nextlander patreon

The Nextlander Podcast 221: Mortal Monday

🕑 Added 2025-10-30 13:41:16 +0000 UTC

Comments

Daniel F (fds)

Mortal Kombat brings back such unique, fond, yet markedly different memories for me than the Nextlander guys. It's fascinating hearing of their console-centric US world that back then was so unlike mine, despite being in the same age range. Back in the 90s my country has only just recently managed to send our dear Soviet friends/occupiers home from their local garrisons, and dropping the vestiges of communism took a while. MK1-4 were all PC games for me, always on a PC keyborad. I don't think I even knew of Nintendo's or Sega's existence at the time. My family was very far from rich but my dad happened to work in the right field at the right places. My teen years were thus spent always having a high-spec workstation PC at home. The games, those I "sourced" myself through schoolmates or other friends. MK1 instantly became one of my favorites, and despite playing it openly all the time, my parents never once bat an eye about the violence. It was never even a topic of discussion for anyone. My main issue was finding human opponents. Sometimes classamtes, but the most MK1 I played was against the carpenter's son, some 10 years my senior. I guess he was the most gracious about willing to play with a 12-years-old kid who was a total dick about never holding back, even with my clear advantage of being the only one with a machine to actually practice the game on at home. About the only thing stopping me was the keyboard. On the PC both players shared the same single keyboard, one of us pushing keys more on the left side of it, one on the right. It worked really quite well for how silly it sounds, with one glaring issue: the keyboard could only register a limited number of keys being held down at the same time. With both players often needing to hold sometimes 3 buttons simultaneously, some would just not register. MK2 is probably my all-time most beloved, even if most of it was spent playing against the computer, rarely getting anyone to come over for matches by then. One notable memory is that the game had very modest system requirements compared to the machine my dad managed to bring home, particularly on the RAM side. And so I built a whole MS-DOS config.sys boot menu for it which would automatically create a RAM disk of sufficient size, copy the game data over, and run it from there, with enough RAM still left over to satisfy the game. Running the entire game purely from memory, it was like having an SSD in 1994. MK3 will always be partly remembered by me, through no fault of the game, for being one of the two times I ended up infecting our PC with a virus. It was back in the days when viruses actually behaved like their namesakes, attaching themselves to executable files, spreading by injecting their code into any other executable you subsequently ran. I noticed and cleaned up the mess myself, still, it was embarrassing enough for my self-esteem that I recall this incident more than any fatality in the actual video game. It was the son of a colleague of my mom who gave me the infected copy. He later grew up to be a dentist. Yeah, I will never trust dentists. Less shamefully, soon afterwards, I asked for it as a birthday present, and a pristine boxed copy of MK3 PC ended up the first Mortal Kombat my teenage self had a legit disc of. MK4's memory is completely intertwined with that of our Matrox Millennium G400 video card at the time. It was just past the Quake and 3dfx Voodoo years, where for a while you'd have a 2D video card hooked up to two more 3dfx Voodoo 2 cards in SLI. By then, sanity and simplicity was returning, and you'd have 2D and 3D in the same video card, what a novel concept! This upstart company NVIDIA was beginning to make a name for itself at the time, except they had really lousy digital-to-analog video converters, and it just could not produce a sharp enough picture on your giant high refresh rate CRT monitor. Matrox was always the real deal in that. And, finally, they had reasonable 3D support alongside it. The G400 introduced something called environment-mapped bump mapping, and MK4 I believe had support for it, although what I most remember is how much in awe I was by Liu Kang's fireball lighting up the scene.

WulfBane

The double character building is KEY to later levels in BallXPit. Both characters get credit for clearing the stage and you'll get two gears that are used to get deeper. There are some character combinations that make the back attacker just shred.