I thought Mortal Kombat 1 was a good introduction to the series for me. The cinematic story is a banger in the first 2 thirds, and the final part is weak, but doesn’t break its neck.
And for quite some hours I had a lot of fun just playing it. However the gameplay will not hold up past the 2 week honeymoon phase, with all the bugs, pricing, always online and truly awful invasion mode, which is the core single player experience next to the story.
So it depends what you expect of it, other fighting games are just better in many aspects.
Mortal Kombat 9, also known as “Mortal Kombat” or “Mortal Kombat (2011)” is where the modern canon starts. It’s also delisted from sale, so you’ll need to find a used copy for consoles or pirate it for PC. It’s a soft reboot of the story and also establishes the bar for what fighting game story modes should be. It’s campy and leans into it, and that’s the tone that MK always has when it’s at its best.
Mortal Kombat X and Mortal Kombat 11 are sequels to that, and they escalate the ridiculousness. These are direct sequels, so while they make efforts to ensure you can understand what’s happening even if you haven’t played the games before, MKX is best enjoyed after playing MK9, and MK11 is best enjoyed after playing MKX.
Mortal Kombat 1 is another soft reboot, but (slight spoiler) it also does this while preserving the canon of, and sequeling, MK9, MKX, and MK11.
MK9 is a throwback to your favorite characters with modern (at the time) mechanics.
MKX brings back the run button and tries to keep all of the different versions of each character over the years in the same game via its “variation” system.
MK11 tries to do away with some superfluous features of MKX while adding more defensive options.
MK1 introduces “kameos”, which is like a Marvel vs. Capcom 1 style assist system.
MK9 is also the start of the modern game mechanics, in addition to the story. They established the current gameplay formula in MK9, and have been iterating on it since then.
Unless you really want to play the classic games, I think MK9 is the best starting point.
edit: Wait wtf am I talking about you obviously start with the movie from 1995.
I buy a lot of my telescope equipment from Celestron so I got their kit. It was like $2 more than the knockoff brands but I like my eyeballs so went with a company I trust with relatively inexpensive optics.
I am near the totality line, but stressing over this problem resulted in me giving up planning to see it.
Seeing the eclipse directly would be cool, sure, but it will certainly be photographed extensively. I feel like permanently damaging my vision is way too likely buying something off of Amazon, and I don’t have a clue where else I can find them.
If you can get to an area where it will be in totality, you can see it without eye protection during that brief 2-3 minute window. The danger to your eyes is when it's at anything less than full total eclipse.
Workaround: You can see the eclipse with a low tech solution of a pinhole camera. Google it for a better explanation, but
-poke a pin through a sheet of paper.
-during the eclipse, just hold it over something like another sheet of paper and you can see an accurate projection of the sun as the eclipse progresses
It's actually pretty neat.
But if your weather is good, consider going to a place where the eclipse will be total. I'm in the path, but I'm seriously considering driving several hours to a place with a better weather forecast. I've seen good quality photo and video of total eclipses since I was a child. And the people who showed it to me (astronomy nerds from a club) told me "it's not the same."
Thank you, yes…I’ll probably do the pinhole camera I suppose. I won’t be quite in totality, so definitely don’t want to risk it without protection. But I might try Lowes, from BeardedBlaze’s recommendation, since I assume there’s accountability in their distribution chain.
I’m driving about 15 hours (over 2 days, not all at once, lol) from Virginia to the totality path with a “just ok” forecast. I made a similar trip in 2017. It is definitely not the same as looking at a picture. It’s the changes in atmosphere, the insects’ behavior, the light quality all around you that make a totality viewing special. If you can make it somewhere with decent enough skies, you will be glad you did.
You can use a pinhole to project an image of the sun onto a sheet of paper but not directly as glasses. Look up a ‘pinhole projector’ you can make a pretty good one with an Amazon box.
I can’t see it anyway from my part of the world :( I was just curious because it doesn’t seem like it would be safe, but it was literally taught to me in elementary school.
No. As others have said, there’s just a lack of information about what’s coming out. Basically starting last year, companies got fed up with announcing release dates that they can’t meet, which has a tangible marketing expense on their side, among other problems. So now we basically only hear about games’ release dates when they’re imminent. This year, we’ve gotten:
Arzette: The Jewel of Faramore
Balatro
Final Fantasy VII Rebirth
Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth
Penny’s Big Breakaway
Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown
Tekken 8
The Thaumaturge
Under Night In-Birth II Sys:Celes
…and while it’s divisive, I quite liked Alone in the Dark.
We’ve got the likes of Palworld and Enshrouded in early access, with No Rest for the Wicked to join them shortly.
There are a couple of games from smaller developers and publishers I’ve got my eye on with likely or confirmed 2024 release dates. They may have a wide spread in quality when reviews hit, but some of them could be winners, especially since they’re in genres currently underrepresented by the wider market:
Aero GPX
Agent 64: Spies Never Die
Big Boy Boxing
Broken Roads
Conscript
Commandos: Origins
Core Decay
Fallen Aces
Kingmakers
Phantom Fury
The Plucky Squire
Streets of Rogue 2
Tempest Rising
Titan Quest II
V Rising (1.0 release)
Warside
Then some other noteworthy games that are likely going to be very good and have a real shot at releasing this year:
Avowed
Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree
Dragon Age: Dreadwolf
Gears 6
Hollow Knight: Silksong
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle
Judas
Mina the Hollower
The Rise of the Golden Idol
What this year doesn’t have, at least so far, is a clear front runner like Baldur’s Gate 3 or God of War, but there’s more than half of the year left.
I assume you’re talking specifically about upcoming games that haven’t been released yet? Yeah I can’t really think of anything coming up that I’m excited about. Currently the only games I’m looking forward to are Metroid Prime 4 (if it ever comes out) and the indie game Dreamsettler (the sequel to Hypnospace Outlaw)
The problem you’ve got is that the two lists that you’re looking at are ones with concrete release dates, and we’re currently in the period of the year where the release dates are the hardest to come by. Basically everyone’s either just started their fiscal Q1 and so have a completely clear slate, or like Microsoft have just started their Fiscal Q4 which means all they’ve got left on the slate are the delayed stragglers.
Not sure about the upcoming months but I felt like 2024 started off with quite a few games coming out one after another, including Like A Dragon Infinite Wealth, Helldivers 2, Last Epoch and Dragon’s Dogma 2.
Don’t a crazy amount come out towards the end of the year rather than the beginning? I’ve never really paid a whole lot of attention cuz I’m always playing old games.
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