Ultra Street Fighter IV (Capcom, 2014)

Historically, the final revision in a Street Fighter series has always been the most radical. Super Street Fighter II Turbo was the first game in the series to feature Super Combos, juggles, and the ability to soften throws. It also implemented the most drastic changes yet to individual characters’ move sets, most notably distinguishing Ryu and Ken by their new punches and kicks. Street Fighter Alpha 3 introduced multiple fighting styles (or “ISMs”), the Guard Power Gauge, Air Recoveries, two-button throws, projectiles that weakened as they traveled across the screen, and the most liberal juggle system in the series. Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike added the Guard Parry (better known as “Red Parry”) and allegedly more pixel-accurate hitboxes via the “Progressive Hit Frame System.” Ultra Street Fighter IV, which is almost certain to be the last titular update to Street Fighter IV, continues this trend, being actually the first to introduce any significant mechanical alterations to an engine that had remained basically static through four editions.

Ultra Combo Double

The most obvious yet least meaningful new system is “Ultra Combo Double” (or “W Ultra”), which allows players to enter into a match having access to both of a character’s Ultra Combo options, rather than having to choose between them. In previous games (beginning with Super Street Fighter IV, when the second Ultra Combo was first made available), players had to consider the matchup and decide accordingly whether to go with a character’s more reliably damaging Ultra, or the usually “alternative” Ultra with perhaps special situational utility. In Adon’s case, for example, his Ultra II, “Jaguar Avalanche,” is much easier to combo into for heavy damage, making it definitely the preferred choice for offensive output. Ultra I, “Jaguar Revolver,” meanwhile, is a long-range attack that is easy to see coming, but it comes with the advantage of being able to travel through projectiles, allowing Adon to wield it defensively as a potential punish against fireball characters, who would otherwise give Adon a hard time. Ultra II is still the more useful in most cases, but now, with W Ultra, Adon players no longer have to trade utility for damage, or vice versa, but can actually enter into battle with the versatility of both. At least, that’s the selling point for W Ultra.

In actuality, W Ultra is merely a third choice now available, in addition to Ultra I and Ultra II. In order to keep things balanced (and not have W Ultra render the other choices obsolete), the price for choosing W Ultra is that the damage dealt by either Ultra Combo is reduced by a not insubstantial 25 or 40 percent, depending on the character (and “power up” Ultras, which do not deal direct damage, are equivalently reduced in duration). Thus, using Adon again as an example, the decision between Ultra I, Ultra II, or W Ultra comes down to whether you want utility, damage, or options. Damage generally being the priority in this game, Ultra II is the obvious choice in all but a few matchups. In those specific matchups, Adon players may consider going with W Ultra, if they need Jaguar Revolver to keep fireball-happy opponents in check, but don’t want to give up Jaguar Avalanche as a potential combo maximizer. You must also keep in mind, however, that, with the sting of both Ultras so lessened in W Ultra, an opponent may not even respect the threat that Jaguar Revolver is meant to pose. So perhaps you might just as well commit to Ultra I, if you’re going to have it at all.

Furthermore, Adon is actually a rare case in having a second Ultra that is still somewhat useful. The majority of characters, in this edition as before, have one Ultra that is clearly better than the other, so W Ultra is entirely pointless for them. There are only a select few cases—characters such as Dhalsim, who essentially have two utility Ultras (Ultra I as a momentum-shifter and escape tool, Ultra II as a situational punish)—that might gravitate toward W Ultra as a serious choice. And, even then, it’s not likely that you’re going to be able to use both Ultras in the same round, so you might just as well commit to one or the other, so as to clarify, for your own benefit, your objective and strategy for the match.

Red Focus

A far more significant addition is the “Red Focus Attack”—as its name implies, a souped-up version of the Focus Attack. Like the regular Focus Attack, Red Focus is a universal technique available to all characters. It has a few different applications. In previews, it was mostly presented as a defensive mechanism, able, like the regular Focus Attack, to “absorb” a foe’s attack. The user will still receive provisional damage (“white damage”) to their health, but they will not suffer any stun and can basically attack “through” the opponent’s attack. The difference with Red Focus is that it costs two bars of the Super Combo Gauge to execute, but, in exchange, it is able to absorb multiple hits (indeed, as many as the user has health). Unfortunately, it retains the regular Focus Attack’s susceptibility to throws and to Armor Breakers (character-specific attacks that cannot be absorbed). More importantly, there are very few situations that would actually justify holding a Red Focus long enough to absorb multiple hits, because the extended duration of the Red Focus would give the opponent ample time to react to the gambit.

The more useful application for Red Focus is as an offensive tool. In previous games, players could, at the cost of two bars of the Super Combo Gauge, cancel an attack of their own into a Focus Attack. Known as “EX Focus,” this was a way of slamming the brakes on your own move to cut it short and bypass the recovery phase. In Ultra Street Fighter IV, players can now also perform “EX Red Focus,” which costs three bars. The massive benefit of EX Red Focus is that, if it hits, it will “crumple” the opponent, setting them up for a followup attack. Thus, an effective use of EX Red Focus is to cancel into it as a combo, whereupon you can easily follow up with your most damaging combo against the crumpled foe.

This is a huge deal, as it means that suddenly almost every character in the game (ever-hopeless T. Hawk is the exception) now has the means to reliably land an Ultra Combo anywhere on the stage. Before, so many characters with poor offensive tools struggled because their most damaging techniques were highly situational, depending on the opponent being in just the right place at the right time. Either that or they required the player to master some high-execution combo (which would probably also be situational (e.g. only works in the corner)). Now, as soon as you have access to your Ultra Combo and three bars of Super Combo Gauge, it’s a simple matter of “land that hit, cancel into EX Red Focus, convert into Ultra Combo.” This doesn’t mean that suddenly every character can fight on an even level; it just means that even the weaker characters now at least have a puncher’s chance, if they can get enough meter and then land that clean hit. And, execution-wise, it’s as easy as almost any combo in the game, making this a more accessible edition of Street Fighter IV, as new players need only learn how to perform their character’s EX Red Focus combo in order to have that same puncher’s chance. Granted, it would still be an exceedingly slim chance for a newbie matched up against someone who has been playing the game competitively for the last five years.

Delayed Wake-up

For those high-level players, the most transformative change to the mechanics may be the ability to perform “Delayed Standing” (or “Delayed Wake-up” (DWU)). This is a new universal ability, whereby players, when their characters are knocked down, can opt to lengthen the amount of time it takes for them to get back on their feet (colloquially dubbed the “wake-up” period). The delay is subtle enough to be just about imperceptible to the untrained eye, but, in a game where movements are timed to the exact 1/60th of a second, this has drastic repercussions at the tournament level.

As the competitive game evolved over the course of the previous four editions of Street Fighter IV, the style that emerged as dominating toward the end was the “vortex” offense, most notably employed by Akuma and Cammy players. Essentially, these characters, once they knocked the opponent down, had a number of set plays that experts would time to run at the exact moment that the fallen foe would rise. The opponent could only guess which of the several plays was coming, and even guessing correctly would not yield a victory in the exchange; it would only mean successfully blocking the incoming attack—a draw, at best. On the other hand, if you guessed incorrectly, that would mean getting knocked down again, at which point the whole guessing game would start up once more. You were effectively caught in a “vortex” of repeated knockdowns, until you managed to guess correctly.

Delayed Wake-up at last foils the vortex, as the ability to vary one’s wake-up after being knocked down means that Akuma and Cammy players can no longer rely on set plays based on specific timing—at least, not without risk of being punished, if the Akuma or Cammy player guesses incorrectly whether the opponent is going to delay their wake-up. Thus, in Ultra Street Fighter IV, these guessing games have become a whole lot fairer, with actual risk and reward on both sides.

The Cast

The addition of Delayed Wake-up stifles Akuma’s offensive game somewhat, but, as with every new revision, Ultra Street Fighter IV also promises to reshape the competitive balance by bringing with it numerous changes to each character individually. This early in the game’s life, it is impossible to declare with any authority the new tiers and matchup charts. Not even the designers of a fighting game can accurately forecast how everything will shake out (or else somebody would have designed a perfectly balanced fighting game by now, which hasn’t happened). Nevertheless, with Evo 2014 running this weekend, what better time to speculate?

Based on the first few tournaments that have taken place for Ultra Street Fighter IV, it would seem that not too much has changed. The characters that were winning in Super Street Fighter IV: Arcade Edition Ver. 2012 are the same ones that are still winning now. But that may just be because it’s the same top players sticking with their signature characters. When Infiltration wins a tournament with Akuma, it may not say much at all about how strong or weak Akuma is. It may just be the case that Infiltration is a really strong player, who is really good with that character.

Rising in the community’s estimation is Evil Ryu. In the previous version, this was a character who could deal a lot of damage in a single combo, but that didn’t mean so much, because isolated combos were all he could hope for, whereas the vortex characters could cheaply multiply the damage they dealt. In Ultra Street Fighter IV, with Delayed Wake-up having dispelled the vortex, characters such as Evil Ryu, and perhaps also Dudley, who can deal damage in bursts, are worth a lot more than before, since even Cammy no longer gets free damage.

The supreme character, however, by a pretty clear consensus, is Yun. Yun was the dominant character two revisions ago in Super Street Fighter IV: Arcade Edition. Then he was nerfed for Ver. 2012 but was still a very strong character—among the group just below the elite tier of Akuma, Cammy, Fei Long. In Ultra Street Fighter IV, Yun has been buffed (some would say needlessly), the addition of Delayed Wake-up has hurt characters formerly above him, and, most significantly, Red Focus suits him especially well, as he builds Super Combo meter very quickly and has probably the easiest EX Red Focus combo of anyone. He is perhaps not as unfair as in Arcade Edition—he needs to take risks and can be out-struck in the neutral game (when both fighters are on their feet at a neutral range), which, between EX Red Focus and Delayed Standing, is where more of the action takes place in this edition—but top players and analysts are nevertheless already declaring him peerless in this game.

The new challengers have yet to make a mark on the tournament scene, and the outlook is not that bright for any of them. Hugo is the most fun and intriguing, as his design is very extreme. He has a few absurdly good aspects (an attack with tremendous range, which also blows through other attacks) and many absurdly bad aspects (he’s so big and slow that he can barely move without running into an attack). Elena and Rolento are pesky, but the former has limited offense, while the latter has practically no defense. Poison, a depressingly undistinguished character in Street Fighter X Tekken, has a good variety of projectiles to zone effectively in this game, but is still fairly middle-of-the-road overall.

Decapre, despite sharing many of Cammy’s basic traits, is an odd one. Unlike Cammy, she’s a charge character, which suggests she should be played more defensively. But she doesn’t have the counterpunching tools or quick self-launching attacks that charge characters typically possess. If you try to crouch in the corner with her, she has nothing that can command the opponent’s respect from that position. Or you can try to go in and play her like Cammy, but then you lose your charge. The closest comparison might be to Chun-Li, a charge character who fights on her feet at mid-range. Indeed, Decapre also has a rapid-button-press special move of her own. But then she lacks Chun-Li’s arsenal of excellent normal moves.

The most inscrutable part of Capcom’s rebalancing on Ultra Street Fighter IV is which characters got nerfed. Basically, it wasn’t any of the characters who were actually at the top last game. Akuma, arguably the best character in Ver. 2012 (and perennially a top 3 character throughout Street Fighter IV history), even got a few buffs. This is actually understandable, when you consider that the addition of Delayed Wake-up is already a major nerf to Akuma’s offense, and so Capcom probably figured he would need some individual improvements as a consolation to keep him from entirely plummeting in the rankings.

But then what about someone like Gen, by all accounts a mid-tier character? Gen was another fighter whose game plan revolved heavily around tricky setups against rising opponents, though to a far lesser degree of effectiveness than Akuma or Cammy. So the introduction of Delayed Wake-up deals a serious blow to him there. Gen’s other strength—the thing that allowed him to hang in there and make comebacks against the top characters—was his unique ability to combo his Super into his Ultra, allowing him to deal tremendous damage from neutral (i.e. not situational). The value of that ability has been negated now by the advent of EX Red Focus, which grants virtually every character a high-damage combo from neutral, and at the expense of fewer resources than performing a Super.

So, realizing that Gen would get screwed over by the universal systems changes, mightn’t Capcom have seen fit to compensate by giving him some good buffs? Not at all! In fact, if you check out Capcom’s official video detailing Gen’s balance changes, you’ll note that it proudly details the many nerfs that have been made to Gen. What’s so peculiar is that the video is presented from the perspective of Gen’s opponents, as it repeatedly makes mention of how players have complained about this or that when fighting Gen. Meanwhile, if you watch the Akuma video, it seems more sympathetic to Akuma players’ point of view, as it describes the changes that have been implemented to address their requests for better tools.

It just doesn’t make sense. Who were all these players whining about Gen being too strong? Maybe they would have had a legitimate case, if there had been multiple Gen players making top 8 at every major. But, no, there’s, like, one guy in the entire world who even places at tournaments using Gen. However, because that one guy, Singapore’s Xian, won Evo 2013 with Gen, it’s as though Capcom overlords, feeling threatened by this Gen player competing so far above his mid-tier character’s station, decided they needed to “restore order” by rigging the game against him.

It brings to mind 2001, when the NBA ruled to allow zone defense. Officially, the rule change was explained as intended to produce a more technical and artful style of basketball, taking it away from the superstar-dominated action of the ‘90s, when fundamental shooting and passing skills fell by the wayside, as instead a few physically gifted players could completely take over games with their relentless driving and above-the-rim athleticism. Quite a number of fans understood, however, that the rule change was really targeting one player specifically: Allen Iverson, at the time the most explosive scorer in the NBA. Yes, Iverson was practically impossible to guard man-to-man. Yes, his game amounted to a fairly simplistic and repetitive tactic of isolating the defender, then burning them with a devastating crossover on his way to the rim. But was Allen Iverson too good? Was he unfairly physically gifted? Please! Iverson was the only normal-sized guy on the court at most times, in a sport where you have to be a freak of nature in order to even be allowed the dream of competing professionally. But perhaps it was the very fact of his smallness—that he challenged established notions of what professional basketball was “supposed to” look like—that so upset the NBA’s old white guy judgemasters, such that they had to re-rig the game to stop him from winning so much, even though it was really the Lakers at the time who were the ones dominating the league.

No, I don’t seriously mean to suggest that there was some anti-Xian conspiracy behind the nerfing of Gen in Ultra Street Fighter IV. Sometimes fighting game designers make curious decisions, which seem clearly misguided in hindsight, simply because it’s impossible for them to exactly predict to what extent changing one move will affect a character’s overall viability. Still, what could possibly have been Capcom's rationale behind crippling the damage on Gen's already now-obsolete Super? And Gen’s not the only one. Why did they reduce Guile’s health, dragging him below the likes of Ryu and Ken and down into the soft range with most of the female fighters? Why did they increase the recovery on Sagat’s High Tiger Shots, effectively neutering the very essence of the character? These were mediocre characters in the last game, who needed help, not handicaps. The only weak characters who have been notably improved are Vega, who has received some upgraded ground tools, and T. Hawk, whose improved Condor Spire supposedly makes him quite frightening, although tournament results have yet to bear out such speculation in either case. Meanwhile, Cammy and Fei Long, top-tier characters in the last version, look to still be very strong, and Yun and C. Viper, characters formerly on the cusp of being top-tier, have been massively improved, which all seems very unfair.

But, again, it’s way too early to declare Yun unbeatable, or Gen hopeless. A few exceptional players, like Xian, managed to perform very well in Ver. 2012 with characters deemed mediocre at best. They dedicated themselves to learning all the intricacies of their chosen characters and got as much mileage as could be gotten out of what strengths they possessed. Maybe these specialists will learn new ways to push their characters even further beyond the popular perceptions of their limitations.

Or maybe Capcom will just rebalance things again in the near future! Despite Ultra Street Fighter IV’s billing as the final edition of Street Fighter IV, the fighting game community has already brought to Capcom’s attention a number of new bugs. And Ultra Street Fighter IV won’t even see a boxed retail release until almost a month after Evo 2014. With the game’s audience expected to expand considerably at that time, that might be a good opportunity to revise the balance once more and level the playing field, so that early adopters would have to relearn the game along with newcomers.

Et cetera

I would welcome more changes for the retail release, because, in its current form, Ultra Street Fighter IV doesn’t even feel like a finished product. In addition to the bugs, there is an overall lack of polish and lack of effort to this package. Mechanically, it may be the most radical revision to Street Fighter IV, but in other ways it is disappointingly the laziest.

There is no new intro video, and even the title screen still says "Super Street Fighter IV." Many of the menu screens do feature new background art, but I personally find the new art much uglier. The portraits for the new characters are also clearly done by a new artist, and while they’re not terrible, the style is noticeably and distractingly inconsistent with the artwork for the old characters. The new characters do get fully animated intro cinematics in Arcade mode (in contrast with the old characters, whose intros consisted of still images with animated elements), but these are basically worthless, since the game’s story and single-player modes are as garbage as ever.

The character select screen is the same as before, except for the addition of the new characters, which has been handled most poorly. The four Street Fighter X Tekken refugees have all been crammed together on the right, while Decapre takes the previously empty upper-left corner slot. This completely ruins the symmetry of the character select screen. Brothers Yun and Yang no longer mirror one another on opposite ends of the screen. Juri, in the second column from the left, remains the default character for Player 1, but the Player 2 default, Hakan, is located in what is now the third column from the right, offsetting the symmetry by one column. This is a minor thing, but the sloppiness of it really annoys me, especially since it would have been so easy to get it right.

On the bright side, one much appreciated new feature is the option to configure your buttons on the character select screen. Anybody who has ever watched a competitive Street Fighter stream is surely acquainted with the “button check”—that phase before a fight officially begins, when competitors enter a round only to configure and test their buttons, before exiting back out to restart the match for real. Waiting for people to get through their button checks can be a real drag for spectators. Giving players the option to check their buttons on the character select screen itself should speed things up considerably, though it won’t entirely eliminate the old button checks (some players will still want to practice their combos first, and some just use button checks to pysch themselves up before a match). Moreover, while the button config menu on the pause screen has always been set up in the “scroll to the function you want for each button” style, the new button config menu on the character select screen is presented in the “press the button you want for each function.” There are advantages to each approach, but this is the first game I’ve ever come across that actually provides both, which is very cool indeed.

Training mode has received some nice improvements, most significantly the ability to record and reload the training dummy’s actions and position, allowing players to more easily practice specific scenarios. Weirdly, there is no way to set the training dummy to automatically perform Delayed Wake-up, which is quite a glaring omission that will hopefully be remedied in a patch.

The most substantial new offline content comes in the form of the "Edition Select" mode, available only in offline Versus matches. Edition Select allows players to choose previous versions of characters, excluding minor or short-lived revisions, such as the early version of Ultra Street Fighter IV (where Dhalsim had a medium kick that hit twice) that was played in Japanese arcades for about a month. Edition Select is basically an edition unto itself, and it’s interesting to speculate on how characters from different versions might now interact to establish new tiers. Unfortunately, there’s not much to do but speculate, as Edition Select is, right now, a “just-for-fun” mode that has not been explored seriously at the competitive level (which is understandable, because there’s no way the community could embrace two versions of Street Fighter IV at the same time). In the few minor Edition Select tournaments that have taken place, players have consistently opted for the classic original Street Fighter IV characters. These are surely the cheapest characters to lazily win with, since they simply deal more damage per hit, so maybe Edition Select wouldn’t be that interesting as a tournament game. But who knows. Maybe if, in a year, the community manages to completely exhaust Ultra Street Fighter IV, it will move on to Edition Select as the new game.

Felicity (1998-2002)

I first became aware of the existence of this person J. J. Abrams when I heard the name mentioned in association with the television series Lost (2004-2010), my favorite show on TV at the time, for which Abrams was credited as co-creator. Looking over his filmography, I can see that he had earlier established himself as a successful Hollywood screenwriter, having written the screenplay for the 1998 summer blockbuster Armageddon. Yet there is little doubt in my mind that the legend of “J. J. Abrams,” as we know the man now—go-to guy any time you need a new genre show to fill a TV time slot, or a geek-friendly director to helm the relaunch of a franchise with a fanatical following—began with the cult yet mainstream Lost.

How curious it was, then, to learn that, by all accounts, his active involvement with Lost barely extended past the pilot—well before any of the distinctly zany twists for which the show is mostly remembered. Since Lost, his name has been used to try to sell at least one new show every season, usually unsuccessfully so, as nearly all these shows have been rightfully short-lived, though he has shouldered little of the blame for these failures, since, again, he has been, by all accounts, barely involved with these productions in his role as executive producer. So it would seem that his reputation was built largely off works that couldn’t actually tell us very much about J. J. Abrams as an artist, since he wasn’t truly the guiding visionary behind any of them. Contrast this with another geek idol, Joss Whedon, a writer who maintains an unmistakable voice and recurring themes through his works, such that, when people say "a Joss Whedon show," that tends to mean something, in a way that, say, having Steven Spielberg's name attached to a TV series means far less (though this too has lately been muddled by Whedon handing off projects to his brother and his sister-in-law). Meanwhile, J. J. Abrams is more often recognized by his technical signatures (e.g. lens flare)—an unlikely basis, you’d think, for the cultivation of a devoted fan following.

I decided, at last, to look into the shows that were actually run by the man now directing Star Wars. I began with Felicity (1998-2002), J. J. Abrams’s first TV series, which was not a genre show at all, but a rather straight young adult drama, like so many of its contemporaries on The WB Television Network. What perhaps distinguishes Felicity from the lot of its peers is that, rather than being set in high school, it is set in college. I’ve mentioned previously how, while high school has provided the backdrop for a great many worthy shows (Friday Night Lights, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Veronica Mars), I could think of no great series about the college experience. Watching Felicity has not altered that opinion.

I’m not sure whether a show like this is targeted primarily at actual college students, at teenagers expectantly looking ahead to college, or at adults looking back nostalgically. Felicity originally aired when I was in high school, and I had no interest in watching it then. Now that I am well out of college, I find there is little to recommend the show today. Partly that is because it is simply dated in a lot of ways. For example, the characters don’t really start carrying around cellphones until toward the end of the series, and there are so many nowadays unimaginable crises that arise just because the characters couldn’t instantly reach one another by phone. Watching it on Hulu Plus, it’s also neither widescreen nor HD, which makes it look even more aged than it really is.

But, mostly, the show is just kind of dumb, which may not actually be a fault, depending on one’s interest. In my case, I recollect college as an especially idiotic period in my life, which I have no interest in revisiting. To its credit, Felicity actually represents it fairly accurately, hence why it holds little interest for me.

The whole crux of the story is that, coming out of high school, awkward and naive protagonist Felicity Porter has no idea what she wants to do with her life. She begins by abandoning her plan to study pre-med at Stanford, instead deciding suddenly to follow some unsuspecting boy she has a crush on across the country to the fictional University of New York. In her studies, she continues to drift between medicine and art, much to the chagrin of her parents, who are funding her education, and who show up about twice a season to put the gloom on the holidays by reminding her of their disapproval. Her love life is similarly wishy-washy, although this is as much due to the two male leads, who, over the four years that this love triangle persists, continually fall in and out of commitment.

Keri Russell as the title character is surely the best thing about Felicity. She manages to portray Felicity as innocent yet staunchly upright, without being insipid, because her heart is transparently earnest, as is the show as a whole. The rest of the cast give forced performances conforming to type (e.g. passionate yet unreliable hunk, steady nerd always quietly angling to move from platonic male confidant to romantic lover, white girl with whom the protagonist suddenly becomes best friends immediately after meeting, black female friend who curiously hangs out almost exclusively with young white people), and are all barely tolerable, with the notable exceptions of Amanda Foreman and Ian Gomez, who have more minor recurring roles, before earning promotions to series regular status in later seasons. Foreman plays Felicity’s goth roommate, Meghan, who begins as a sort of adversary, but gradually becomes Felicity’s most fiercely loyal ally, their friendship the best and most rewarding relationship in the entire series. Gomez, as Javier, Felicity’s gay Spanish boss at Dean & DeLuca, as well as her most unconditional supporter, provides a perhaps over-the-top portrayal of both gay men and Spaniards, but he is nevertheless one of the more entertaining and likable characters.

If Javier comes across a bit of a caricature today, Felicity was nevertheless a fairly politically progressive show for its time, positively featuring multiple gay and bisexual characters, and also including a same-sex wedding between two males (hardly the first on television, but this did come not long after the passing of the Defense of Marriage Act). The show also comes out unambiguously in support of both women’s right to access to birth control and also increased gun control, two lately high-profile issues on which our justices and legislators have proven themselves woefully antediluvian.

For the most part, however, Felicity plays out now as a generically predictable young adult melodrama, rarely profound, but for the occasionally eloquently expressed observation on young love or youthful ambition. If a self-serious adolescent soap about angsty good-looking white people and their on-and-off (and on again) romances sounds like a good time to you, still there are probably any number of more current shows to recommend that operate the same way while feeling less dated.

More than a decade removed from its conclusion, perhaps the series’ most notable episode now is “Help for the Lovelorn” (Season 2, Episode 11), an unexpected tribute to Rod Serling’s classic The Twilight Zone. J. J. Abrams wrote the episode, but they actually enlisted Lamont Johnson to direct. Johnson directed several episodes of the original The Twilight Zone back in the ‘60s, and this episode of Felicity goes far beyond a simple black-and-white aesthetic to capture the look, sound, and feel of the classic series. Characters adopt vintage attire, the environments all inexplicably regress to sets out of a previous era, and even the dialogue is written and delivered with an old-fashioned theatricality. And, of course, the cinematography, editing, and scoring are all spot-on.

One of the more half-baked ideas in the series is a framing device that has Felicity narrating early episodes to a tape recorder, the intensely personal cassette tapes intended only for the ears of her old mentor, Sally. Sally never appears on the show, but occasionally Felicity receives back audio tapes in response, where Sally is voiced by Janeane Garofalo. The device is mostly dropped without remark, once it becomes clear that this unseen mentor character serves no purpose, since Felicity finds a new female best friend, a male confidant, and eventually even a school therapist to consult whenever she is in need of guidance. It does feel rather unresolved—the way the Sally character just disappears from Felicity’s life—but perhaps this realistically reflects how a teenager’s relationships can fade, once they move away to college and form new ones. It’s just very odd whenever the recordings occasionally return later on (but Garofalo doesn’t), and Felicity opens an episode by addressing seemingly the audience (or perhaps the unresponding ether) with “Dear Sally.”

The narrative device is partially replaced by mockumentary interview segments. One of Felicity’s friends, Sean (Greg Grunberg), is a would-be entrepreneur, who comes up with a different harebrained scheme almost every episode, among them a documentary focused on his college friends (even though he himself is not a student), which forms the basis for the episode “Docuventary” (Season 1, Episode 17). The episode is not especially remarkable, but then Season 2 brings a sequel (Season 2, Episode 17 “Docuventary II”). By Season 3, the mock interview segments just become a regular part of Felicity. Sean is an obnoxious and overbearing idiot, and his subplots are the worst part of any episode. It is clear that Abrams and crew increasingly revisit this concept, not because it is a compelling subplot unto itself, but because, three years before Ricky Gervais’s The Office, they stumbled upon the discovery that reality TV-style interviews and confessional segments could be adapted to add a surprisingly effective new narrative dimension to scripted television. I’ve never heard Felicity credited as such, but, in this way, it may actually have prefigured all the mockumentary sitcoms that are now commonplace.

Despite its place as one of The WB’s first critical successes, Felicity was canceled after four seasons. In hindsight, this was probably a fitting place to end, as each season corresponded to one year in Felicity’s undergrad experience, making it, from beginning to end, “the college drama.” And it is bittersweet but true how nothing is settled by the time Felicity graduates. It is not to diminish the significance of the college experience; it is only to show that, for a great many people, college is NOT where you discover who you are, as everybody claims, but, for some, it is only that time in our lives when we are permitted the time and the vanity to devote to the pursuit—to try different things, to change our minds (and change them again), to actively wonder.

That said, it is what happens after Felicity graduates that is, in my opinion, the best and most remarkable part of the entire series. You see, as the story goes, the network had the consideration to inform the crew early on that they were being canceled, thereby allowing the writers the chance to script a proper ending. Then, at the eleventh hour, the network decided to grant the show an extension and ordered a few more episodes, AFTER the writers had already plotted out their season based on the shorter schedule. So the writers found themselves in the awkward position of having graduated Felicity, thus bringing the story to its appropriate conclusion, only to end up with five more episodes they needed to fill somehow. What to do? The answer, on this drama that had theretofore aspired to present a realistic portrayal of the college experience, was apparently to introduce the insane twist of TIME TRAVEL VIA WITCHCRAFT.

Having ended up with one guy in the “first ending” to the series, Felicity afterward has reason to regret her decision, and so she travels back in time to a point when, she thinks in hindsight, she should have chosen the other guy. I had actually heard about this twist before I started watching Felicity, and it was definitely something that motivated me to check the show out. Now that I’ve seen the entire series, I can’t say I’d recommend it, but Season 4, Episode 12 “Time Will Tell” might actually be worth watching just on its own.

When Felicity goes back in time, the results are hilariously mad. Once she herself comes to grips with the realization that time travel is actually possible, she determinedly sets to work on her mission. She quickly dumps the one guy and insists on getting together with the other guy. For her, these decisions are informed by the last regrettable dead-end year she has had to mull over. But none of the other characters have lived out that year yet, so her actions come across rash and inexplicable, which is perturbingly out of character for her. And Keri Russell is fantastic as she finally gets to have fun on this show. Granted the advantage of prescience, the typically uncertain Felicity becomes terrifyingly resolute in the decisions she makes for herself and for others. On the other hand, when she has to lie to her friends (to the extent that she must withhold from them what she knows about the future and how), her natural integrity (and persistent awkwardness) makes her a terrible liar, and so she’s continually making cryptic allusions to a future she intends to change.

The time travel gag is good for about two episodes, but has a hard time sustaining five, even with them calling back to long forgotten Felicity history by bringing in Jennifer Garner (pre-Alias) and Amy Jo Johnson (yes, the original Pink Power Ranger herself) for substantial guest parts. The last three episodes see Felicity settling back into more standard melodrama, albeit still with the bizarro twist that Felicity has traveled back in time via witchcraft, before everything wraps up (for real this time) with a clip show episode of all things.

The one other Felicity story worth mentioning is the two-part “Todd Mulcahy” (Season 1, Episode 13/14). Part 1, in particular, might be the best non-gimmicky episode of Felicity (although it’s still pretty gimmicky), and while it’s hardly a must-watch, all-time great hour of television, this relatively self-contained story, wherein Felicity is confronted with the male version of herself—a minor acquaintance from the past, who, at a crossroad in his life, has decided to journey uninvited across the country for the slimmest chance to be with her, much in the same way that she herself, in the absence of any clear direction, basically stalked the boy she had a crush on all the way to New York—rather concisely captures the core narrative of the entire Felicity saga, and does so simultaneously with good-humored self-awareness yet also sincere reverence for the material. These also happen to be the only episodes that J. J. Abrams himself directed.

Abrams was heavily involved in the first two seasons of Felicity as co-creator (together with Matt Reeves), writer, and show runner, then considerably less involved during the last two seasons. I wouldn't say the earlier seasons were noticeably better or worse than the later, nor is there anything in the series that stands out to me as distinctly reflecting the hand of J. J. Abrams at work (indeed, I’m still not sure what that would mean). Well, actually, Abrams does loudly leave his mark in one area, ironically on the last two seasons most of all.

Beginning with the third season, Felicity gets a new opening credits sequence, which lasts through to the end of the series. And it is accompanied by a brand new, singularly atrocious theme song—truly, the worst I’ve ever encountered across all the television shows I’ve ever watched in my life. After a few episodes of it bringing me close to retching, I had to look up who was responsible for this offense. Lo and behold, the song, “New Version of You,” was written by none other than J. J. Abrams himself! A regular Hollywood renaissance man, this one.

http://youtu.be/Xu4HjT9--r0

Mario Kart 8 (Nintendo, 2014)

I was leading all the way into the final turn. Cruising, even. Then I got hit by a Blue Shell, a Red Shell, another shell. I finished 7th.

Not only did I get hit by a Lightning Bolt, but it zapped me mid-jump, so I also fell into the pit. #ItHappenedToMe

Got hit right _before_ a jump. Didn't have momentum to make the jump, so I fell into the gap. #YouAreNotAlone

Finally, a break. They give me Crazy 8. Before I can use it, Shy Guy rams into me and I explode. He set off my Bob-omb. #ItDoesNotGetBetter

Game hands me Triple Mushrooms on Rainbow Road. What am I supposed to do with these? Can’t even dump them. #TakeBackTheseMushrooms

I had the Golden Mushroom, so I figured I’d cut through the rough. Lightning zapped me and left me stranded in it. #YesAllMarioKartPlayers

Lakitu fished me out of the water. Before I could even start driving, another Lakitu dumped Donkey Kong on top of me. I was Toad. #IWasToad.

The coin was really a banana peel. #NeedGlasses

Mario Kart remains frustrating as ever. The above is a fair representation of the running commentary from my siblings and I, every time we sit down and play the Grand Prix mode against the CPU in Mario Kart 8. If someone were to record the audio, transcribe it, and then have strangers read it back in solemn voices, I imagine it would sound something like the therapeutic sharing that goes on in a support group meeting.

More than any of its other series, Mario Kart exemplifies both the positive and the negative to Nintendo’s iterative design. The games are consistently excellent yet rarely surprising. The latest, Mario Kart 8 for the Wii U, is the first in HD, and, at least visually, it sparkles brilliantly.

Many of the tracks actually play up the sport of kart racing as some sort of arena spectacle, which recalls for me the podracing sequence from Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace. I also see it as carrying on the legacy and glossy sheen of F-Zero, Nintendo’s other racing series, which was last seen in action two console generations ago.

The similarities to F-Zero, specifically the 3-D installments, F-Zero X (1998) and F-Zero GX (2003), extend beyond the visuals, as Mario Kart 8 features a number of vertically winding tracks, with sections that will have players racing along slanted roads or even fully perpendicular to the horizon. There are even anti-gravity segments, which feature the most notable new mechanic.

Vaguely reminiscent of Burnout, making contact with another kart while in anti-gravity mode will result in both racers getting an immediate speed boost. Factoring in also that the anti-gravity sections are very often the parts of the track without railings, the high speed and the feeling of danger during these segments provide for the game’s wildest, most exhilarating moments.

Quite a number of Mario Kart 8’s original courses are staged in the sky, the better to showcase the expanded vertical component. But the most original course is surely Mount Wario, the final track of the Star Cup. Mount Wario is not a circuit with laps, but rather is raced continuously down a snow-covered mountain. Not entirely an original concept (but new to Mario Kart), it resembles an SSX downhill course, cramming in as many elements as feasible—ramps to trick off, midair targets to hit, cave and forest areas, moguls and slalom sections—in rapid succession to create the most seamlessly varied experience in Mario Kart 8.

Mario Kart 8 includes more playable characters than ever before to toy around with, including nine "brand new" racers. But, seriously, who wanted all the Koopalings, let alone such complete oddball unlockables as—SPOILER—Baby Rosalina and Pink Gold Peach, especially while favorites like Birdo and Boo are MIA? One thing I appreciated in Mario Kart DS, my favorite entry, was that almost every racer had unique stats, so you might play around with all of them just to get a different experience (and because Mission Mode forced you to use everyone). In Mario Kart 8, why would I ever use Larry, if his stats are just the same as Toad, Koopa, and Shy Guy, all of whom are much cooler characters?

For all the bells and whistles, the experience of playing Mario Kart 8 is altogether familiar. The meat of the game is the Grand Prix. You can still try to beat the staff ghosts in Time Trial mode, and Balloon Battle also returns, although it's very lazily implemented this time (not that I've cared for that mode since Super Mario Kart (1992), when I only played it because, as a nine-year-old, I was not a skilled enough player to enjoy the actual race modes). But what I’ve traditionally loved about the Grand Prix in Mario Kart is that it includes support for local split-screen multiplayer—a rare feature in the 16-bit days, and seemingly even rarer now. Mario Kart 8’s Grand Prix mode even accommodates up to four players simultaneously.

Playing with other humans helps to make racing against the CPU a little fairer. With unlockable cups, classes, characters, vehicles, and stamps at stake, players may be incentivized, especially in the ruthless 150cc class, to transgress into unsanctioned team racing against the CPU. This is no worse than the cheating and collusion that the CPU itself engages in, of course. As always, the game will randomly designate one CPU racer at the start of a Grand Prix to be the players’ “rival,” who will consistently place highly. Even if you knock them down a few times during a race, they will somehow miraculously fight their way back ahead of the other CPU racers, such that a Grand Prix cannot be won without outracing that rival specifically.

Even on 150cc, simply outracing them would pose no difficulty. But Mario Kart isn’t a pure racer, and what inevitably frustrates is the unavoidable cheap shots that can snatch victory out of one’s grasp. The worse your position, the better the items you receive. Being in first just means you get to be the target of everyone else’s assaults. The worst part is that the most devastating items, Blue Shells and Lightning, are only handed out to the poorest racers. Such tools still won’t suddenly vault a racer from last place into contention, so the Blue Shell doesn’t actually help the user; it just screws with the people in the lead.

This is an old song now, the cheapness merely reflecting Nintendo’s longstanding socialist philosophy toward competitive multiplayer, also seen all over the Mario Party series. Nintendo does not equate ability with performance in Mario Kart, nor, theoretically, performance with fun. I even understand it, given that Nintendo designs its games for all audiences, and so needs to ensure that a young child, who might never be able to win a race against a hardcore enthusiast gamer, can nevertheless feel engaged while hurling thunderbolts from the rear. But I play to win, and it’s really not my concern whether some five-year-old novice is having fun while eating my dust. That never happens anyway, because I don’t play with five-year-old novices. It’s only ever the CPU running these item scams against me. Are you telling me the game needs to handicap me in order to preserve the CPU’s ego? I also swear, any time I’m not actually looking back at them, the CPU racers behind me just start flying.

Yes, the game is still fun and worth playing, despite the moments of frustration. It has charm, the controls and physics are perfect, and it’s great for parties. It is both the best racing game and the best local multiplayer game of the moment. Unless you take the game online, it does run out of content quite quickly. Once I beat all the cups on 150cc, there wasn’t much else for me to do. And how anticlimactic! All you get for it is Mirror Mode and the same lame ending credits that I already saw on completing the lower difficulties.

Uh Huh Her - Future Souls Tour (Belly Up Tavern, June 19, 2014)

I did not know that Leisha Hailey, bassist for the electropop duo Uh Huh Her, was also an actress, apparently best known as one of the stars of Showtime's The L Word (2004 - 2009). I did not know that Hailey was, in real life, an out lesbian, who had dated none other than k.d. lang herself for a number of years. I did not realize that Camila Grey, lead vocalist and guitarist of Uh Huh Her, was also openly gay, and had, in fact, been romantically linked to Hailey. I had not heard the story of their having been kicked off a Southwest flight, allegedly for arguing with a flight attendant over their public display of affection ("Leisha Hailey escorted off Southwest jet after kissing girlfriend." Los Angeles Times, September 26, 2011). I honestly had no idea that Hailey and Grey were lesbian icons of any sort. But that became very clear very quickly, as I went to see Uh Huh Her perform at the Belly Up in Solana Beach, CA, where the crowd was 95 percent female, mostly girls each with an arm around another girl. And, in case that wasn't clue enough (and I never jump to conclusions!), I overheard the girl next to me say to her companion, "They're such lesbian icons, y'know?" Well, now I know.

Prior to seeing them perform live, all I knew about Uh Huh Her was that I really dug their debut album, Common Reaction (2008), at its best resembling the progeny of Depeche Mode and Garbage—channeling the new wave in its synths, and with grittier vocals and an all-around darker, moodier, subtly more menacing sound than many contemporary electropop acts. With their recent third LP, Future Souls (2014), they went entirely electronic. While the album has overall more of a dance sound, its best tracks ("Innocence," "Bullet," "Fine Lines White Lies") retain the soulful swells, intimate harmonies, and haunting edge of Common Reaction, along with more polished and sophisticated production that lends the synth a cinematic flavor.

The quality of the songwriting also came to the fore during the live show, where, in contrast to the arrangements on the Future Souls album, Hailey and Grey stuck to their bass and guitar almost throughout, only switching to their keyboards on a few select songs or parts of songs. With just a lone drummer added to back them up, the sound was more minimalist than on the album, yet surprisingly it had the feel of a hard rock show. Missing a large portion of the synth component, Uh Huh Her live did not sound very much like they do on the albums, yet the melodies and lyrics carried through intact and continued to stand out, while Camila Grey's raw guitar solos were impressively legit.

Edge of Tomorrow (Doug Liman, 2014)

Edge of Tomorrow, about a future soldier who finds himself endlessly reliving the same hopeless battle against a race of aliens dubbed "Mimics," effectively plays out as a cross between Groundhog Day (1993) and Starship Troopers (1997). Well, the visuals, composed of shots of soldiers in armored battle suits running and gunning across desolate arenas, borrow even more directly from sci-fi shooter games such as Halo and Gears of War than from Starship Troopers. And the video game-like aspect to the film runs deeper than just the visuals. As protagonist William Cage (Tom Cruise) is repeatedly killed by the Mimics, only to "reset" after each death again to the previous morning to give it another go, the process resembles the experience of playing a classically challenging video game.

Lately, I've been playing Konami's Otomedius Excellent (2011) for the Xbox 360. A spin-off of the Gradius series of horizontally scrolling shooters, it is not an especially difficult game on the shmup spectrum, yet it is nevertheless unfair, in the way that all shmups are. Lives are fragile; unless you have a forcefield, a single hit of any kind will be enough to destroy your ship. Yet there are enemy attacks that, I contend, cannot possibly be evaded on pure reaction. And even if you could move out of the way on reaction, if you were to fail to evade it in the "correct" direction, you might just end up cornering yourself with no chance whatsoever to dodge the next attack. But, of course, the game has no expectation that you will be able to avoid everything on reaction, nor that you will be able to perform well at all on your first attempt. This style of game demands rather that you learn through repeated play and repeated failure, only prevailing after having committed to memorizing all the enemy patterns, so that you can always position yourself in the right place to dodge an enemy attack before it even happens.

Likewise, in Edge of Tomorrow, Cage fails repeatedly, but each time he learns, and the next time he is able to exploit that knowledge when everything resets. When eventually he starts gunning down Mimics before other soldiers can even spot them, it may seem to everyone else that he has the reflexes and battle instincts of a god of war, when, in reality, reflexes and instinct have little to do with it. He is indeed able to hone his abilities to expert levels through the unspeakable number of hours that all his resets come to comprise, but, more than that, he knows the future, because he has already lived it (having also died many times to make it this far), and so he knows what the enemy is going to do before it even happens. This ability is, in fact, the only thing that permits him to even survive, let alone win, a battle against the Mimics. Although Cage begins as a common man with no combat training, the truth is that even humanity's most decorated soldier, Rita Vrataski (Emily Blunt), stands no chance trying to fight the Mimics without the advantage of foresight, and seeing her fall repeatedly, always suddenly and rather feebly, reaffirms the disheartening fragility of life and the fundamental unfairness of the reaper.

Edge of Tomorrow is based on a screenplay adapted from the Japanese light novel All You Need Is Kill (2004), whose author, Hiroshi Sakurazaka, has stated that video games were indeed his inspiration for the story. Based on the movie's early trailers, I honestly expected (and hoped) for the video game connection to be actually made explicit in the plot. I had this theory, actually, that Cage and Vrataski were unknowingly video game characters, who somehow became aware that they were being made to play the same brutally themed game over and over again, though still with no understanding of why or how to stop it. Basically, I was hoping that it would be like that classic The Onion story about Solid Snake pondering the meaning of the endless loop of his video game existence.

I was disappointed that there wasn't more of a twist to Edge of Tomorrow's story. The "time loop" plot device has already been done several times in fiction, perhaps most famously in Groundhog Day. The concept was also similarly handled in the greatest episode of Stargate SG-1, "Window of Opportunity" (Season 4, Episode 6), which I feel actually treated it more purposefully. In Edge of Tomorrow, there is no great explanation behind the time loop, nor behind the existence of the Mimics, who really are just malicious alien monsters.

The pleasure of this movie is in how it spends the loops. Cage, not a soldier at first, though luckily already in peak physical shape within the window of the loop, has to learn clumsily and comically the hard way through trial and error how to progress inch-by-inch toward victory. The movie perhaps returns too often to the same joke of Cage almost wearily informing other characters (and the audience) what's about to happen, to their astonishment, with such exact attention to detail of someone who must have lived these moments hundreds of times already, far beyond what is depicted. But it is cleverly constructed to keep viewers on their toes, as they realize that their first time witnessing a scene may be Cage's thousandth time experiencing it.

Where Edge of Tomorrow actually differs from other time loop stories, such as Groundhog Day, is in Cage's consistent earnestness. Rather than getting bored to numbness, he's more just saddened by the Sisyphean futility of it all. He has moments of exhaustion. He gets demoralized at times and has to take the occasional break. But he never really "has fun" with his ability. The movie forgoes the obligatory moment when the looping protagonist decides just to lay a kiss on an unsuspecting female, knowing that, when they reset, she won't remember. Cage never takes the opportunity to tell other characters how he really feels about them, whether positively or negatively, knowing that there will be no one to hold him accountable. On the contrary, the most compelling aspect of the film may actually be the way Cage's relationship with Vrataski continually deepens, but only on one side, because she can never remember the experiences they've shared. On the one hand, he surely appreciates how profoundly he comes to know her life, her mind, her spirit over the, for all we know, hundreds of years that he is able to spend with her. On the other hand, it must also be somewhat of a torment for him that she can never have more than a day or two to develop any emotions for him before her regard resets back to zero.

What we learn about Cage is that, at his core, he really is a good person—someone who does the right thing when no one is watching. I don't personally read this as any kind of redemption story a la Groundhog Day. As the story begins, Cage is a coward, who hopes to avoid combat any way he can. His spinelessness is good for a few laughs, but, honestly, I was totally on his side, and I think maybe the writers were too. The film provides a none-too-flattering portrayal of the military, which is at least a sub-antagonist in this story. In truth, even today's weapons would be enough to annihilate the Mimics several thousands of times over. Yet the military repeatedly dooms humankind in the movie, because its leaders are inflexible and preoccupied with schlong-wagging. Only a crazy person would willingly follow such command. If the time looping in Edge of Tomorrow has any allegorical dimension, it must relate to the tedious and inert bureaucracy of the military machine.

One last thing I appreciate about Edge of Tomorrow is that it evinces a sincere affection on the part of its cast and crew for the main characters, who are fun to follow along with and easy to root for (even when Cage is being a coward). Contrast this with current hot blockbuster screenwriters Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman (Transformers, Star Trek Into Darkness, The Amazing Spider-Man 2), who, for all their success, seem to write always as though with limited respect for their own work, resulting in movies that degenerate from promising components into cheap stunts done for their own sake. Edge of Tomorrow, meanwhile, although it borrows its aesthetic from some of the most violent video games on the market, is good-humored and surprisingly gently themed. If the ending wraps up the war a little too neatly and easily, still its final shot, one of the more applause-worthy in recent memory, feels earned, not through manipulative stunts, cheap romance, or overly clever plot twists, but simply through respectfully and honestly written characters who are cool and admirable.

Little Daylight - "Mona Lisa" (Live X-Session)

From a 91X "X-Session," rising Brooklyn-based group Little Daylight performs a sweet acoustic version of one of their earliest compositions, "Mona Lisa":

http://youtu.be/RbjodrPR3h0

And, off their forthcoming debut LP, Hello Memory, here's the studio version of "Mona Lisa," a fun synthpop track blending both live instruments and electronic elements, along with alluring vocals and infectious hooks and choruses:

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Little Daylight's Hello Memory is due out July 15. You can pre-order it on iTunes.

Mortal Kombat (NetherRealm Studios, Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment, 2011)

By the time Midway went bankrupt in 2009, the strength of the Mortal Kombat brand had diminished greatly from its 16-bit heyday, when it was a controversy-courting cultural phenomenon. The series transitioned uneasily to 3-D with the lackluster Mortal Kombat 4 (1997), but it weathered the demise of arcades better than most fighting games, rebounding after director Ed Boon and his Midway Games team refocused to exclusively target the home market with 2002's Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance. A generation later, however, Mortal Kombat was again struggling to stay relevant. 2008's Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe for the PS3 and Xbox 360 was a title suffering an identity crisis—too mechanically crude to satisfy competitive fighting game players, too bare-bones a package to long occupy more mainstream gamers, and too low-budget to try to get by on its looks. Even the die-hard Mortal Kombat fans were up in arms over the game's "Teen" rating and accompanying softer fatalities.

If nothing else, the underwhelming crossover perhaps paved the way for Warner Bros. to step in and purchase both the Mortal Kombat brand and its Chicago-based developer, to be rechristened NetherRealm Studios. Given this new lease on life, Boon and his team took the time to reevaluate what had worked about past successes, to truly get at the essence of Mortal Kombat, as a guide to determine what direction the series should take moving forward. The end result was 2011's reboot, titled simply Mortal Kombat.

Commonly referred to as "Mortal Kombat 9" (in order to distinguish it from the arcade original), this most recent installment dials the story and characters back to the beginning, retelling the plots of the first three games (i.e. the ones that most people are actually familiar with and fond of), though with subtle yet significant changes here and there. Every character from the original Mortal Kombat through Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 is included, although the traditional bosses remain unplayable, and the centaur-like Motaro is relegated to only appearing in the background and briefly in the story. Meanwhile, the only characters drawn from the 3-D installments are the villainous sorcerer Quan Chi from Mortal Kombat 4 and, as DLC or in the Game of the Year edition, the blind swordsman Kenshi from Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance. Two new(-ish) additions to the roster include another robot ninja and another female ninja (DLC). Guest characters Kratos from God of War (PS3-exclusive) and Freddy Krueger(!) (DLC) round out the cast.

There was clearly a conscious effort here to take the series back to its roots, and that extends to the gameplay, which has triumphantly reverted to being entirely 2-D. The combat is classic and familiar yet also refreshing. Gone is the bloat of all the stances and weapon styles introduced in the 3-D games. There is a "change stance" button, but the effect is purely aesthetic; you can have either your character's front or their back facing the camera, but it won't alter their attacks in any way. This back-to-basics approach was initiated in Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe, but the reboot even dispenses with that game's sidestep. It's also a much sharper and more polished game besides, no longer plagued by floaty jumping or instances of weird collision. The combat is fast, maybe not the most fluid, but accessible while still possessing enough depth to give it some competitive legs.

Evo 2011 Mortal Kombat Grand Finals

http://youtu.be/MycRHqvHpZU

Mortal Kombat remains confidently unique, a 2-D fighter that is not a Street Fighter derivative. Projectiles pass through one another, normal attacks inflict chip damage, and you have to press a button in order to block. Nor is the game comparable to 3-D fighters, such as Tekken and Soul Calibur. The ranged game in Mortal Kombat is more of a factor than even in Street Fighter, as virtually every character has one or more projectiles. There is a certain degree of homogeneity to the characters, as everybody walks and jumps about the same, and they mostly all have the same uppercut, jump kick, and sweep.

The one major new Street Fighter-esque mechanic is a revamped three-level super meter. At one bar, the player can perform an enhanced special attack (similar to "EX moves" in Street Fighter III and IV). At two bars, you can perform a combo breaker to get yourself out of trouble. Saving up a full three bars gains you access to your character's "X-Ray Attack." These risky yet devastating attacks are Mortal Kombat's take on the super combo—a first for the series. They also provide this installment's signature effect, wherein the camera zooms in and enters X-ray view to show the extreme damage inflicted as it happens—bones shattering and blades piercing the skull. Landing an X-Ray Attack can quickly turn the tide of battle, and yet, even as powerful as these moves are, the damage they deal to the opponent's health bar doesn't quite live up to just how horrific the attacks are made to look. It's a bit silly watching a character's skull get bashed in by an X-Ray Attack, only to have them get right back up and ready to continue the fight. You would expect such an attack to be fatal. In fact, Liu Kang's X-Ray Attack is his classic fatality—a cartwheel into an uppercut—from Mortal Kombat and Mortal Kombat II. At the competitive level, of course, the hard-to-land X-Ray Attacks are seldom seen, meter being most often reserved for the combo breakers.

For the majority of consumers, who will never play at a competitive level, Mortal Kombat includes a ton of single-player content. The game has received much praise for its story mode in particular, which many reviewers have stated should be the model for all fighting game story modes. In reality, the format is nothing revolutionary. The structure, alternating between gameplay (i.e. fighting) and non-interactive story sequences, is essentially the same formula that has been employed in most triple-A games of other genres for as long as video games have aspired to be like movies. Within fighting games, Guilty Gear and the other Arc System Works games have included story modes that basically operate the same way, only they have had to make do with flat images and text (and maybe voiceover), compared to Mortal Kombat's fully animated cut scenes. This game's own immediate predecessor, Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe, included a story mode that was done in the exact same manner, advancing the plot through voiced and animated cut scenes in between fights, yet it received barely any notice, probably because the story was insufferably stupid.

What elevates this game's story mode so far above all those others, ultimately, is not any inspired narrative technique. Rather, the story itself is simply entertaining. At least, the back two-thirds of it is. The first part, which retells the story of the first Mortal Kombat, is overly familiar and simplistic—a vaguely mystical take on Enter the Dragon, or any number of early Van Damme movies based around underground martial arts tournaments. Or if you've ever seen the 1995 Mortal Kombat movie (as I have multiple times for some reason), this is just an uglier version of that. Although the game generally looks pretty good—better than Mortal Kombat ever has before, with even the various ninja characters appearing visually distinct—the cinematics, rendered in real-time, are merely serviceable, and are especially disappointing after the awesome pre-rendered opening to Mortal Kombat: Armageddon (2006).

The chapters based on Mortal Kombat II and Mortal Kombat 3 are stronger, thanks in no small part to the addition of archvillain Shao Kahn, surely the series' most transcendent creation and one of the greatest video game antagonists, period. Beyond gameplay, the pitiless emperor of Outworld's personality comes to permeate the series. As the announcer, his booming delivery has become forever attached to such series-defining exhortations as "Fight!" and "Finish Him!" And, while cheap video game bosses may be common enough, perhaps no other has such brass as Shao Kahn to pause mid-battle to add insult to injury, taunting the player repeatedly with lengthy and cutting barbs. His obsessed schemes to invade Earthrealm through victory in Mortal Kombat tournaments frankly defy all reason, but his brutality and treachery at least provide for some enjoyably lowbrow material for the story mode.

Even for players who already know the plots of the first three games, this retelling is really the first time the story has been told via a (mostly) linear, coherent, and fleshed-out narrative. In the original games, the only in-game story material consisted of prologues and the various characters' bios and arcade mode endings, which often conflicted with one another. There was probably a story bible somewhere that detailed the canonical sequence of events, but you would have had to venture beyond the games themselves to learn why, for example, Johnny Cage was missing from Mortal Kombat 3. At last, in the reboot, players can learn what happened to Jax's arms between Mortal Kombat II and Mortal Kombat 3, discover how Kabal came to be so disfigured, and experience the origin story of Noob Saibot. Some questions linger. For example, what the hell is Nightwolf's deal?

The movie sequences are easy to follow and enjoy, but, as a game, the story mode is not quite as fun to play, and it doesn't do a great job of teaching players the mechanics. Although every heroic character gets a turn in the spotlight, combat can quickly become a dull exercise of just repeating the same jump kick with every character, as the most efficient way to get past the AI and advance the story. As is typical with fighting game story modes, there are also way too many totally contrived matches, where one character will randomly run into another character, and they'll immediately start exchanging blows over some misunderstanding. I also have no idea how the Mortal Kombat rules committee justifies having so many tournament rounds pitting the player one-on-two against a tag team of opponents.

Once done with the sizable story mode, there is still the more traditional arcade mode as well, where you can fight through a ladder of opponents and unlock your character's ending upon defeating Shao Kahn. With a playable cast of 27 characters (+4 DLC/GOTY additions, +1 PS3 exclusive), that's a lot of endings to unlock, although these are done up in the classic style—narration over still images—and considerably more inane than the story mode cinematics.

Most of the offline player's time will probably be spent in the "Challenge Tower," consisting of 300 short challenges. These include fights with special victory conditions, as well as a number of mini-games, including a shell game (which uses severed heads in place of shells) and the classic "Test Your Might" bonus round. Many of the challenges are conceptually clever, although, without an attached story to motivate progress, there's no real hook to keep players going for round after round. I wish some of the challenge content had been integrated into the story mode to give it more variety, a la the story mode in Jojo's Bizarre Adventure for the PS1 (1999), which I still consider to be the greatest single-player mode in any fighting game.

Completing challenges earns the player coins, which can be spent to unlock concept art. There is enough art to unlock that it would take the average player weeks to complete the collection. I personally had no interest in this, so I didn't delve very far into the challenges. I should point out that I did not grow bored of the game in a vacuum. Were I a younger gamer, or one with only funds enough to buy a new game every few months, I'm sure Mortal Kombat could have kept me happily occupied for a very long time. As it is, I simply have other games to move on to that I'd rather spend my time on.

But I truly admire NetherRealm for its commitment to producing a fighting game that actually includes substantial and worthwhile (and, unlike in the previous generation's Mortal Kombat titles, germane—no puzzle or kart racer games this time) single-player content, and not at the expense of the competitive component. Comparing Mortal Kombat to Street Fighter IV, certainly Capcom's game has more refined art and has cultivated a much healthier competitive scene. But, to almost anybody who is not a part of that competitive world (i.e. the vast majority of gamers), Mortal Kombat has so much more to offer. And most of the modes and features that Mortal Kombat has over other fighting games are actually incredibly obvious inclusions to anyone who hasn't already been conditioned to expect only the bare minimum that is the standard in the genre.

One feature that I especially appreciate is Mortal Kombat's tag team mode. You can play versus matches with up to four players, and you can even fight through the arcade mode with a partner cooperatively. It's not perfect. The arcade mode endings only recognize the first player. This led to an awkward moment, when my brother and I completed it as Liu Kang and Raiden. After my Liu Kang fell to Shao Kahn, my brother as Raiden finished the fight... only to watch as Liu Kang jumped in to steal the kill in the succeeding cinematic, followed by an even more awkward ending, where Liu Kang actually killed Raiden in order to take the thunder god's powers and position for himself. Nevertheless, it's a lot of fun being able to take the fighting beyond one-on-one, and it boggles my mind why this isn't more standard an option. Capcom doesn't have tag modes, it has tag games. Namco is the same. The only times Tekken includes tag team gameplay, the word "tag" has to be in the game's title. In Mortal Kombat, it is humbly included as though a matter of course.

Much as it has always forged its own path as a fighting game, apart from its Japanese peers, here Mortal Kombat looks not to Street Fighter as the standard for what a fighting game should include, but is rather more comparable to such a genre-transcending industry leader as Call of Duty, which receives equal attention for its campaign and online components, or to EA's sports games, which are full of modes and options to accommodate playing alone, online, or with three friends locally.

Mortal Kombat, as a brand, will probably never again be as prominent as it was in the '90s. It's certainly not as novel anymore. If anything, the gratuitous gore is, along with the ridiculously skimpy outfits for the female characters, the most unbearable aspect of the game for me, as some of these HD fatalities are truly stomach-churning. But 2011's reboot is, better than novel, a legitimately great game, which all other fighting game developers should look to and learn from, if they mean for this genre to survive and expand beyond the hardcore competitive audience.