You Remember that Carl Douglas Song? Yeah...

I'll maintain that the new Mortal Kombat has the best single player experience of any fighting game since Soul Calibur 2... maybe the best ever.

But 300 (yes, THREE HUNDRED) levels to the Challenge Tower mode is a bit much. The game already has a several hour long story mode. It has lots of fighters to toy with and play through the basic one-player fight 'ladder' and even non-fighting game activities, the Test Your Might and Test Your Sight sections.

I'm up to challenge 83 or so. Some of the challenges are easy and quick, some take a bit of time to get the hang of. But even if I spend an hour a day (and at this point they aren't so engrossing as to spend more than that) which would get about ten challenges done, that's over twenty days to completion.

THREE WEEKS. Holy crap. I want value for money, and Mortal Kombat has more than already delivered... but jeezo pete that's just too much. Seems like a dumb thing to complain about but this one of the few games where I could genuinely have enjoyed having 'done everything'. Lots of neat unlockables and generous gamerpoints.

I'll still pick away at this, but I've already found myself sliding back to spending more time with Super Street Fighter IV. That game doesn't have nearly the one-player content, but the actual fighting engine is something I like a lot better. Street Fighter IV (not Super) basically triggered the new modern happy-time for 2D fighting games. New titles (as opposed to re-releases or HD remakes) we've seen on home consoles:

King of Fighters XII
BlazBlue: Calamity Trigger
BlazBlue: Continuum Shift
Tatsunoko vs Capcom
Street Fighter IV
Super Street Fighter IV
Marvel vs Capcom 3
Arcana Heart 3
Mortal Kombat (2011)

Upcoming still:

Super Street Fighter IV: Arcade Edition
King of Fighters XIII
Street Fighter X Tekken

I'm sure I missed something in the lists above too!

Marvel vs Capcom 3 and Mortal Kombat have definitely taken attention and traffic away from SSFIV, but the fact that Street Fighter has another update coming and is absolutely the best balanced technical fighting game means I probably have great timing to be learning and re-learning my Street Fighter chops.

Online competition is brutal for reasons mentioned in a previous post, and it is only going to get worse. But at least I find myself getting better, even if it only by inches.