Mortal Kombat 1 doesn’t look like it’s going to break any kombos

destructoid.com:

I remember when Mortal Kombat launched in 1992, or rather, I remember when it was ported to consoles in 1993. I was six at the time, but it was impossible to avoid the media fervor around its ultra-violence. My parents didn’t bat an eye when I rented it. My mother’s reaction to seeing me play it was to just ask if it was that game everyone was talking about. Then she continued with her day.

That would normally be an extremely weak way to start talking about Mortal Kombat 1. The original Mortal Kombat (which we can no longer refer to as Mortal Kombat 1) was 11 Mortal Kombats ago.

Yet Mortal Kombat 1 seems somewhat keen to tap into nostalgia for the ‘90s, and there’s nothing I have more abundance of than ‘90s nostalgia. It seems aimed at lapsed fans and dilettantes like myself. Through the Kameo Fighters, we get to see some of the Kombatants as they appeared in the original trilogy. However, this grab for nostalgia proved rather confusing to my thumbs, which tried to throw combos from muscle memory, only to have them not work in the new system.

The beta weekend provided a decent way to get my feet wet with Mortal Kombat 1. It was enough to show my I’ve got a long way to go before I can compete at even the basest level. There’s a single-player tower mode, as well as a simple online versus. No practice mode, however. That really threw me.

It messed me up mostly because Mortal Kombat 1 doesn’t use a genre-typical combo system. In something like Street Fighter II, it’s mostly just a matter of finding out which moves flow best into each other. In Mortal Kombat 1, you need to dial-a-combo. You can view each combo in the movelist, which is helpful, but it means that if you fail a combo input, your character will throw a punch,