Konsole Kombat

 Switch it up, Boon!

Whew-wee! It's been a hot minute since we've had a face plant this egregious on the marketing and delivery side of the games industry! I mean the only controversy in a while was really the whole situation with the sad Payday 3 launch debacle with an always-online game that failed to secure the appropriate servers to accommodate for that method of running their ecosystem. But that right there, frustrating though it is, is not really an end all circumstance. It isn't a deal breaker that's going to make you reconsider your relationship with the game developer, as long as those servers are fixed eventually at least. But the same relief cannot be claimed for every game under god's blue sky. Take, for instance, the Switch port of Mortal Kombat 1... I wish somebody would, the game's slowly killing the hopes and dreams of everyone who thought that standards still held some place within this industry!

First off, I didn't know there was a Switch port for Mortal Kombat 1 because... well... why would there be? Mortal Kombat 1 was marketed as the crème of the crop for the franchise to date, taking advantage of the decades of experience from the team to pull all the stops and extract every ounce of power from the modern consoles. And the Switch is just... not as powerful. Heck, I was pretty sure that the Switch would be put out to pasture when the new generation rolled around considering it's difficulties keeping up with the last generation's best. But then I find out that not only is there a Switch version, but it's being charged the same over-premium price point as the console and PC version? Implying some form of quality parity? Well isn't that just a curiosity and a half! I wonder by what metric of sorcery the fine folks over at Warner Bros. were capable of transforming such a pretty looking fighter and fitting it into such a tiny and relatively weak system?

Answer: They didn't. But I guess they tried. Shiver Entertainment and Saber Interactive were handed the unenviable job of performing the impossible here, and from the product they delivered it's very clear that the art of the 'weaker system port' is long lost upon the industry. Once upon a time such a port was, curiously, not as much of a rarity as one might expect, but when such was approached it was done with an understanding that one-to-one parity was a frank impossibility. So the scale of the game would be reduced, the systems reworked, the files recompressed, any trick that could get the hardware chugging along neatly on the weaker software was pulled from the proverbial hat and put to the test. For Mortal Kombat 1, however, now chill was given. They tried to port everything, and crammed it all onto a system that whelps and hollers because it just can't take it. And the results? Glorious. In the bad way, though. Can't state that enough. It's bad.

If you've ever gotten curious as to what some of your cleanest 'looker' games appear as when you turn down the graphical settings to their absolute lowest, the kinds of lows that can only be achieved by meddling with the Ini files, then you've already seen what this port is like. The character models look perpetually unloaded and their mouths refuse to move during their mid-combat quips. Faces bulge unnaturally and there's a distinct lack of shadow really flattening every image and drawing the worst out of colour contrasts and the game lags whenever any action starts. Actually, the game lags on the home screen. In fact, this might be worse than a game at it's lowest settings, because at least in those instance you get the benefit of improved load times. Not so here- the game's loading moves along about as smoothly as a pig that's been fed a life long diet of hot molasses.

It's shocking. Not least of all on the back of all the actually good press that Mortal Kombat had been enjoying thanks to the quality of it's main title, which has been a hit for it's fun story, brutal fatalities and... no, those are the two things people really go to this franchise for, isn't it? It's such a shame that all that goodwill got cut right though the middle by the stink of a rank and awful title that, to be honest, was a rip-off to all those who bought it. Sold under the false perception of the 'rising cost of game development' but delivered as a bag of faeces; there's a big wonder why this wasn't more of a talking point before release and that much is obvious: because Warner Bros didn't want anyone to know. Not once was any Switch footage revealed to the public, underlining the very real fact that they knew what a stinker they had on their hands and released it anyway hoping the fuss would be short lived.

Of course it all gets more embarrassing the more the look into it, but for me the height has to be the apparent fact that this game was poorly extracted from the Steam port to such a rushed degree that Steam Achievement implementation still exists and you'll get pop-ups that connect to nothing during play. That particular 'feature' is alleged because I've not seen any reputably replicate it during play, but the fact it's even believable really highlights the depths to which public opinion has sunken in regards to the aplomb of Mortal Kombat. No body gives them the benefit of the doubt anymore. And if I were £70 poorer after buying a mistake of a game off of them, I'd be very much just as sceptical in the face of any news from the studio that e-mugged me.

Now Ed Boon, whom as far as we're aware had no idea of this game's state before launch (Although as game director that would really be a failure on his part not to check) has already made a vow to fix the Switch port- but I have to ask... how? It's kind of like the whole situation with the Xbox One and PS4 versions of Cyberpunk 2077 which barely ran; with all their time to fix the things all CDPR could figure out how to do was gut the life in the open world, limit the frames, tear out the visual effects- anything to get it functional and back on the Playstation store. The Switch is even more limited than that- and although MK1 is a much smaller game, there's no achieving console parity no matter how much you want it. The best the team could perhaps manage is fixing up some of the in-match lag- and is that really enough to justify the £70 tag again?

It's honestly bizarre how low the advertising standards are- although that might be because there appears to be genuinely no protections in the gaming world about straight up selling lies to the unwary. Look on the Nintendo store listing of MK1 and you'll find absolutely no screenshots, that's a wanton attempt to hide their mediocrity- but does anyone care? What would happen across the industry if MK was crucified by this tomorrow? How quickly would we see a dry up in crappy CG trailers and premature over-hyped 'announce trailer' garbage? And would that equal a better world or one in which game companies advertise less in order to protect their backs? Speculation and theories are all we can muster on such topics, the food of the commentators.