So the only other person I work with who plays Mortal Kombat X is a guy who I don’t normally see or talk to. We don’t have all that much in common, and I probably only run into him by chance about once a week. I’d like to call him by his screen name: BigStick.
I’m get into an elevator and who’s in there but BigStick. He said to me, “They pretty much fixed the PC version, you know.”
I gave him a smug smile. “But I have a PlayStation now.”
“Yeah …” BigStick said. And I had a point.
Still, when I got home that day, I realized he was offering me an opportunity I didn’t want to pass up. Often times, after you select a game to devote your time and discipline to, the next biggest challenge is finding your worthy opponent. Did I really want to play ranked matches against unknowns for my entire run? Of course not. I *wanted* someone at work, someone who I could brag to and talk trash about.
But what about Steam? What about Ed Boon and the devs, the game makers who sold me a bad game? Well at that point, it was clear that I wouldn’t get my money back. The PC version of the game had sat idle on my computer for long enough. As might as well get *some* use out of it, right? I mean, wouldn’t it be a bigger tragedy if I paid for two versions of the game, and then *didn’t* play the PC version, when circumstance dictated that I should?
That night, not surprisingly, I saw BigStick online. I was in the middle of playing MKX on my PS4 when I saw him on, and I messaged him just as I was starting a match. Did he want to play?
He did, and I did. Now for the controller, the last time I had played the PC version, I used my Qanba fightstick. But since then, I switched to a standard PS4 controller, and I haven’t looked back. I briefly considered plugging in the fight stick, for no better reason than it wasn’t doing anything else, but I knew that would be a mistake.
I had been, for weeks now, building muscle memory around the PS4 controller. If I wanted to bring my A game, that was the controller I’d have to use. On a side note, I almost can’t believe the money I wasted on that fight stick. I mean, before I got back into MKX, before I got back into the fighting game, it seemed like the thing to use. I’d watched a few Street Fighter tournaments on Twitch.tv and seen how uber pro the players look, with their fight sticks. So clearly the best of the best use them.
But since then, I saw SonicFox destroy people with a standard controller. Not to mention so many other pros, who do just fine with the PS4 Dualshock. Now, with perfect hindsight, I realize that what I was buying was nostalgia. What I was buying was the dream and familiarity of the traditional arcade joysticks. But I was living in the past. The new controllers are here, and there’s a reason why most people *aren’t* using fight sticks.
Probably the same reason I’d grown tired of it. The buttons all feel the same. The damn thing is huge and clunky, and I simply got tired of constantly moving the fightstick from my lap to the table in between rounds.
So I plugged one of my PS4 controllers into the computer and fired up Mortal Kombat. I was happy to see that I worked straight away. After I rebound the buttons to default, I was ready to play against BigStick.
For our first match, he choose Jason Vorhees. I picked Kotal Kahn Sun God. We duked it out. I won the first match, he took the second. Then, with just the smallest sliver of health left, he took the third. Damn.
But I took the rematch after that. If there’s one thing I like about Sun God, it’s his command grab throw and what he says when he performs it. “On your knees!” But if there’s one thing I don’t like about Sun God, it’s that you really have to milk that throw for everything it’s worth. You have to perform it three times, just for it to do its maximum damage. And then you have to use it more to get that maximum damage, and to do the cool brutality.
Which means he’s going to say “On your knees!” a few too many times. I kinda wish they’d given him a few more lines to randomly mix it up.
We played many matches, but I won more. Still, I have to admit it was pretty close. Neither of us wanted to back down, and continually clicked rematch. But alas, he was unable to pull into the lead of matches won. So he eventually clicked Player Select.
He changed to Kano. I took Jacqui Briggs. Again, he won a few, and the matches were close, but I kept the lead on games won. Sweet. I got him to back down, and go back to the Player Select screen again. I was running out of characters I knew how to play.
I picked Dvora. He picked Tanya. Again, I kept my lead, and to be fair, it didn’t seem like he really knew how to play Tanya very well. But I didn’t really know how to play Dvora very well, so I think it balances out.
We played for more than an hour. Until finally, I could play no more. That last game, I clicked back on the Player Select screen, for one final game as Kotal Kahn before calling it a night. When he saw me pick Kotal Kahn, he changed back to Jason Vorhees.
We started to fight, but in the middle of battle, my game froze. Lost connection. A minute later, he messaged me and told me that his game had frozen. So there you have it. The PC version isn’t fixed, per se. But it is much more playable. It still crashed, at least for us.
One of the things I’m most surprised about was how seamless the transition was for me, from PS4 to PC. I was literally able to simply plug the controller in, and play just as I had been. I could do all of the combos and special moves without a problem. That was something which scared me. The idea that I might have to ‘relearn’ how to play, because I was on a different system.
But one of the things I really didn’t like was how the game looked. The way I have my PC and PlayStation setup, they use the same HDMI monitor with a switch. So in this case, I literally pressed one button, and switched from the PlayStation to the PC. Even though I built my PC specifically to run MKX, it didn’t look nearly as good as the PlayStation version. For some reason, the PC version looked darker.
I was happy to see that they finally included the character walk aways. It may be a minor aesthetic touch, but I’m glad they finally got it in. Still, my original point is still quite valid. Why play the PC version when you have the PlayStation version? The answer is, so that you can kick your friend’s ass and brag about it at work the next day. Which is exactly what I intend to do now.
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