Mortal Kombat 1 is a very bad game

[Zaxx]

It feels weird to replay the first game these days: I expected to have the same great experience I had in the 90's, but after playing I feel like MK1 has huge shortcomings. Let's see:

- clunky gameplay + controls: gameplay feels slow, the number of moves a character can perform is ridiculous, fatalities are super easy to perform and there are some unfair moves. It's funny to see that I can just spam my enemy with low punches, he gets stuck and I can almost take away half of his health. That's stronger than any special move you can perform. :D

- unfair, unbalanced difficulty: Difficulty is all around the place, when you start a new game you can feel every enemy is a bit harder than the last one, but if you die and try a fight again against the same fighter that defeated you that same fight becomes easier. That's really bad becuse you basically can't practice smarter opponents so your learnig curve increases. It's also a bit strange to see how the AI performs: sometimes it automatically uses the same move over and over again against your certain attacks, destroying even the illusion of a human being.

-unbalanced fighters: Some are strong, some are very-very weak. I started using Johnny Cage just to realize his nut-punch has a so small range it's almost useless and his other attacks are easily blockable.

Overall MK feels as bad as a fighter game can get, thankfully the wonderful atmosphere saves it from being an utter disappointment. MK2-3 are still great fighting games to this day though so at least we get two good games in this package, however after seeing the fighting system of MK9 on a friend's console I'd cry tears of joy if that game was released on Steam. That's godlike and that makes me a sad, sad PC gamer.

[Bad Fish]

lmao its the same game just controls and online are diff mk1 was more of a joke and when mk2 and umk3 came out mk1 was lost still a great game but not worth really playing much if u have a snes or a sega with 6 buttens go find mk1 ull see it or emu mk1 on ur pc from coin ops

[Tanooki]

:(

[AutisticPinoy989]

It's worth playing the emulator to run MK1 than this port collection. The titles are straight out of the arcade machines, but the dev who ported them lost their mind to make them unplayable yet unfunctional.

[Zaxx]

Originally posted by Apoptygma:

Nice troll post. MK1 doesn't have low-punch.

Nice ignorant post. MK1 has two kind of punches if you don't consider the ones from a crouched position. I meant the lowes punch from a standing position, I don't really care if you would call it medium or low punch because that's the lowest punch in the game.

[Maxalty]

The game is 20 years old what you expect... and for the 2.80$ i got it from gmg is totally worth the money...

[Zaxx]

Originally posted by Blood Lover.:

The game is 20 years old what you expect... and for the 2.80$ i got it from gmg is totally worth the money...

Yeah it's worth the price and don't misunderstand my post I still like MK1 to this day, it's just a little weird that a game we always loved so much has so bad mechanics even compared to Street Fighter 2.

[xx20]

The game is too hard for me-only because I just started. I tried and tried to win but I can't. Even when the difficulty is very easy I can't win.
The game is too difficult for me. I wish there is a training selection where Raiden pratices with you. *sigh* I never be good at Mortal Kombat.

[Zaxx]

Don't give up, if you manage to be good at the basics you'll beat the game eventually. MK1 is an unfair game because it was designed as such, that made people put a lot of coins into the machine.

[GNU/LINUX]

MK1 is great, but 2 is the best, maybe the greatest fighting game of all time.

[sir-scudio!]

Fun Fact : Sub-Zero's Spine Rip Fatality made Mortal Kombat get the M rating. overall the game is bloody old,

[Ulaanaa]

mk1 mk2 mk3 are best. I respect them

[Zaxx]

Originally posted by Mr. Waffle© (Graveyards):

The game is too hard for me-only because I just started. I tried and tried to win but I can't. Even when the difficulty is very easy I can't win.
The game is too difficult for me. I wish there is a training selection where Raiden pratices with you. *sigh* I never be good at Mortal Kombat.

Just messed around with the difficulty settings: does this thing actually work? :D Playing MK2 right now and I can't even win 2 matches in a row, no matter what difficulty it is on it's the same experience. I always remembered MK2 to be extremely hard and unforgiving (and bad, but that's another story) but this is insane (or Street Fighter 4 and the PS2 MK games messed up my skill badly :D), my MK1 skills worth nothing here.

Also why does MK3 appear to be ultra low res compared to MK2? Is this how the game's supposed to look?

[moike]

Ha-ha no.

[Zaxx]

Okay, figured out why MK2 is so hard: you don't have a chance to learn a fighter, you just don't. The AI is so tough even on very easy difficulty that if you want to start playing someone new, you'll have a very bad time if you want to practice your special moves. Solution: learn them in the other games, then start playing MK2. :)

[Zaxx]

Oh man, I hate and love MK2 at the same time:

- the atmosphere is fantastic, graphics are better than what we have in MK3 and the arenas look fantastic ( I love Shaolin Monks so that's a huge plus for me).
- the AI is cheating and because of this the game is extremely hard. I play Sub-Zero now and love how even the very easy AI dodges every one of my projectiles from point blank range. Playing on medium now and I can win my first three matches fairly easily but then things go extreme.
- the fighters are fairly imbalanced. It seems like the Liu kang is the strongest one and every other kombatant suffers because of this.
- thanks to the game for listing some of the moves and showing how the game works but it's just ridiculous that they forgot to tell the player how throws work. Had no luck figuring out how to actually do them so far which is pretty irritating considering that the AI is throwing me all around the place.

Things however are absolutely better than what I had experienced in MK1: gameplay is a bit faster and controls are not that clunky and archaic. I miss the combo system from MK3 and the agressive meter from Trilogy though, those were nice.