User blog:Selto854/Community Discussion!: Pilot

Hey there everyone, your resident Selto here!

I'm writing this to try out something with the community. I want to see if this will get any traction so we can do it more often. As evidenced by the title of this blog post, I'm calling it a Community Discussion! because... well, it's a discussion with the community!

Each week/month, depending on how popular this is, I'll put up a blog post or something about a topic that the community can discuss and stuff. Friendly, of course, not flaming or anything. Well, without further ado, I guess I'll unveil the topic for the pilot!

What do you think is the most influential series of games or game in the industry?

I guess since I'm the blog poster I'll lay out my decision...

Looking back, I think that my decision would have to be Mortal Kombat. I think that it's influential in that, while not single-handedly, a lot of the effort can be given to the original title in creating the ESRB. As I'm sure most of you know, back then Mortal Kombat was pretty shocking to everyone because no one had seen that level of violence in games before. Severed heads with spinal cords attached, still-beating hearts ripped out of torsos, it was every teenaged boy's dream.

As the franchise got bigger and new installments came out, the gore dial was toned up and the characters came in like a rush of water. Digitized actors changed the game; most games back then had animated graphics, and the fluidity of the graphics themselves were the icing on the cake. Although not the first game to do this, it was also popular in that it used pallete swaps--Bi-Han, Scorpion, and Reptile--to make entirely new characters. It spawned a number of imitators that tried to use digitized graphics to no avail and also games that tried to include mass amount of gore in them to rival the series, also with no success.

It also was revolutionary in that it used actual fighting styles in the games themselves and tried to educate the gamers, as evidenced by Deadly Alliance's Konquest Mode. Styles used include the Mantis style, Tai Chi, and Jeet Kune Do. It could've just used the real styles and stopped, but, and I can't stress this enough, IT TRIED TO TEACH US WHAT THEY WERE. That's awesome, if you ask me.

Well, that was my opinion. What about you guys? What do you all think? Do you disagree?