It’s accessible enough for newcomers while providing a nearly endless skill curve for dedicated players.
The most nourishing aspect of MK11 is its core fighting gameplay. But all that pudding won’t nourish you on its own it won’t arm you mentally or emotionally to deal with the struggles of life as we know it. It excites the senses and ignites the imagination on all the primary, visceral levels. You’ve got that trademark hybrid of stylized ultraviolence, popcorn thrills, and kitsch, and characters drawn from martial arts, fantasy, and sci-fi. Mortal Kombat 11 mixes pudding and pill in its own ways. As an artist and an entertainer, Brown knows that fans come to his shows to dance to party bangers, but they’ll be feeling his message long after they leave. All that nuance may not resonate at a conscious level the first time you listen to a Danny Brown album, but you feel it, and that’s by design. Far from a celebration of 24/7 clubbing, “ Party All The Time” is a parable about a groupie girl who does just that, only to end up “lost in the fog, head in the smoke, laughing at the world ’cause her life is a joke.”įrom track to track, what seems like a party album on its face is actually a rumination on the struggles of wasted potential, drug addiction, and economic despair. The album’s title is undoubtedly a reference to pornographic content, and it lives up to that promise in odes to cunnilingus (“ I Will”) and toasty party bangers like “ Blunt After Blunt.”īut in its title track, XXX reveals itself to be Brown’s meditation on turning 30 without yet achieving the success he envisioned for his 20s. For example, start with his instant-classic 2011 album, XXX. There’s a pill in the pudding, as rapper Danny Brown explained to NPR in 2014.īrown is a Detroit icon whose works expertly weave the stimuli of hip-hop shocks and fantasy fulfillment (the pudding) with layers of social commentary (the pill). Given all this moral hand-wringing of mine, how the hell do I justify working on MK11, a game that’s all about violence? From my perspective, there’s more value in Mortal Kombat than the ultraviolent graphics ostensibly suggest. Mortal Kombat 11 mixes pudding and pill in its own ways The range of possible human expressions is so rich and varied, and yet, as Chris Plante has said, so many games limit and reduce their protagonists’ modes of expression to “shoot” and “kill,” leaving no space to consider other, perhaps more constructive, relatable ways to overcome obstacles and resolve conflicts. I often feel that contemporary creators are extraordinarily lazy in their reliance upon violent acts.
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That doesn’t mean that all violent media gets a free pass from me. When it comes to fictional media, games or otherwise, I believe that people are naturally drawn to depictions of violence as a hypothetical means of contemplating real-world terrors. The realities of violence are repugnant to me. I question whether dropping nuclear bombs on Japanese cities in 1945 was a morally justifiable act. I’m a student of history who mourns the millions of souls lost in the industrial-scale wars of the past century. I’m a law-abiding, patriotic American citizen who is anxious about the rising tides of authoritarianism and police brutality around the globe. I’m a parent who fears for my child’s safety in a country overwhelmed by utterly senseless gun violence. I’m a pacifist who believes violence is never justifiable, except in cases of emergency defense. That assumption could not be further from the truth. If they had, I may never have gotten a job working as narrative lead and co-writer on Mortal Kombat 11.īeing that I grew up playing violent Mortal Kombat games and, for the past few years, have made a living writing the most violent Mortal Kombat game of all time, you might assume that I enjoy, crave, or even occasionally indulge in violence. Fortunately, my parents didn’t listen to Lieberman.