It's been a considerable amount of time since I dug deep into the recesses of my childhood memories and yanked something out worth talking about.  As gaming played a fairly large role in my formative years, it’s no shocker that a lot of the stuff I look back on as a kid involves a controller and a cartridge. And this story is no different. As a child, fighting games were something of a risky genre to partake in.  It was perhaps the only type of game that brought out the worst in me,...

I briefly mentioned my gripes about the boss fights in Mortal Kombat last week in my piece about its story mode. This isn’t just a trend I’ve seen in fighting games, though it is the most apparent there. For quite a while now, bosses have been, for lack of a better word, cheap, or at times incredibly easy. They should be some of the most memorable and balanced events in a game. Too bad in most games these days bosses are frequently complained about, and with good reason. For those who are...

Ah, Mother's Day. A special day where we all take time out to show our dearest mommies just how much they mean to us by showering them with flowers and sentiment-filled cards. But for a few choice ladies in the videogame world, Mother's Day should be no cause for celebration.  Matter of fact, if we had known how bad some of these moms would have turned out, we would have asked them to get their tubes tied a long time ago.  Spoilers aplenty so tread cautiously dear reader, as we...

Mortal Kombat has always been the late bloomer of the fighting game genre in more recent memory. As one of the original arcade fighters that popularized the genre, the series seemed stubborn when it came to diverging from the concepts that birthed their first game. Mainly this pertains to the advanced sense of brutality and fatality finishing moves. Other progressive aspects that games like Street Fighter and Soul Edge/Calibur either introduced or perfected, such as 3D planes or a...

Fighting games aren't usually known for telling the best stories. Most of what is revealed in an Arcade Mode conclusion is never known to be canon or not until the next iteration of the franchise. Mortal Kombat's narrative, for example, was an utter mess until recently. Who won which tournament, how were people who died resurrected, and which kombatants came from which realm? These questions are hardly touched upon in the series, and if they are some hard research is needed to figure...