Spam Ryu & ken fireballs all day long?
And how is that different from spamming Meelena Sai’s and Subzero ice all day long?
MK’s fighting engine just never had the dept SF does. This is evidenced by the way, aside from their specials, all the characters move/work exactly the same.
When i say this i’m speaking of the older 2D MKs BTW(even though they have their problems, they’re still superior to recent 3D efforts).
Try that against anyone that knows what they’re doing, seriously.
I can guarantee 100% you will lose. Hard.
Hmrph?
That isn’t true at all. The game stresses more offense, but so do most game that come out right now. Thats like saying everyone in GG plays the same: try to get dat ULTRA COMBO son.
Yup. From MK1 all the way to MKT, each character shared the same standard attacks.
The Same high/low punch, high/low kick, same sweep, uppercut, etc. Only thing that really separated them from one another was their individual special moves.
The only characters that share normals are the male ninja amoung themselves, the female ninja amoung themselves, and the robots amoung themselves. Everyone else has different properties on their normals.
Going by that logic, everyone in MK2 should have had a roundhouse infinite.
Your point = False.
Different properties maybe, the point is they all had the same ol’list of normal attacks.
In SFII, aside from ken & ryu, everyone played quite a bit different from one another. You had zangief- the slow powerful type, Dhalsim with weak but long range attacks, Guile was strong with mid-range speed, etc.
They all moved and attacked differently. Not like MK with the identical set of High/low, sweep, uppercut, junk for every char. Take away the specials and you’re almost left with a cast of clones.
I see your point, but MK characters don’t all move or attack the same way. If I’m rushing down with Ermac, I do things pretty differently than if I was using Kitana. The game doesn’t make uber distinct differences in the characters like “this is the big guy who gets close, this dude runs away all day, this chick uses cr.forward” but to say they all play the same is ludicrous.
Ok but try playing completely without any specials.
I remember when me and my bro were playing MK1 for the SNES. There was an option somewhere to disable specials, and it did not matter who we picked afterwards. Everyone was almost exactly the same.
The technical problems with MK have all been outlined here. My personal beef with MK is potential.
Some of you may laugh, but I feel an MK with great gameplay and good, updated use of its gimmicks could have been a real winner. Instead, we’ve got shit for gameplay and (outside of Create-a-Fatality) the same usage of the Fatalities and lame unlockables since MK1. Don’t get me wrong, I could take Chess and Puzzle Kombat, but who wants to RACE in MK? Who wants to spend VG currency to see the behind the scenes aspects of a game? No one cares about staff photos as prizes. Who wants to just see the same old fatality over and over again? Unlockables and fatals are about all MK has going for it, and there hasn’t been anything really cool in either for the past few years.
You know, I totally came across the wrong way. Damn, I didnt mean to sound like I’m putting SF down. I was actual referring to alot of the people that used to play SF at the Putt-Putt I used to work at LONG ago.
Spamming anything in any game isnt worth a shit, but thats all these guys did. Fireball, Fireball, Fireball…oh god. They were terrible.
I also totally know that as a whole, The SF engines (Alpha series, which is my fave & the whole VS series too) were way deeper, but UMK3 is the best in gameplay for any fighter IMO…and as far as I go, 3-D MK = poop. The only decent MK game since UMK3 was Shaolin Monks!!!
I do hope maybe MK8 is done right. I dont know what I mean by right, but hopefully SF4 will help MK8 be better…if that makes any sense…
There are minor differences in characters in MK when characters aren’t palette swaps. In the case of palette swaps the difference is the special moves. To break UMK3 down specifically:
Sweeps in some cases have different animation counts, sometimes before contact and sometimes after.
Kano, Sonya and Jax all have the exact same sweep duration for start up, contact, and recovery. Their recovery is faster than the other 20 characters in the game, which means, in a sweeping contest, they can do more sweeps in 10 seconds than any other character. he difference then between these 3 characters is the collision detection per sprite. A cold collision box for any sprite in MK is 100% the height the sprite, and approximately 25-30% the width, centered. So picture a rectangle running up the center of the character. So for Jax Sonya and Kano, their cold collisions depend on the height and width of the frames. Their hot box collision however is something more manually predetermined than that generalized 28% cold collision box width. Since there are no physical double hits in MK, a zero frame differential priority is randomly determined at the start of the round, ie: Sonya vs Kano, if Kano is chose, identical sweeps will always be won by Kano, however, other characters will always beat them by mere ticks in sweep start up even though they have faster overall sweeps than anyone. So, here we have the same sweep for three characters, and each has their own collision propertiers that are of course, subsequently related to their sprite size.
Similar to any fighting game, priority depends on the location of the hot box in relation to the cold box. So say a character has a very narrow sprite for an attack, their cold box is also very narrow, but the hot box might be very similar to say, a rooundhouse collision. A good example is Nightwolf’s Axe Uppercut. This move has a very narrow cold box on collision and a logically far away hot box since he’s holding a weapong. The move itself does 12% damage and activates damage protection, meaning every hit thereafter does half the normal damage. This move is excellent anti air and anti cross up because of it’s collision, but the damage you can attain off a single axe is relatively low vs most characters.
Roundhouses are big deal.
Liu Kang’s roundhouse is the best RH overall, with the male ninjas, Kung Lao and Kabal also being high up there. Collision detection for Liu’s RH is very different than say, Sub-zero’s whose anti air RH abilities are limited due to start up and his collision detection upon RH contact. Liu’s foot is a mile away from the center of his body and reasonably high plus he has normal start up time so his RH is godlike, however before someone assumes that something as simple as a RH can make an MK character good, his RH alone doesn’t put him anywhere near the top of the tier list. Sheeva’s roundhouse has a lot of range, but the start up is slow and can be snufed very easily.
Jump kicks all have different properties and some are easier to anti air than others. The best aa for a jump kick for damage is an aaHP, which can lead to additional enormous damage for Sindel, Ermac, Reptile, Stryker and Human Smoke. Big damage for Kabal, Robot Smoke and Cryax. As for the JKs themselves, Nightwolf and Kano have the best JK range in relationship to their cold collision in the game. They are very hard to anti air while in their contact frame, while someone like Sindel is very easy to hit even when she’s in her contact frame. For Kano and Nightwolf you have to wait until their attack duration has finished and by then they might be too close to the ground to get anything substantial against.
Run jab effectiveness has a lot to do with the pushing area of the sprites, the female ninjas have low locking run jabs, while some characters like Jax are higher up allowing for ducking LK’s to sneak in more easily.
Ducking LKs are important to fend off rush down as well, and Sonya has the best ducking LK in the game. Against even high level players her ducking LK strats are annoying to work around, but it’s not something to rely on. Kung Lao also has a very pointy ducking LK, but Kano on the other hand has a slower clunky ducking LK as does Liu Kang and Jax. Robot Ninjas’ and Sheeva’s D+LK is good, but not as good as Sonya or Kung’s and the female ninjas are somewhere between that. The differences may be small, but MK is about very small windows of timing.
One other thing I want to touch on, is the concept of spamming projectiles, as it relates to old school SF and MKII. No one can tell me that Guile Sonic booms in SFII are any different than Mileena sai spamming in the respect of, a good Guile player knows how to space time and zone those Sonic Booms that even a high level player has trouble with them, much like Mileena’s sai shots can be placed, in fact Mileena’s air Shot can have a lower place collision box than the ground one in MKII. These high players don’t wrecklessly use the fireballs just as high level Mileena doesn’t throw sais out when it’ll get her in trouble.
Shock is a god.
So what are your thoughts on Mk Trilogy? Its the only 2D MK i have for PSOne. Better than the N64 version.
(have all the others on Emus)
Agreed with the thoughts on the 3-D MK’s.
It inspired me to create the Best 5 things that came with the 3-D MK’s:
MKT for PSX is essentially a sped up version of UMK3’s engine. In other worse, it retains 99.9% of the properties of UMK3 arcade, only it’s 33% faster. There are tweaks to characters here and there and added moves and slightly changed properties. MK3 to UMK3 is like the difference between 2nd Impact and 3rd Strike and the MKT would be if they made another game that added a bunch of totally broken characters to that game and added “Turbo” to the title. It’d be like Street Fighter 3: 4 Car Pile Up"
Back to what I was saying earlier, I obviously didn’t cover everything, and I forgot to point out that MK doesn’t have invincibility frames unless you count Jade’s special move that can only prevent her from being hit by most projectiles for 2 seconds, and then it has a 2 second recharge before you can use it again. What I am referring to is, moves like the Dragon Punch and Flash kick, which have no cold collision box upon start up in SFII. In MK you can always be hit, but you can always block as long as you are touching the ground. There are instances however when air contact is so low that it causes ground contact results and after autocombos you cannot block until your character starts to get up, resulting in 1 infinite for Nightwolf, which can only be done in the corner, on 6 total characters in UMK3, and in MKT a few of the added characters are also succeptable.
In N64 MKT, many characters can do corner kick combo infinites to many more characters than what would have been logically translated from the original engine. I don’t know what happened but bottom line, no one should play N64 MKT.
See abovr post^^^^
The PS1 Greatest Hits MKT is best of the bunch that I’ve played. I never played the PC version, but I hear it pretty much the same. Its alot of fun, but add inthe broken characetrs, bosses and the loading times for Shang, I’d rather just play UMK3.
BTW and FTR, the Nintendo DS version is a GREAT port of UMK3. It plays fast like MKT, but isnt MKT, hehe. Online is a bit laggy, but there is Kombat Kodes to help with that…
N64 one was missing stuff like the 4 bosses, and the 4 older versions of characters like Raiden.
Only thing it has over the PSOne version was the lack of load times.
Wow good stuff shock, I was always under the impression that everyone had the exact same properties…looks like I was wrong.
why do people think MK pokes are all the same? Makes no sense…