those young people today

Yeah, I'm on a roll. It's totally just because I'm making up for having been offline a lot and not because I'm procrastinating, no, not at all.

So, I was poking around plot spoilers for a recent Mortal Kombat game on TVTropes (don't ask how I got there, I don't even know, it just came up somehow) and saw a reference to something that sounded like it might be interesting to watch, so I looked it up on Youtube. More fool I. You know, in a series that is all about super-powerful people beating the crap out of each other in show-offy detail, you would kinda expect a cutscene described as "X Kills Pretty Much Everyone" to involve a certain amount of awesome. NOT the villain just walking into the room, the heroes lining up to charge at her one at a time, and to each be taken down by maybe one or two punches which is somehow supposed to kill them, in comparison to the enormous amount of damage they take during normal gameplay which doesn't have any lasting consequences at all.

No awesome smackdown. No special talents used by anyone. Just *bap* *bap* *bap* *bap* all the heroes are 'dead'. This is what passes for big-budget entertainment?

That's not the only offputting thing. I have vaguely fond memories of MK even though I never played it for more than a few movies. The original game was iconic. The movie was fun (there was only one! that sequel did not happen!). But in recent years they've moved towards making the female characters look MORE and MORE ridiculous (It's not even the fact that they now have costumes the size of candyfloss, the graphical style that these weirdly distorted bodies with breasts the size of watermelons are rendered in is also really visually unappealing to me. So they've made them "sexier" and "uglier" at the same time, and I feel quite uncomfortable looking at them.) and making the game grosser and nastier and bloodier (Yeah, I'm kinda squeamish at heart.) Uecch. I feel dirty for even looking at it.

And there's a trailer going around for a new MK movie reboot that's aiming for Darker And Nastier Still. People are cheering that it's been inspired by Saw and other super-grotesque horror flicks. WHY?

I watched some beardy guy's video argument recently that it's completley natural for videogames to be mostly violent due to the nature of the medium. He wasn't totally wrong, but BOY was he oversimplifying things. Yes, video games lend themselves to spatial interaction and visual displays. That doesn't mean that it is inevitable that all games should turn into hyperrealistic heads being ripped off and fountaining blood. C'mon.