mortal Kombat -- PS2 Editions

Welcome back to another episode of Discreet Air, the podcast where every week we dive into the fascinating and extensive library of the greatest selling video game console of all time, the PlayStation Two. I'm Derek Kicker.

I'm Ian Golding.

And this week, we finish him. We finish him off.

We get over here.

Your soul is mine. Yeah. We're playing Mortal Kombat on the p. S. Two. Flawless victory, flawless intro.

Mortal Kombat.

Mortal Kombat. Indeed. So there are four Mortal Kombat games on the PlayStation Two, which I thought there was more.

I actually thought there was a lot more. I was surprised there were.

Yeah, it feels like there should be more, but there's not.

Well, it's an interesting combo, and we'll get into it, but the PlayStation Two was around for a very long time. But unfortunately for my love for Midway, was really tested. This was a dark time for the.

Mortal Kombat series, I would say it was dark and then it was light. It is weird, but those games are mortal Kombat Deadly Alliance. That was the first one. Then Mortal Kombat deception, then Mortal Kombat Shaolin monks and then capping it off was Mortal Kombat armageddon.

Armageddon.

So we're doing all four games. And Ian played Deadly Alliance and Deception, and I played Shaolin monks and Armageddon. But even though these games, I would say, are very different from one another, in some ways, they do share some similarities. One of them being that they were all developed by famous Mortal Kombat developer Midway Games.

Indeed. Before. Was it Nether Realms?

Yeah. A company like, was solely dedicated to making Mortal Kombat games.

Right.

Do they make anything else other than.

The crossover ones with, like, do they do the injustice stuff?

I don't know. Maybe they do.

I know they do. They're the same.

I didn't really play that shit. Mortal Kombat is like, a legendary video game franchise.

It's Pantheon.

It's absolutely the pantheon mount Rushmore of fighting games. You have Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, Tekken, and fourth one is a Rotator because.

Some people would say, like, virtual fighters. Some people would say soul caliber. Soul caliber king of fighters. Like, there's a lot for that fourth spot.

Maybe killer instinct.

Yeah, maybe killer instinct. But there's no question that Mortal Kombat is in rushmore. It cannot be supplanted.

You know what? You know what I'm going to say? I'm going to go ahead and say the fourth one is Super Smash Brothers.

Is that a fighting game? This is a different debate, but I guess it's a fighting game. It's more of a basher, though, isn't it?

I'll drop it in there as a hot take.

Hot Take.

I think those are the four that's the Mount Rushmore of fighting games, undoubtedly. Mortal Kombat is up there. It's an old gaming franchise. Oldish. There's no, like, NES Mortal Kombat, but it does go all the way back to the Super Nintendo and the Genesis. And famously, the first mortal Kombat on Super Nintendo had green blood because Nintendo was squeamish. And that's why Genesis absolutely rocked them in sales when it came to that first Mortal Kombat game. But I think I said this in our very first episode, our preview episode, that one of my earliest gaming memories is Mortal Kombat Two on the Sega Genesis.

Fuck yeah.

And I played the shit out of that game. And to this day, I think Mortal Kombat Two might be still my favorite Mortal Kombat game.

Yeah, it might be mine as well, because Three just got it was just too much.

Three is a little goofy. I do like Trilogy on N 64, which is like the best revision of Three. I think Ultimate Mortal Kombat Three fixed a lot of what was wrong with MK Three. Though I do not think there is really any good Mortal Kombat game. I would not say any of the Mortal Kombat games that are on the PS One are very good.

No. Well, I think was it two or three where I remember you could finally play as Shang Tsung and you could change characters because that was one of his powers, I think it was like.

A thing yeah, he like Imitates. Yeah. He can turn into other characters.

And the stupidest fucking thing in PlayStation One was every time you did that, it would load. So it would pause. It wouldn't pause, it would just freeze. And then it would load for a couple of seconds and then you'd become Scorpion or whatever.

Yeah. And I think that might be this also might be a completely different debate. But it's also one of the reasons why a lot of the arcade ports to PS One were much better on Saturn than they were on the PS One is just the way the processing of the chip set was, is that they had to remove like a third of the animation frames because of the ram.

Right?

Yeah. Which I mean, back to that Rushmore thing real quick. Maybe we put the Marvel versus Capcom in that fourth spot.

Very possible.

Because what technically like Marvel versus Street Fighter. X Men versus Street Fighter, marvel, Clash of Heroes, those are all in the Marvel versus Capcom franchise.

I could also say that you would technically lump that in with Street Fighter. You know what I mean?

That's true. That is true. But back to Mortal Kombat, because we could talk fighting games all day. There were a lot of Mortal Kombat games before the PS Two. A surprising amount because on the Genesis alone, there's Four, right? There's one, two, three and ultimate three. Same with the sness. Then there's Mortal Kombat four on the N 64 Mortal Kombat trilogy on the N 64 Mortal Kombat special forces on the PS One. A very bad spin off along with Mortal Kombat mythologies legend of subzero. Whatever. Also a very bad spin off. And then you get to the PS two, and surprisingly, we don't get one right off. The bat from Midway came out in November of 2002.

Okay, so a while.

Yeah. So like a year ish into the life of the PlayStation Two. But we've talked about Midway before. They're a legendary developer, and this would actually kind of be their final run at the Mortal Kombat franchise with the PS Two. So let's start with deadly alliance.

It is now known that the sorcerer Quan Qi has escaped from the Nether realm. Escape? Quan Qi has unlocked the secret of the ancient room stone discovered the ancient undefeatable army of the long forgotten Dragon.

King, which you played. And how does this kind of stack up to previous Mortal Kombat games?

To me, it felt like I hate to use, like, business terminology or something, but it was a solution in search of a problem. It's suddenly not mortal. Kombat you have the same characters. You have the same like you have, but it's a lot like it's complicated. It's not just remembering moves. Suddenly there's a you can circle around. So it's more in three D. And then for some fucking reasons, you can fucking switch your fighting styles on the fly. And that's not mortal. Kombat Mortal Kombat is for idiots. It's for children. It's for people who think that a strategy is crouching and hitting uppercut over and over and over again.

You're going to piss off the competitive Mortal Kombat scene.

But that's the problem, is I think that it that existed. And then they thought, well, Tekken and all these other games, they are now in this kind of 3D space, and they're a little more deep, I guess, would be the gameplay.

That's true. Tech and Tag was that's an interesting an interesting thing to point out, too, because Tech and Tag was a PS Two launch title. So do you think that the direction that Tekken went in may have influenced this game for the worse?

I think they thought they saw the writing on the wall and they felt like they were getting kind of like, it's all the same. It's all the same. Nothing shame made it some focus group. And they're like, we got to do a big change. Well, not big. We don't want to reinvent the wheel, but we want to make it a lot deeper of a game, a lot more appeal to this tech and Tag, like these kind of soul caliber. And it doesn't feel to me this is me doesn't feel like Mortal Kombat anymore. It feels like a cheap imitation of those other games.

The way they explained it is that it's a feature, right, that each character now possesses three individual fight styles, and the combo system kind of changed.

And I don't know if this was in four or any of those others, but you can pause and there's a move list now. And it's like, man, I know it's 2001 and we have the Internet, but.

I think that goes back away.

I don't remember that from two, three.

Or four where you could like I'm pretty sure it's in Flu. I think it's like a modern one. I think once we got out of Snass and Genesis, it started because once the first Mortal Kombat only had seven characters, this has, like, 20 something. So once it started being, like, an unwieldy amount of characters, I think move lists were put in as a way to be like it was either every character has the same moves and just slightly different animations, or they do something like that that'll help you keep track so that doesn't bump me as much. And that's also, like, a pretty common like, Street Fighter has that. Street Fighter has, like, a combo list. Tekken definitely does.

Well, that's what hit me as I was just thinking about Tekken when playing. I think it was Tekken Two. And just looking at the guy who did Brazilian fight dancing.

Eddie Gordo.

Yeah, Eddie Gordo and his, like, 30 fucking combo thing and just trying to pull that off and how fun that was.

Oh, my God, I love Tekken.

Tekken is the best. So, yeah, this just felt like they were like I said, they thought they were seeing a lot of writing on the wall and didn't want to be like, oh, Mortal Kombat, that's so simple. And it's just, like, for kids and trying to expand to this new kind of era of fighting, which it's not for me and it's not Mortal Kombat. Yeah, that's my first impression now as I played into it. I got into combat mode. They do everything with the K, and they kept so close to accidentally putting three KS and things a lot. But, you know, they got one guy over at Midway, or maybe now Neverworld, who's like, no, can't do that.

That's not going to go well in America.

No hard C or K sound in a third word. Guys can't do it because they'll ask why we didn't change this one to a K. So I played through that. It felt this one was just kind of the latter, but you just fought the same kind of thing where it was like going up the mountain and you whatever.

The same tower ass thing that every single conquest mode, every single Mortal Kombat game that is a straight Mortal Kombat game does. Right.

But in this, the story is woven in, and each character has their I beat it only with scorpion, of course, because that's what you do. But, yeah, the story is woven in as it goes on. And again, Mortal Kombat has just become this nebulous thing with Reboots and blah, blah, blah, where it's like you don't even fucking remember where you first heard of Quan Qi? And I was like, oh, is he in this? He's the bad guy. Or is it Shanks? Whatever.

Yeah, I think Mortal Kombat Four is when just a whole slew of new characters came Shinok and quantity and all that and just a whole new level of the gods and crazy stuff. But that is interesting. It is something I didn't really think about is this we're seeing like the Tekkenization of Mortal Kombat?

It's what it felt like. And they definitely, I will say in in the more modern ones, since the Reboot, since X, they have really pulled back. There's still a lot of moves. There's still move list, blah, blah, blah and it's still technically in 3D, but that feels like the actual successor to the one, two, three and I guess four.

I don't really I would say in this generation I like the Tekken games more than the Moral Combat games. But I would say in the modern games, I kind of like the Moral Combat games more. I think moral Combat Ten is incredible.

I love that game.

Yeah, moral combat. That's up there on list of moral combat games. But it's interesting. I think it's hard to talk about Mortal Kombat outside of the context of what's going on with other fighting games because I believe at this point in time, street Fighter is still riding the wave of Street Fighter Two.

Yes.

Right. Capcom is still I mean there is like Street Fighter Ex, Street Fighter Anthology and Street Fighter Alpha, but there are all kind of just like variations on Street Fighter Two and each one an absolute hit.

Yes.

Not skipping a beat and basically doing very similar things. Whereas Mortal Kombat really after three, really trying to reinvent itself kind of with every game.

As you were talking about that. This is where I think the difference is capcom said, let's make this a little deeper, more complicated. But still, if you're just a fucking kid and put a quarter in and hit start, you can still slam the buttons and feel like you're doing well.

Absolutely.

This is where Midway went wrong. You don't have that feeling anymore. You can button mash and you're still going to do fine. But it's not the same feeling of like, I'm good at this, and then you play someone who's really good at this.

Yeah, but it's also not deep enough to really compete with Street Fighter. I don't think there's ever really been a point where Moral Combat actually competed with Street Fighter in like a competitive scene.

No way. No.

Street Fighter still like Street Fighter Five right now. Those servers are still heavily used. Street Fighter Five came out like seven years ago. We're just now getting like the Street Fighter Six sequel.

So one final thing on this game is I found this fucking hilarious. So this was the return of test your might remember.

Yes. Now I can't want and Test your site.

Well, that's what I wanted to bring up. So test your might is exactly what you remember. You hit the buttons, you smash the things. But then they had Test Your site, which I don't know if you this might be before your time. There was a video game growing up in Arcade called Tapper where you were serving root beer or if it was in a bar, you were in Budweiser. And every two or three levels there would be a little mini game which was exactly fucking Test Your Sight. It's moving back and forth, going up the balls under this cup, and now I'm going to move them around so fast. I was like, this is not fucking Mortal Kombat.

I don't know. That's kind of a legacy thing, too, because Test Your Might was in another one. But Minigames is very much a mortal minigames, including when we get to Armageddon, where we basically get Mario Kart with Mortal Kombat characters, which is very funny. But after Deadly Alliance, and I believe, correct me if I'm wrong, the deadly alliance refers to I mean, the story of this game is so by this point, so convoluted and nonsense. But the deadly alliance that gives this game its name is Raiden aligning himself with Quan Xi, right?

Correct.

To defeat Shao Khan. Something like that.

It's the bad guy netherworld gods.

Yes. Yeah. But then we move on to deception.

Radiance Earth Realm champions had failed to stop the deadly alliance from fully resurrecting the mummified army of the Dragon game. In the end, only Raiden himself stood between Earth Realm and total destruction. Defying the elder god's wishes, he alone challenged Kwan Qi and Shang Song in Mortal Kombat earth Realm's last hope for freedom.

Which looks somehow looks worse to me.

The graphics are decidedly worse.

It looks kind of like P s one Dead or Alive graphics.

Everyone's a lot, I want to say, like, not blockier, but they're like more steroided up, but shiny. They're shiny, they're more balloony. The animation, I think, is actually a little better, but the actual models are fucking garbage in this one.

This seems like a very I don't know, I guess, like, moderate update from Deadlier. Right? This seems like if this were today, this wouldn't be a full game. It would be a patch.

It would be DLC.

Yeah, this is DLC.

They did, I will say, for the conquest mode, it's not open world, it's semi open world. But it's now, like not just going up the mountain. You're like this little fucking jamoke who you're not an established character. You're like a new character gibroni, just a gibroni. And you got to run around the temples and this guy teach you how to back up and then move forward, and this guy teaches you how to punch, and then you get into the actual game. So it's more of again, they were like, oh, we want to make it make it more like fucking everyone wants to do GTA stuff. So that was an improvement. I will say I'd enjoyed pieces of that.

Also, and this is the first game, I think, with fan favorite bull rye cho.

Sure.

The alcoholic who has a special move where he, like, pukes on everyone, right?

Yeah. I didn't play as him, but I got puked on many times.

And he's like, a heavily part of the story. And we were talking about minigames. This one has chess combat.

Okay? We could do an episode on Mortal Kombat uncheck, because here's why. It's one of those things you're like, oh, this is stupid. And then you start playing it and you go, oh, it's chess. But when the two pieces come together, like, no matter who makes the move, you then fight. And then that piece, whatever damage you took, sticks over till the next time he fights. And then you're about 15 minutes in and you just go, I don't have time for this. And there's no stakes. I'm quitting. It's a great idea, but it's also a horrible idea because it's so mind numbingly boring. And it's just like, it's fucking chess. They didn't cut down on the number of chess players. They didn't do any of that. It's just like you're like, this is going to take 4 hours, and what am I going to get? I'm going to get some coins with a K, and maybe I can buy a new outfit for Scorpion. That's it.

What was his name?

Scorpion.

Scorpion.

Scorpion, yeah.

Scorpion.

Yeah. So it's that. And then there's another what's the other fucking minigame that I started I messed around with, like, 25 seconds puzzle Combat.

Which is a Blatant rip off of Super Puzzle Fighter.

Dude, I could not figure out the fucking rules to this Tetris rip off. And I got infuriated. I was like, setting up and I know I could have looked it up. I was like, setting up to get four or to complete a row of all one color, and then nothing happened. And I was like, well, that's infuriating. What am I supposed to and then the computer just fucking smoked me. And it was horrible. But yeah, it's Puzzle Fighter, basically. But they make little bobblehead Mortal Kombat characters at the bottom of the screen, and it's cute.

Nice. Precious.

One other thing to point out about this second one is so the fighting styles is not only has it not gone away, it feels slower to switch somehow. And I can't explain how, like, you hit L one and you swap fighting styles, but in a second, it just felt like it takes first of all, also in both games, you can't swap unless you're in the middle of the fight. You can't start with the one everyone wants, which is the fucking sword or blades or Baraka's Arm choppers, okay? Those are built into his arms. That's not a weapon. That's part of him. Why do I have to switch to that? That's true, but you can't do it in between rounds or after a knockout. Like, you have to do it on the fly, which I guess is strategy.

Or some scorpion snake is in his hand.

It's part of him. That's movie cannon. I don't think that's Game Cannon in Game Cannon, it was a rope with a spear.

You know what it's called?

A dart. Okay. Dart. Sorry. The fighting mechanics were pretty much the exact same. It just felt, again, didn't feel very Mortal Kombat like.

Well, if that was a departure from Mortal Kombat, this next game is Mortal Kombat. Basically in name only.

You won your first Mortal Kombat Tournament. Earth has been spared, but Shang Tsung is a poor loser. This is Goro's lair. It is one of Shangsung's traps. You must find your way off the island before it crumbles into the sea. Make your way to the Wuxi Academy.

Deception came out in October of 2004.

Okay.

Shaolin monks came out in September of 2005. So less than a year has passed and we get the first spin off since Special Forces. Which did you ever play Special Forces?

I did.

Horrific.

Horrific.

Like just an unfinished game that isn't good and not fun and is pretty terrible all around.

Yes.

But I will say unequivocally, this is the best Mortal Kombat spin off. Shaolin monks. Of the three of the three of Special Forces, mythology subzero and Shaolin monks, this game is the best one. I don't think this is a great game, but I also don't think this is a horrible game. So this isn't your typical Mortal Kombat game. This is a beat them up game. And I would say that God of War came out the same year, but like eight months earlier or seven months earlier. I would say that there was some influence on this game by God of War. God of War influenced this somehow. There are things that now, mind you, none of this game doesn't do anything as well as God of War, of course, but the kind of, like, level structure and I guess the just overall gameplay style is more God of War than it is Mortal Kombat.

Interesting.

So there is three dimensional God of War. You're not stuck on a 2D plane fighting some one person. You're running around fighting all kinds of things, and then you run into bosses. And I think that one of the weakest parts of this game is you can only play as Lu Kang or Kung Lao.

So it's only for boring people.

You know what in Bite Chichang, Kung Lao is a baller.

He was when he was mysterious, and then they gave him backstory and I was bored.

That's true. That is accurate. But yes, you can play as Kung Lao or Lu Kang. And this is more story focused than, I would say, other Mortal Kombat games. And I guess it would have to be if this had no story, this would be the most boring piece of shit ever. But basically, Shangzang cheats like he do, and then you follow him into Outworld and you're on a quest to fix.

Knock him around.

Yeah. Beat his bitch ass up like that, as per usual. And you just run around and do combos and you do like a Devil May Cry thing where you're trying to juggle them in the air and you hit them in the air stuff. And there's a lot of combo things. There's destructible environments, there's a little bit of puzzling. I wouldn't say puzzling is a big part of it, but then it tries to keep itself firmly in moral combat territory by giving you the ability to do fatalities. And this is the easiest game in the franchise to do fatalities on because it tells you what buttons to press as you're able to do.

God damn it.

Which is, hey, as someone who always struggled pulling off a fatality, I appreciate the ease in which you can do it in this one, but I do think this game is kind of good.

Oh, kind of good. Okay.

It is kind of good. It's definitely better than the next game. And I would say this would be a game that you could probably just firmly say is an okay good game if it weren't tied to the Mortal Kombat franchise.

I was just going to say without the Mortal Kombat name, it's probably just a game. Yeah, not bad.

This is an example of a decent game that has the baggage of being part of a franchise.

Right.

Like, I would say like Operation Raccoon City for Resident Evil. Right? That game would be just a good game if it weren't for the fact that it shits all over the lore and the canon of Resident Evil. If it was unburdened of that, then it would be a good game. And that's how I feel about this game because I don't think the story is bad. I do think the voice acting is very bad. Some of the music choices are atrocious. Some of the voice acting seems racist.

Oh, heavens.

Yeah. But honestly, I played through a good, healthy portion of this game. And I think another thing that kind of is of a detriment to this game is that there's not much game.

Okay?

I think this is maybe a three hour game.

Three or four.

Three or four hour game. I think the boss fights are fun. I think the boss fight with Scorpion is a lot of fun. I would say that the whole nether realm section of the game, which is where you fight Scorpion, kind of reminded me of and obviously this game would come out way after this and is way better than this, but it kind of reminded me of Dante's Inferno.

Okay?

Which is a game that I really like. But vibe wise, I think you kind of get that you unlock new abilities and new combos and new specials and new fatalities through spending experience, which is a cool little RPG mechanic.

It's like blood orbs.

Yeah, very much like blood orbs. Because you also get them from, like, breaking crates and shit. You break crates, you get moral combat orbs. There's little dragon coins around. You can pick up health. It's very much of its time and was obviously inspired a little bit by God of War. But overall, I think this might be the best Mortal Kombat game on PlayStation Two. And that bar is so low, but so low. I think it really says something about the state of the franchise and why they had to do what they did after PlayStation Two to keep this train rolling. That the best game of the franchise on this console is one that is nothing like any other.

Wow. Okay.

But then after that, they would do a return to form with Mortal Kombat armageddon.

But ages of Mortal Kombat have begun to tear the fabric of the realms. The critical point has finally been reached. It was foreseen that combatants would one day grow too powerful and too numerous. If left unchecked, their intensifying combat would shatter the realms and bring about real apocalypse.

I will say that this game has a bonkers and fun opening cutscene okay. Where basically the gist of the story of this game is that there are too many Mortal Kombat characters and they're too strong. And them being and ironically, I think this is the first game since Mortal Kombat trilogy that has every character oh, wow.

That's 40s or something.

There's 26 in Deception, this game has 63 characters holy. Which is, A, too much, and B, very funny because the whole gist of the game is that there's just too many mortal combatants, and by virtue of them just being around and fighting, they are releasing so much energy that it's going to destroy the world. Oh, my God, it's going to cause Armageddon.

Yeah, that's great.

So the Elder Gods or whatever the fuck. Again, the story is nonsense. They are like, well, we got to do another tournament or some shit to, like, figure this out.

Oh, my God.

There's a literal pyramid, but there's a bonkers opening cut scene where, like, everyone just kills each other on the pyramid.

I love that.

Yeah. Also, I love what they did with Ermac, right? Because Irmac was a joke character. It was like a bug, right? In the debug menu. He was basically scorpion with, like, a red sprite. And then they turned him into his own thing, and now he's like a wizard. You're a wizard her.

Max, is he the one that's, like he's basically black goo now, who was that? Is that Noob CYBOT?

That's. Noob CYBOT. Noob, CYBOT is actually, like, the Dead original subzero.

Subzero. That's right.

ERMAX no longer a ninja. He's like a sorcerer.

Well, and then there were all the fucking robots from Three. It just got just so fucking weird.

And it's funny because the robots I mean, again, this is not a PS Three podcast, but in the 2009 reboot of. The franchise on PS Three, they would actually, A, connect it to this game, but B, they would give a very good explanation for the ninjas, the robot ninjas. That makes it much more satisfying and makes them much more interesting. This game just cannot land that at all.

The scene you're talking about, this cutscene of this, isn't this the start of the reboot and the PS Three?

It is, because Shao Khan ended up to kill Raiden, and Raiden's like, I got to send a text message to my past self, right, and be like, you got to let Shao Khan win.

I like the sound of this. Opening cutscene.

Yeah. So you get through the opening cutscene and you would be forgiven for thinking, hot damn, this game might be good. You would be very mistaken, though, because this is basically, like gameplay wise, this is basically a rehash of deception. They did cut down the fighting styles there's, thank God. Two instead of three. Each fighter has two, and some of them only have one. Because you can play as some of the bosses. Because, again, you can play as everyone.

That's cool.

Yeah. And there's more weapons or whatever. But what this game also tries to do and hot damn, do they fucking fall flat on their face with this? There's a create a fighter no. And a Create a Fatality, both of which are fucking awful.

No.

Yes. It is impossible to make a decent looking character in this game.

Of course.

And also, why would you want to?

Why would you want to? I was just going to say that.

The entire point of moral combat is that the characters are like, cool.

Yeah. They're their characters. You get to say, I like this guy speaks to me. I like a guy with hook swords.

I can never imagine hopping into Street Fighter and being like, yeah, I don't want to play as any of these guys. I want to make my it's like people who play as the me characters on Super Smash Brothers. Out of here.

Fuck.

Out of here. Out of here.

Yeah.

Also, through the it also does the shitty thing where when you're playing Conquest Mode, you're playing as a guy named Taven.

That's worse than the one in Taven.

And his brother Dagon, Lord of the Ring shit, is the bad guy. And he's working with Chinook. Of course. Why not? Why wouldn't you can collect stuff. It's not very fun and it's not very interesting. I would say this game looks better than the other two standard moral combat games. I feel like they maybe struck a balance here with how dark they let the screen be, because I know in Deception, they kind of do some goofy shit with stages. So I would say this looks a little bit better, but not by much. And gameplay wise, there's just really nothing of note here that it makes it in any way very different than the last one, but the last one was bad. So it's like I would have appreciated something different, though. This does have what might be my favorite Mortal Kombat minigame, which is just your light motor Combat, baby, which is almost literally Mario Kart with Mortal Kombat characters. I love it. I honestly had more fun playing that than I had playing any of the other parts of the game.

I have to ask, if you drive as Scorpion, can you throw your spear and pull someone who's ahead of you behind you?

I didn't play as scorpion.

You didn't play Scorpion? You played a Mortal Kombat?

I played Baraka because he had swords on his he had swords on his.

Thing built into his arm.

No, here. It says right here, scorpion's car is powered by a fire breathing skull. Of course as an homage to his toasty fatality.

Well, and as an homage to Sweet Tooth from fucking from Twisted Metal. Metal.

Yeah. So you cannot play as all 60 ish, whatever characters in Motor Combat, you can play as Scorpion subzero Bori, which I'm pretty sure you can puke off the side of your car. So literally, this game is endorsing drinking and driving. Which is funny. Sure. Jax Baracka Raiden, katana Molina Cyrax and Johnny Cage. Who is my least favorite Mortal Kombat character of all time?

Yeah. I was said if you're boring, you play as Luke Hanger or Johnny Cage. No, but if you're injured in the head, you play as Johnny Cage.

Yeah. If you lived under power lines as a kid, you played as Johnny Cage.

Then you're Johnny Cage fan.

If you hate paint chips as a.

Kid and come at us, Johnny Cage fan. Come on, let's hear it.

Come get it. I didn't mention this, but he's also in Shaolin Monks, you don't get to play as him, but he shows up every once in a while to just be like when Katana's around, he just shows up and be like, oh, she's hot. And she's into Luke Kang and not me.

Oh, dear God, that's fucking horrible.

That's gross. Which, again, seems a little racist. I would say that it's a mixed bag playing Mortal Kombat on the PlayStation Two. But let's see what the critics said about these games.

I cannot wait.

Mortal Kombat on Sega Genesis is the best video game ever.

I disagree. It's a very good game, but I think Donkey Kong is the best game ever.

Donkey Kong sucks.

You know something? You suck.

So let's start with Deadly Alliance, which is the first one. The reception was generally favorable.

Wrong.

Yeah, I know. Right? Wrong. Wrong. Just everyone wrong. It looks like. There is no I don't see an aggregate score here, but game rankings for the PS Two given 81.9% out of.

50,000 out of 100.

Oh. Metacritic has it as 79, which is super high.

So fucking high.

Yeah. In fact, the GameCube and Xbox versions are even higher and 81 no, I.

Was going to say I've heard that GameCube is a definitive version, but it's the same game, so it's garbage.

Yeah, this game is garbage. Game Spot gave it a 8.1 out of ten, which is wrong.

Fuck.

Game Spot gave it a four out of five, and IGN gave it an 8.6 out of ten.

And everyone's just drinking that same tech and Koolaid. Oh, it's got to be more like.

Tech in it, I guess. Hot fuck. Maybe they were just blown away by the graphics. But let's move on to Mortal Kombat deception.

Yeah.

Now, again, generally favorable reviews, in fact, sold better than the previous one, and Metacredit gave it an 81.

What the fuck?

Yeah, game Spot gave it an eight and a half out of ten out of ten. Game Spy more in line with how we feel about it, gave it a 2.5 out of five.

Yeah. Okay, good. That's right.

Game Zone gave it an 8.7 out of ten.

Game Zone, what are you doing?

IGN gave it an 8.8 out of ten.

What the fuck?

It also won the Spike Video Game Awards fighting Game of the year. Spike TV a member. TV for men.

That's right.

TV for dudes. Just guys being dudes.

Just dude. Dude shows about steak.

Just dudes being guys. But let's move on to the outlier.

Right?

The weird one of the group, and the only one that I think is worth checking out, even kind of, which is Shaolin Monks, received mostly favorable reviews. There's a fucking theme here. People just are hungry for Mortal Kombat.

Games at this time. I guess so.

Well, this one game rankings gave a 79.10%, and Game rankings is an aggregate like Metacritic.

Okay?

One up. Gave it a B plus. Game Spot gave it a seven and a half out of ten, which I think is a very accurate ranking for this game. Maybe that might be a little high. IGN gave it an eight out of ten. Xplay, the geniuses on that show, gave it a three out of five for some reason.

Xplay, well, Xplay sounds like more maybe a little low, but more in line.

Yeah. Armageddon. Armageddon.

Arm.

Also generally favorable. Who could have fucking seen that coming? It got a 76, though, on game rankings, so this might be the lowest one. Eurogamer gave it a five out of ten. Game Informer gave it an 8.25 out of ten. Game Spot gave it a seven out of ten. Game Trailers gave it an 8.6 out of ten, and IGN gave it an 8.5 out of ten.

Madness. People were just fucking salivating their Pavlovian response to the words Mortal Kombat.

People are simps. Simps for Mortal Kombat. Refusing to acknowledge the turds in the library of Mortal Kombat games. All right, so let's give our ranking.

Scorpion win Lawless victory.

Let's hear your rankings for deception and deadly alliance.

I'm going to give Mortal Kombat Deadly Alliance two and one half animalities because.

It'S dog shit animalities from the movie Mortal Kombat. What's the Second Mortal Kombat movie.

Annihilation.

Annihilation, the animalities from that movie?

From that movie.

Do you think that they're on the first draft of doing Animalities, they were like, Bestiality. And then they were like, wait.

The same guy who does the you can't have three K words in a row was like, whoa.

You cannot have it be bestiality.

This isn't technically my job, but I'm going to jump into here, too.

Someone in Standards and Practices almost had a heart attack.

What do you mean, bestiality?

No, you can't call it bestiality.

And then we'll move on to deception. And I think this might be my lowest ranking ever. I'm going to give it one out of five. Friendship. Friendship. Just pile of garbage. Pile of garbage. Even hated the chess, even though I like the idea of Mortal Kombat chess.

All right. So Mortal kombat shaolin Monks. I'm going to give Mortal Kombat Shaolin monks five and a half sub. Zero spine rips. Nice out of ten.

Nice.

It is not all that bad. Now, Armageddon, on the other hand, I'm going to give three out of ten. Babalities.

Babality. Beautiful.

Babalities.

Goddamn, that's stupid.

Is that the one where they turn them into a hot chick or the one where they turn them into a baby?

A baby?

Yeah. Do you think they called that something else? And then someone was like, no.

Child love.

Yeah.

NAMBLA Ality. Guys, what are we doing here? We can't put that on a fucking arcade game.

Finish him, Pedophile.

Him pedophile. You've been pedophiled. All right, well, that was the Mortal Kombat games that appeared on the PlayStation Two.

But yeah, check us out on all our socials. You can find us on instagram at discrete AirPod and you can find me at funeral. Casual games.

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