I’ve said often that while I’m okay reading horror novels — it’s been about eight years now since I was turned on to Poppy Z. Brite — I don’t care to watch horror films. I grew up in the age of the Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street franchises, and even at an age where I was only concerned about whether or not I liked a film and had barely any conceptions about what made a “good film” and a “bad film,” there was still something I could grasp that let me knew that these films were not good films. Then again, I’ve never been much of a film person to start with — that age was also the age of the first home video game consoles and personal computers, so I’ve always desired more interaction with my entertainment — but I seemed to go out of my way to avoid horror films in my youth. To this day, even if I need to know something about a horror film (usually because one of my students references it), I usually check out the plot summaries on Wikipedia. On rare occasions, though, I’ve checked out YouTube clips, and I’ve regretted it every time I’ve done so. I’d heard that they’d upped the gore content in recent years, but lately it’s just become, pun intended, overkill.

However, several weeks ago I found myself going onto YouTube to watch videos of all the fatalities in the Mortal Kombat games. I played Mortal Kombat a fair amount a dozen years ago; I really got into Street Fighter II, so that led me to try Mortal Kombat out, and Mortal Kombat II was the only recent arcade game they had in the Student Union building at Antioch while I was going there. I’d stopped playing before the series went 3-D, though, so I had several games’ worth of fatalities to watch. Surprisingly I found myself cringing a lot at the fatalities from the more recent games, even though I think the fatalities from the old 2-D games were a lot more imaginative. I didn’t have problems looking at those old fatalities, either. I’m trying to figure out why I would have such varying reactions to these displays of blood and gore; I don’t think it’s the three-dimensional aspect of the new fatalities that is getting to me, especially since the first 3-D Mortal Kombat games had fighters that looked less realistic than the ones in the later 2-D games. Whatever the case, I hardly had an inclination to pick up another Mortal Kombat game — I don’t even follow Street Fighter any longer — and watching the new fatalities has soured me to the idea even more.

That being said, I’ve seen many television commercials for Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe lately, even on CBC. I was a Marvel Comics reader growing up, so having DC characters in there doesn’t exactly want to make me pick up the game. Anyway, I saw the fatalities and “heroic brutalities” on YouTube, so I’m guessing that I’ve seen all there really is to see about the game. There are two questions I have that are bugging me, though. First of all, how can anyone kill Superman with the usual range of fatalities since, you know, he’s invincible and stuff. Secondly, one of the commercials I saw featured the Joker playing the old joybuzzer prank on Raiden. Would someone care to explain to me how, exactly, the God of Thunder is supposed to get hurt by a shock like that? Yes, I know that in all the other games you can play two Raidens against one another and they can each be hurt by the other’s electric blasts, but still, the Joker/Raiden thing is kind of counterintuitive, and it’s definitely not the kind of thing I think Midway should put into a commercial just because of the strained logic involved in trying to explain it.