#1189

Gameplay of the characters Shang Tsung and “Matches” in the Gameboy port of Mortal Kombat 1.

Well, here’s a couple of oddities. I didn’t have a plan to even look at Shang Tsung until I was looking up on game genie codes for this game again, and notices something called “Matches”. We’ll get to that in a second.

So, Shang Tsung first. Interestingly, he’s relatively playable, but unfortunately he doesn’t have any moves. This means of course that he basically can’t do anything. When you press either of the attack buttons, he’ll sort of disappear and, bizarrely, turn temporarily invincible, so if you time it correctly you can technically avoid being hit as a result. Neat, but ultimately just a curiosity as he can’t attack.

Then you have “Matches”. As you probably gathered from the title, yeah, this is basically MK’s Wild Card. It’s a strange glitch character with a bunch of assets which flash on screen randomly, mainly those relating to special moves and fatalities, implying that they’re stored in the character slot or something like that. Matches can attack, but it isn’t consistent at all and hits only seem to land at random, and there’s a huge chance of him glitching out the game as you see here. The first time it happens, well, it’s just beautiful, a classic even; it locks up the game and emit a beautifully ear-piercingly loud noise that Lou Reed only wishes he could have produced. The second time, it seems to have put the opponent in some kind of win screen for some reason. Why it does this, well, who really knows; just something to do with the data in the character I suppose. Matches just generally seems mess up the game in general, the point that one time I tried to play as him he actually caused Goro to be the opponent for some reason. Very odd but, hey, haven’t had a strange oddity like this to look at in a good many years.

That’s it for MK1. Next up, MK2 for the Game Gear, where we’ll see a surprisingly playable Kintaro.