The first time you heard this phrase, you had probably just been beaten into a pulp by some white-clad 1870s Chinese railroad worker who, apart from subjecting you to the brutally repetitive pugilism of the kind favored by Jean Claude Van Damme, also happened to shoot lightning from his fingertips. What happened next blew your eleven-year-old mind out of its brain case, pulling your twitching, prepubescent spinal cord out along with it. Because that's precisely what happened: your bathrobe-clad lightning-summoner adversary grabbed your pathetically lolling head and tore it right off your shoulders, de-spining you and holding aloft the gruesome remains of your cool blue ice ninja dude. Your mouth dropped agape at the horrifying awesomeness of your avatar's mutilation, and in an awed whisper you intoned, "Rad!"

   What you experienced so long ago was a groundbreaking scientific innovation known as a "Fatality". Fatalities killed Street Fighter. Fatalities propelled this otherwise unimaginative and restrictive 2D fighter to the forefront of the video gaming community and turned it into an instant classic. More than a decade later, Fatality technology has morphed more times than should be legal, experimenting with sundry linguistic variations such as "Animality" and "Brutality". Occasionally the MK team would blaze daringly past the blockades of rhyming mores, like that time they introduced the ability to fatality oneself and called it [guess now! - ed.] "Hara-Kiri".

   Of course, the Mortal Kombat franchise has done more than that in recent history. MK Deadly Alliance introduced an interesting and nuanced three-style fighting system, which MK Deception improved upon (vastly) with a much needed breaker mechanic. Deception also introduced experimental mini-games that were equally entertaining in their own right, such as Chess Kombat (for the intellectual bruiser) and Puzzle Kombat, and also introduced interactive arenas that had level fatality traps. But by far the greatest contribution these two games provided to the legacy of the series was an incredibly compelling and complex canonical story grounded in a fully fleshed-out fantasy universe. Deception's brilliant Konquest Mode, which basically amounted to a condensed adventure game that could easily stand on its own, allowed you to explore this universe's rich history in an absorbing manner.

Get over here! And get on with it!

   Alright, alright, alright! Geez. Right, so this new game, Mortal Kombat: Armageddon, is supposed to be the defining MK game for its console generation, bringing together damn near every single Mortal Kombat character ever conceived, plus a few new ones, for a ludicrous 62 character roster. [Couldn't push it a little more to 69, eh? Whimps! - ed.] The title itself suggests it is the fighter to end all fighters, the pinnacle of digital martial art dueling, and heralds the end of the gaming world as we know it. Dubious? Well, you should be.

   Armageddon moves away from the more grounded, tactical style of its recent predecessors and returns to the frantic high-flying arcade feel of the original games. The emphasis in this iteration is on the multiplayer experience over that of the single player - for better and for worse.

Ready...fight!

Witty transitional heading! Laugh at my inimitable brand of humor!

   However, the sheer number of characters lays bare [with downright uncomfortable nudity - ed.] the repetitiveness of the special moves they have. Often times the moves only have cosmetic differences, but other times characters blatantly share the exact same move (e.g. Jarek, Kira, and Kano all have the same cannonball move). Mortal Kombat is notorious for cloning (Sub-Zero and Scorpion were originally the same character model with different colors, for instance), and the trend has not stopped. Not enough effort was put into individualizing many of the characters, and this detracts from the power of the game's impressive roster.

   Oh yeah, the roster. Sixty-freaking-two characters! It's still mighty, even if it does get a bit repetitive. They even bring back Sareena (!), a character that only shows up in the obscure Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub-Zero. Additonally, each player profile created can harbor one fighter each, adding even more fighters for as long as your memory cards and your sanity allow.

   I have to say, though, that once you kreate your own character and go through the trouble of naming and painstakingly customizing your fighting styles to suit your desires, you will never play as a stock character again. There's no advantage to it; you can pretty much tweak every move and every combo your character can do until you reach a balance that is tailored to your gaming needs. Many parts of this character kreation are admittedly weak: only swords and axes are available for selection, axe weapons are few and have a paltry selection of moves, costume choices are either perfect for what you want or entirely unable to satisfy your basic desires, and most of the special moves are fire related, making it extremely difficult to make a character who isn't a flamer. Despite these shortcomings, no other game that I know of has a similar system, and this is certainly the only game in which I have found myself fighting (and, admittedly, losing to) Kofi Annan and Jack Thompson. This is also the only game in which I felt the impulse to kreate something as zany as a zombie Abraham Lincoln and was actually able to do so. This is without a doubt the funnest (yes, funnest) part of the game. Kreated fighters make the online experience almost as much fun as licking chocolate syrup off a hoo...um...a hookah. Yeah.

Speaking of chocolate, enough of the main course! Bring me dessert!

   Fine. Well, in terms of mini-games, puzzle kombat and chess kombat have been eliminated, but in favor of something far less thinkful and much lots more funwise. Get this: Motor Kombat. Scorpion on a raceway! It's Mario Kart with fatalities! "Eetza me, I'M DEAD!" Ha ha ha ha ha! *wipes tears of self-amusement from eyes* Aahh. Well. Anyway. While obviously nowhere near as deep as Mario Kart Double Dash, it's a much more balanced and unpredictable game, surprisingly. Literally anybody can win, at any point in time, from any position in the race. It's that freakin' balanced, and at times incredibly daunting to play. Motor Kombat is just sheer brilliance; all it needs is more playable characters and this thing could become a stand-alone game. Hooray for dumbing down!

Do the rest of the goodies taste that good?

   Sorry little Timmy, but no. You picked the wrong "every flavor bean", I am afraid. The deeper we delve into the game, the more sh*t-tastic it gets. I won't even bother talking about the story; to do so would be a waste of time. Remember the awesome-icity of Deception's storyline? Yeah, well, they took that storyline, shoved it up a diarrhetic elephant's sphincter, swirled it around a bit, and then took it out and packaged it with a bunch of ebola-ridden chew toys for padding and gave it to a premature incubator baby to play with. It's that awful. Maybe even more so. Also, tangentially [I said tanGENTIALly, not tanGENITALly! - ed.], I'm a terrible human being and I'm going to hell, first class.

   Even more heartbreaking is what those scheissköpfen in charge of developing the Konquest Mode did to what used to be the franchise's newest and most glittering feature. The previous iteration of Konquest Mode encouraged the player to roam about freely, interact with the environment and with NPCs, and even to backtrack across dimensions to accomplish peripheral tasks that were nonetheless engrossing, varied, and rewarding. In Armageddon, Konquest mode has been relegated to a coin collection chore. You play an imbecilic character (whose name is not worth uttering) trapped in a world where all you can do is walk in a straight line, pick up coins and open chests [NOT belonging to Pamela Anderson - ed.], and wade through repetitive minions. Over and over and over and over and over again. Allow me to stress: you walk in a straight line. All the time. I'm so traumatized, I can't even finish this se

   The unlockables in the Krypt are, for the most part, not worth the effort. The overwhelming pecentage is a bunch of worthless notes and koncept art that is of no use to anybody. There are unlockable secondary outfits (w00t, I guess), buyable new characters, and some new arenas, too many of which have no interactivity or level fatalities at all. Boring! There are some videos on different martial art styles, but all are way too short to be even mildly edifying.

   Now we get to interface and performance. I'm wondering if Mortal Kombat is actually a reference to the struggle that I have to go through to get the game to do anything. Dialog boxes spawn like zombified jackrabbits all over my screen, swamping me with redundant and awkwardly worded warnings and proclamations that reduntantly tell me in an awkward fashion that I am intending to accomplish a task that the game is freaking out about. Profiles need to be loaded and unloaded practically whenever I navigate to a different screen, load times are abysmal across the board, and the interface for online play is perhaps the most obtuse and frustrating system I have ever encountered.

Hey Raf, you're starting to whine a little.

   Yeah, you're right. Okay, let's wrap it up: Mortal Kombat Armageddon does not deliver on what it promises. It often feels more like a beta version of a game, full of glitches and underdeveloped segments. That being said, the main aspect of the game, the ability to beat the turd out of somebody else, is quite well done. It also has a few truly entertaining gems, like Motor Kombat and a rough but versatile Kreate a Fighter mode. This is enough to make the game worth your time and worth purchasing. But be warned: it'll prove to be a troublesome brat of a child at times.

       ... Rafael Gamboa