In 1991, Capcom hit gamers with Street Fighter II: The World Warrior and it firmly solidified their title as King Shit of Fuck Mountain. Other games have come along and taken a run at the belt, most notably Midway’s Mortal Kombat and Tekken by Namco, but they never really came close to dethroning Ken and Ryu as the champs. You could argue King of Fighters/Samurai Shodown by SNK, but they too could not match the quality of Capcom.

Unfortunately for Midway’s clunky fighter, only the first handful of games in the series were memorable. Everything released past Mortal Kombat 4 declined rapidly in quality and were even less fun than going through old photo albums and reminiscing about your ‘skinnier days’ when you didn’t need your wife to move you around with a pallet jack.

Mortal Kombat enjoyed some brief success for a few years in the early 1990s but the games just came off as gimmicky and entertaining in a morbid kind of way but never posed a true threat to Capcom’s franchise. With the nutty finishing moves and over the top violence, it was obvious that it was marketed towards the easily amused ADD kids shrieking for blood like starved harpies, while the smug, more mature Street Fighter fans stood back and shook their heads in quiet amusement.

I don't know how old Cammy is, but a webcam would put her through college.

Gore does not make a game better, gameplay does. Gameplay is where Capcom outshined the competition for years. The skill of a player can make Ryu look like a graceful ballet dancer moving to a symphony of pain and pugilism, or else like Stephen Hawking trying to line dance in high heels. Being able to do the former and dominate your local arcade requires a lot of dedication and, I hate to say it in reference to a video game, talent. I’m not saying old Mortal Kombat games don’t require skill, but the tap-tap-punch style controls always felt more like you were entering cheat codes or playing Dance Dance Revolution with your fingers, as opposed to Street Fighter’s poetic flow which was harder to master.

Mortal Kombat’s strongest showing was in 1995 with Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 and I fully admit that I love that game, but like Kevin Smith waddling in front of the sun, it was soon eclipsed by Street Fighter 3: Third Strike which put a stranglehold on the fighting game market for the next decade. Capcom continued to destroy the competition with games like Marvel Vs. Capcom 2 while Midway struggled like a Down syndrome kid trying to wipe his own ass and made a shitty mess of things for the next number of years. Ironically, the best thing to ever happen to the once decent Mortal Kombat franchise was the sad demise of Midway.

Years of awful decisions, and just plain terrible games that didn’t sell drained money from the company and eventually forced them to liquidate their assets in 2009 and sell to a dinky little film company you may have heard of: Warner Bros. Like three black dudes in a porno with a blonde chick ready to make like a circus seal, this is when things began to get interesting.

Capcom had just taken another dump on Midway’s head and delivered a KO punch to the jaw of the short lived Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe with Street Fighter IV and then kicked them while they were down a year later with Super Street Fighter IV. The new Midway, renamed to Netherrealm Studios, finally made a bit of a splash with their newly acquired franchise and dropped a hydrogen bomb on the Japanese with a reboot of the Mortal Kombat series and fuck me is it good. So good in fact that it pushed 3 million units and paid for the Midway acquisition in a few short months.

The new Mortal Kombat game makes nerds touch their controllers in whole new ways.

Mortal Kombat 9 has absolutely blown Street Fighter out of the water to the point that the latest Super Street Fighter IV and Marvel vs. Capcom 3 seem like a distant memory that’s as bland as a cardboard popsicle. Not only is this newest MK game loaded with the blood and violence it’s famous for, but it plays better than any past Mortal Kombat game could even dream of. It is without a doubt the greatest fighting game our world has ever known, and to top it off, Netherrealm Studios has just added a few new characters to the roster, one of which is Warner Bros. very own Freddy Krueger who goes together with Mortal Kombat like cheese and crackers.

Street Fighter fans around the world, including myself, who have been talking shit all these years have spit coffee all over themselves after trying this great game out and now look like idiots with their dicks caught in their zippers. The big question is how will Capcom respond? Can they even?

Your move, Japan. Best make it a good one.

A lot of popular trends from the 80′s and early 90′s that were once highly regarded should have, in hind sight, been stuffed into a suitcase and thrown into a wood chipper. This goes for anything with florescent colors, Steve Urkel, and the entire band Poison. These horrendous embarrassments were good for a few laughs at the time but since then we have hopefully learned our lesson: when you’re alone and bored some things seem like a good idea, but in the end you can never look at your dog the same way.

Possibly the most treasured artifact to be salvaged from a time of fashionable failure was the 16-bit era of side scroller action that produced more lasting memories than your experimental college years which your traumatized roommate wont soon forget.

At what point did the style of retro 2D games stabilize and begin to withstand the test of time? For years Space Invaders was the poster boy for cutting edge technology and entertainment, while it’s still a fun game that is more difficult than explaining the anal nitrate and pack of half frozen wieners under your bed, from an ignorant 21st century perspective it is an embarrassing eye sore that should be shot back into space with all the bald nerds who still play it.

It wasn’t until the 16-bit era dawned and eventually faded in the mid 90′s that we can now look back with fond memories of the style with limited amount of detail and sound quality. I can’t help but think that the recent onslaught of plat formers and beat’em up games that we’ve seen go through the Xbox Live Arcade and Playstation Network will pass quicker than an old bean burrito through your Grandpa’s colostomy bag.

Finally there is a company about to do things right for once. An incredible looking 2D beat’em up game is being developed by Ubisoft and it is called Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World. It features 8 bit sound and a retro 16-bit color pallet with rasterized low-res detail that looks straight from the arcade in 1994. It is based off of a popular comic book called Scott Pilgrim by Canadian writer/artist Bryan Lee O’Malley.

One thing that rubs me worse than the tug job I got in a dumpster behind Dairy Queen is how low resolution raster based imagery has mostly been abandoned and replaced with ‘superior’ vector based graphics that are so crisp and clear they make you sick to look at. Take Castle Crashers for example. It’s a great game and I would be lying if I said I didn’t like it, but with its fancy Flash vector graphics, it feels much more hollow and lifeless, like the time you paid a hooker to say ‘I love you.’ on Valentines day.

Another good example is Earthworm Jim HD. It is literally the original game traced in Flash with some added features such as multiplayer. While its appreciated and all, it just doesn’t have the same charm and warmth that the original had. The best way I can explain my preference of low resolution raster graphics for this style of game is a similar argument I would use for listening to vinyl: it just sounds better.

Check out Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World!