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It’s a very useful, if unfair tactic, to win fights by just chucking stuff at your opponent. It’s too tempting to spam this constant, because the throw comes out extremely fast and inflicts a pretty big chunk of damage. Certain arenas also have objects lying around, like severed heads or rocks, and you can chuck them at your opponent by hitting down and Run over them. Tanya and Reptile go as far as to snap the opponent’s neck, doing only a small chunk of damage as it twists back to normal. This looks especially silly when you do it with Scorpion, who snaps his opponent’s arm before they calmly sling it back into place. There’s also a new kind of throw done by hitting forward and Low Kick next to an opponent, which will usually involve your character break your opponent’s bones. It’s essentially worthless except for dodging the occasional projectile. You can side-step in either direction by double tapping Run, but it only makes your fighter step about an inch to the side, and you can only do it once every three seconds or so. The 3D barely even factors into actual gameplay at all. That’s… a rather interesting solution to the problem so many developers of fighting games face to stop infinite combos from happening. But if you do too much damage with one combo, the words ‘MAXIMUM DAMAGE’ now appear on the screen, and you and your opponent get sent flying away from each other. You’ve still got the run meter, along with the chain combos. The basic fighting mechanics from MK3 still apply here. With some it’s a little more subtle, but with others, it’s extremely obvious. The thing is, Midway decided there weren’t enough new characters, so they just took some of the older characters and reskinned them into somebody else. But not all of the “new” faces are really all that new. The character roster is an equal mix of new and returning characters, with Johnny Cage and Raiden returning from their absence from the arcades. MK3 wasn’t exactly lighthearted, with the plot dealing with the near extinction of the human race, but this time around, the whole thing feels a lot more gritty and brutal than usual.
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MORTAL KOMBAT 4 SERIES
The tone has taken a much darker turn since MK3, with the series returning to its Asian mythology roots. With a new threat for the warriors to face, the only way to save the realms is of course to have a bunch of people dismember each other until they run into Shinnok. Now, with the help of Quan Chi, he’s killed off most of the elder gods and is planning an assault on the realms. That is, until the evil necromancer Quan Chi shows up and releases the fallen elder god Shinnok from his imprisonment in the Netherrealm. Shao Kahn has been deposed (although he’s far, far from actually being dead), and for once it seems like Earthrealm is about to have some peace and quiet. The shark, ladies and gentlemen, has officially been jumped. Sure, there’s a couple of new mechanics in there, but they don’t actually work well enough, and the underlying gameplay is nearly unchanged from Mortal Kombat 3. Tired of MK3‘s gameplay mechanics? So was everybody else, as it turned out. The long answer would be no, because they just took MK3 and slapped a 3D engine over it. But with a brand new MK that would make use of 3D hardware, maybe they’d be able to turn things around? The short answer would be no. Midway had already failed once with an attempt to bring the classic MK gameplay to the third dimension with War Gods, a game that put MK mechanics into an entirely new universe. Some of these, like Rival Schools and Street Fighter EX, worked well enough, while others, like Fatal Fury: Wild Ambition weren’t as well recieved. While Capcom and SNK were far from abandoning 2D just yet, they gave a few attempts at 3D themselves. Games like Tekken and Virtua Fighter were equally hot in the arcades and on consoles. By the tail end of the 1990s, 3D fighting games were slowly but surely taking their place above the 2D games of old.