Word: kombat
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Midway Games makes Mortal Kombat and other popular video amusements yet hasn't turned a profit since 1999. Enter Zucker, 40, who knows something about turnarounds. He spent last year as COO of Playboy Enterprises and helped deliver its first profitable quarter in more than four years. At Midway, Zucker plans to focus operations on the company's best brands and genres and expand export sales from about 15% of revenue to the 40% to 45% achieved by its competitors...
...series. One of the exhibition's objectives is to highlight the role of the artists behind the games. Commentators don't often talk about the aesthetics, says Bodman, preferring to concentrate on sales. Another aim is to raise questions about the morality of violence in games like Mortal Kombat, and the relationship between such content and real war. An art installation by Mark Dean uses footage shot from the cockpit of a World War II bomber. "It's asking you to think about what you're doing when playing games," says Bodman. "It's warning us to remember what...
None of this should be surprising. The latest versions of Doom, Mortal Kombat and Half Life feature realistic sound effects and depictions of violence that are close to motion-picture quality, as limbs are blown off and organs splattered. These games teach kids to connect gore and glory in a fantasy world in which the most vicious killers are the winners...
...irksome if you do happen to have a couch and want to sit on it while playing. But Sega's machine passes the all-important test: it's a blast to play with your buddies. Just ask my girlfriend, who spent hours testing the Dreamcast version of Mortal Kombat with me--and dished out a thorough whupping. Man magnet? More like man trap...
What Canby missed is that it's the moments between the plot points that are worth watching. It was the ballet of precision violence that flew off the screen; every combination you can create in Mortal Kombat can be found in a Lee movie. And even with all the special-effects money that went into The Matrix, no one could make violence as beautiful as Lee's. He had a cockiness that passed for charisma. And when he whooped like a crane, jumped in the air and simultaneously kicked two bad guys into unconsciousness, all while punching out two others...