DG1OA Wrote:
Kano, Raiden, Kung Lao and Jax.
While they were nice, nostalgic inclusions, I feel the developers missed too many opportunities with them. MK1 Kano should have had his victory pose from the first game, where he roared, and Raiden should have had his old screams for his torpedo. I think he even could have had his censored fatality from the SNES version as a second one, where he instead reduced his opponent to ashes. Kano's censored heart rip could have been his friendship, where he fails to rip out his victim's heart, instead hitting them hard enough to knock them to the ground. Kano would be in his heart-holding stance, with nothing in his hand, and three exclamations point over his head, and Shao Kahn laughing in the background.
But Jax and Kung Lao were the most crippled ones, so to speak. They both lacked their more unique fatalities (and KL lacked his gibberish from his throw). I think Kung Lao's hat slice and Jax's arm rip, with some editing, could have worked. For Kung Lao's, the opponents's dazed sprite could have been split in two, and for Jax's arm rip, when grabbing his victim's arms, they could have gone into their scared/shocked state (like they did when they saw Kabal's face), then back into their dazed state when Jax ripped off their arms, only they'd stop moving, like they did in MK2, and after pretty much every decapitations in MK3.
I realize I'm no programmer, but would the developers really have been incapable of making these ideas work? It truly seemed pointless to include these two classic versions without their iconic fatalities. At least Kano and Raiden had theirs.
And speaking of classic characters and fatalities, why the hell was the masked Sub-Zero's spine rip censored, anyway? They easily could have had a spine under the victim's head, though it probably wasn't censored over programming issues.
You have to keep in mind Midway were on tight schedules giving how Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 came out a few months after Mortal Kombat 3 and Mortal Kombat Trilogy was also given to different developers like GT Interactive. There was not enough time for the developers to do all of the fatalities especially when you're on a tight schedule.
I've heard various reasons for Classic Sub-Zero's fatality being censored, one of them was being too lazy to include an animation of the spine getting torn out and the other to parody the politicians who said games like Mortal Kombat were encouraging people to kill each other.
I think they were able to bring in the MK 1 versions of Kano and Rayden and MK 2 Jax and Kung Lao because they still had the same actors playing them. You couldn't do Johnny Cage MK 1 or 2 well because Daniel Pesina got fired, MK 1 and 2 Liu Kang, Kitana and Shang Tsung because the actors sued Midway and Sonya MK 1 actor too.
