There are few things from my childhood, that not only hold up, but at least try to change in a way that makes sense for the time that it's in. After last Tuesday's release of the newest Mortal Kombat, I realized that franchise oddly fits.

Although the nickname for this newest entry is MK9, I tend to split up the entries into two major trilogies. It's makes sense story wise, almost!

First there was Mortal Kombat 1, I imagine in the arcades at the time some people wer like, "hey what's this" and played a round or two. Honestly, if you played the game whether it was the original arcade or the home versions, there isn't much there. The fighting mechanic is rather stiff, and slow. The whole game was put together by less than a handful of people, but the game had a few good things about it, crazy characters, some of which have become iconic fighting game characters, Scorpion and Sub-Zero come to mind. And blood, there was that. You hit someone, and the victim would go into a stun like animation and a little red would spurt out of them, somewhere. Then there was that day, someone was probably messing around after a match when they put together the right combination of directions and hit the right button when it happened, the first fatality. It probably happened differently in every arcade, but everyone had that same, "what the hell was that" moment. THen all the people trying to recreate what they witnessed, trying it on other characters to see what they did, if they did so differently. It must have been a fun place to be, I think. And yes, I'm well aware that the violence in the first Mortal Kombat was nothing but a total gimmick. That actually kind of worked. THere were a lot of rumors and secrets in the game, just getting to see Reptile might cause someone to have a "WTF" moment the first time, and many people probably didn't understand what an "Ermac" was thinking it was another hidden fighter.

 When the second Mortal Kombat came out, it started a few trends for every sequel after. First is taking the previous game and trying to improve or do something better than before, but and most noticeable was the increase in violence. More blood, crazier special moves, increased number of fatalities. They also made taking what was either a secret or a rumor  and making that real. Two characters came this way, the most obvious, Reptile, and one that wouldn't come out until a later game, Ermac. That's not all it did, MK2 had a much cleaner looking style of digitized people throwing punches and spears. They also added something to the finishing moves that were out of left field. Friendships and babalities. Which, in my mind is the beginning of the weird.

 With Mortal Kombat 3 I distinctly remember for the first time in an arcade seeing that crowd of people gathered round a cabinet to see what was going on. Since they were all bigger than I was at the time, I had to wait, a few months to see what was what. MK3 is an odd entrant, beginning with the lack of the Scorpion character. And MK3 is the first time where they changed the control scheme up by adding one button, run. That simple button meant the gameplay sped up considerably, there was no use in backing up, your opponent could make up the space much faster. The third game also added a combo system that was very cookie cutter and memorization heavy.

Also, there was one special edition called Ultimate MK3, which added a slew of new characters in the roster of combatants. And the game Mortal Kombat Trilogy based on th MK3 engine added every character up to that point, including some of the earlier versions of them, like an MK1 version of Raiden in the mix.

 The fourth Mortal Kombat has a few distinctions itself. For one, it's the first not to have digitized graphics, but have 3D character models,  and have a sidestep into a 3rd dimension during combat. It's also the last numbered Mortal Kombat in the series, all the rest have subtitles, and the last to use the original control scheme, with high and low punches and kicks, and the run button.

Mortal Kombat Deadly Alliance, is the first game in the second trilogy. It continues the use of 3D in the fighting, and changes the controls so they're labeled attacks 1 through 4 and takes away the quick sidestep for more natural side movement.  Story wise, MKDA starts out crazy. The sorcerers Shang Tsung and Quan Chi team up and kill Liu Kang, the main hero of the Mortal Kombat series.  It also added the first of several new modes, Konquest mode, where you chose a character and went through all their moves and some combos and had a map with a path on it which you moved forward on every time you completed another task. Each character themselves had three fighting styles, two unarmed and one with a weapon, which you could change anytime by a button press. And this new game introduced the Krypt, as you played the game you collected Koins, that could be used in the Krypt to unlock characters, hidden extras and artwork.

The next game, MK Deception refined what Deadly Alliance brought, including adding multiple fatalities per character, stage fatalities, added suicide finishing moves called Hara-Kiri, more characters and a redefined Konquest mode. Konquest now was a 3D environment where you controlled a single character (Shujinko) through the game's story. You went through the different realms, like an adventurer opening chests and defeating enemies.

The last in the second trilogy is subtitled Armageddon, and a lot like game MK Trilogy when they went to decide who to put in the game's roster, they said, "all of them", and added two characters still. Konquest mode mimicked the one in deception to a point, except it borrowed some elements from the spin-off game Shaolin Monks. One of the main differences between this and all previous MK games are the fatalities. All the games before had individual fatalities for every character, Armageddon had something called Kreate-a-Fatality, maybe mostly due to the fact that the game had over sixty characters and the games memory couldn't handle it all. This game also had a Kreate-a-Fighter, where you could make your own combatant in Mortal Kombat.

After Armageddon, in sort of half break from making another straight MK fighting game, they made Mortal Kombat vs. the DC Universe. Definitely one of the more stranger points in MK history, pitting MK characters like Scorpion and Sub-Zero against DC's more popular characters like Superman and Batman. It had a more complete story mode, switching your control of the fighters as it made sense. And only the MK and the DC villains had fatalities, heroes like Batman had what was called a heroic brutality, because they don't kill people.

Last Tuesday the latest MK game was released. Although just called Mortal Kombat, sometimes it' shortened to MK9, because it's the ninth Mortal Kombat I guess. It takes the 3D model type characters of the previous three games, but instead of fighting in three dimensions, the game is locked in a 2D plane. That makes the gameplay a throwback to the earlier Kombats. The story is a retelling of the first three games. This game also takes the story mode from MK vs. DC and makes it 100% better, it goes from cut scene to fight seamlessly, even if you save and come back later to continue I didn't see very much loading, it just picked up where you left off, and it was much lengthier than I thought it was going to be. And this game has a separate arcade mode where you fight a ladder of ten opponents and two bosses, as both single and tag team. This game also has a mode called the Challenge Tower. It's just a ladder of 300 challenges where sometimes you simply fight a opponent and need to perform a specific finishing move, or you have to fight against three bosses with one life bar, or perhaps still you need to fight someone, with no arms. Two players can fight in a mode called Test Your Luck, where a roulette wheel pops up before each round throwing different variations into the mix, like vampiric kombat, or rainbow blood, or the screen will go dark every few seconds. It has been less than a week and I'm having a lot of fun with it.

Mortal Kombat has definitely evolved itself over the years to keep up with the times. Although it has had a few setbacks, I think it has been a mostly successful franchise that I am fully liking the newest version of, and hope it continues to grow and make improvements on itself.