Mortal Kombat: Deception
Publisher: Midway Games
Platform: PS2
Genre: Fighting

Fuck PC-quality graphics and the “taste and smell” extension that X-Box are secretly developing for their release of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas because the best new innovations that video game companies are designing are the ones that eliminate any chance whatsoever that the player of the game is unreasonably distracted from the action for more than a nanosecond.

Ninety percent of gamers are men and a lot of men these days have girlfriends and wives. The companies realise that making exclusively men-only games that women think are childish and boring is cutting out a potential 50 percent of the market. As a way of combatting this problem they’re making games with built-in “girlfriend pacifiers”.

Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas has the “girlfriend” side-missions where you wine and dine your girl until she consents to be plugged by your character with the double-edged purple dildo. There’s also the two-person mission mode that the girlfriend missions unlock so you can let her join in the game with you for a while, so she can fuck with your progress on the best game ever made which I am still playing every day of my life. I’m even getting back into Helmet because they’re on the soundtrack. I mean, up until Betty, they didn’t put a foot wrong, but then, as the guy in A Mighty Wind says, “Wha happened?”.

Back to the main point, the new Mortal Kombat game has the ULTIMATE girlfriend pacifier device ever invented in the whole world. Why? There is a fucking TETRIS option, where your Mortal Kombat warriors duke it out over a game of stacking coloured blocks. This is a stroke of such GENIUS by Midway Games that it’s hard to believe nobody has ever done it before. It’s something to do with oestrogen and how it relates to unicorns and moon cycles, but Tetris is the only game in the world that girls genuinely like to play, so my relationship has actually been totally saved from imminent destruction.

This is easily the funnest Mortal Kombat game they ever made. All the gore with the blood spurts that look like red ping pong balls is still totally over the top, but this time there’s more glee in the killings than before. In the past, no matter how imaginative the “finish him” scenes in MK were, they always seemed perfunctory. Like, in a “OK hang on…wait a second…just going to pull the spine out the back of his…grunt…back…OK there you go, spine removed” kind of way. This time you kick your opponent into this amazing waffle iron that burns them to a crisp of carbon crumbles. There’s a chess option that I can’t figure out how to play yet but the gameplay is all super fun and twice as good as the last one they put out.


Kill Zone
Developer: Guerrilla Games
Platform. PS2, Xbox
Genre: Shooter

In this first person shooter, you go round with some soldiers fighting these half-human aliens dressed like Nazis. They hired a big orchestra from Prague to do the soundtrack. Um, the graphics are really good and the sounds of the guns are really realistic. Yes, even though this is set in the future where some weird alien takeover of the world is going on, I thoroughly enjoyed playing this exciting game. It’s like a darker version of Medal Of Honor and the people who buy this don’t have girlfriends anyway so that’s why they left out the “girlfriend pacifier” thing that Mortal Kombat has.

SYRUP DAVIES