Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

Oh, boy! I blame my low college GPA on a Mortal Kombat addiction. They had a MK2 machine in our commons next to the pool tables that I'd play during every free moment, then sprinting to and from classes. Then later during junior and senior years when I moved a mile across campus, I'd hit up the local arcade which just got a brand newly released MK3 machine. The great thing about playing fighting games in the arcade was that it financially rewarded skill. The better you got at the game, the cheaper it was to play for a night, since the winner of the match got to play the next game for free. I'd go to the machine with one quarter and play for an hour with a line of people behind the left controller waiting to pay a quarter to lose. All the good players kind of had a pact not to play each other, to maximize our game time. When it was just us in the arcade in the afternoons, we'd play each other with variants like "random character" and "one handed" and "blindfolded" just to screw around and wait for the evening when the fish would show up.

Good times. MK2 was still in the very early days of the internet and people were still in Compusa and AOL. Some enterprising kids would download and print the move sheets for all the characters and sell them for a few bucks.

I still have all of my Sega Genesis MK cartridges.

But when I really wanted to talk trash in the PS2 era, I would brag about beating someone with Kuma.

I’ve played with people like you and bravo on acquiring the skills. I was good enough to play through to credits without losing a round. But I knew people that could do it blindfolded without taking a single hit. I had no chance on 2 player against them. For me it started with Street Fighter 2. One summer when I was probably 10 or 11, when the arcade came out, the corner store near my house had it and along with unlimited refills on the soda fountain. They had some special hypercolor cup that you paid $5 for and got free drinks all summer. They didn’t factor in kids hanging out for 12 hours a day playing the new game they brought in. Or maybe they did, we put a lot of quarters down those games.

They brought MK in later and it was a solid few years of summer memories.

You should write a book or a podcast about your addiction.

He will have to get in line with me and millions of other worldwide students from the '90s.

Basically the launch of any AAA video game back then (like 1994 DOOM or 1996 Quake) would cause a global sink in academic and corporate performance with workers calling in sick and students spending endless nights playing.

It was a great time to be a gamer.

Wait can you actually win blindfolded?

Also what was your character?

When you both play blindfolded, it becomes a meta game of knowing your opponent and how he plays, what patterns he uses, and then trying to change your own patterns to exploit what he thinks your moves are going to be and so on.

For character, I usually just let the game pick a random one for me. I found that after the initial fun of learning everyone's combos and special moves, the basic kicks and punches were all you needed. That was the real secret to MK: Precise use of high kick, sweep, uppercut, and block could pretty much beat anyone who made a mistake. If I wanted to show off (MK3), I'd pick Sindel and not allow one hit against me. I think I was the only person in town who used that character.

Another fun variant was to offer to only use one attack button (high punch, high kick, low punch, or low kick), and allowing your opponent to use all of them. Bonus fun: Let your opponent choose which button you are limited to!

Yes, this was the best kept strategy. Newcomers especially would focus heavily on learning the special moves, assuming the regular kicks/punches to be ineffective (or less effective). Big mistake.

That Liu Kang kick where he used both feet and sounded like a chicken was damn near impossible to defeat when your opponent was spamming it. Every now and then I could block and upper cut but mostly I would upper cut and start getting kicked again.

Repeatedly flying in and elbowing the opponent can also be annoying for them, until one block successfully breaks the chain.

heh yeah it could be defeated with a block and you could then round-house him while he recovered, but getting the timing down was tough

Yes! After playing a ton of rounds, you get to where you can visualize in your head what is happening based on the sound, timing, and what you've done with the controls. As the fight goes on though it gets increasingly more difficult because you don't know what the other player has done with their controls. So, winning is possible, but extremely difficult. Easier against AI players especially the lower difficulty settings that are much more predictable.

>After playing a ton of rounds, you get to where you can visualize in your head what is happening based on the sound, timing, and what you've done with the controls

"Use the force Luke" - Yoda

For the scenario in question, you would really have to attribute it to Obi-Wan.

Yoda would actually say "Luke, the force use, you must". Now you know why he didn't get that line in a script.

I used to be able to provide very accurate play-by-play commentary on someone's game of Addams Family Pinball from the next room, based on sound alone. I doubt I could have played well blindfolded but I bet I could have played better than a pinball n00b, at least.

> Wait can you actually win blindfolded?

Different game but equally impressive imo. Obviously takes a lot of practice but audio cues are huge for these kind of challenges - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5w6z-h4hoEU

Another game, with two blindfolded players sharing one controller: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4HnZ4-_HzI

Early MKs are mostly unreactable visually so sound effects become the first priority.

Killer Instinct 2013 unintentionally at first has different sound (and music!) effects for each move as well as every meter so at some points devs were astonished by a letter from actually blind players with a few advices on how to make it even more accessible.

Upcoming Street Fighter 6 has the options needed!

Mortal Kombat devs made the later games really accessible, to the point blind players can be competitive.

https://youtu.be/zn3r0Pe8f9A

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