I just filled out my report to the DGCCRF, and I hope it’s even more damning, amidst my claims of forced obsolescence, that the game was removed from my account in the past week with a message telling me to check the store for new games to buy.
I’m not sure about anyone else, but I found there to be a lot of homogeneity here. The games that were the most up my alley were the ones I’d already heard of, but there were a lot of Vampire Survivors-inspired games and city builders.
So the thing is, regardless of current campaigns to stop killing games, this is like the definition of throwing good money after bad…unless they actually offered customers assurances that they’ll get their money’s worth out of an up front payment to play the game. Because without that assurance, however long your free to play multiplayer game sustained an audience, the version where you have to buy the game up front will be worse off.
And what’s to stop this game from dying all over again? There’s still no way to run the game server yourself, right? Why do the work if they’re not going to future proof it against an outcome they couldn’t avoid the last time?
He looks really cool. Unfortunately, this game needs some big system changes that I hope, but don’t expect, they’ll make some day. The way burst works, in particular, would be at the top at the list, and as long as there are good universal defensive options, more kameos can have ambush assists (the ones that can be done at any time), which would really open up the freedom of the game, where MK1 is at its best.
It would be one thing if I knew how much I had to do ahead of time, but until I’ve seen most of it before, I have no idea. There was some upgrade I could get only after finishing the entire goron temple, race, and some such, and I was on the final step of it when I ran out of time. I can’t do just the last step of it; I had to repeat at least the race, maybe the temple, in order to get to that spot again. I decided instead, “Nah, I’m good,” and put the game down. I respect that they tried to do a lot with a little on the development side, but it introduced tedium for me, the player, to be within those constraints.
That’s probably the Zelda game I had the most negative reaction to. Oh, you’re going to undo all of my progress because I didn’t know how much more there was to do in this quest line before the world reset? No, I’m not going to do all of that again.
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.
There’s reason to believe that the next Xbox will just be a PC with a coat of paint, the same way that the Steam Deck is, and so this preservation team would, in that case, probably be built to legitimately emulate the Xbox 360 on PC, because that’s where the biggest compatibility gap is.