Boss Fight - Goro (Mortal Kombat, 1992)

What could possibly be worse than fighting a homicidal martial arts master? Only fighting one with four God damned arms! Enter Mortal Kombat's penultimate boss and one of gaming's most recognisable bosses, Goro.

Mortal Kombat's lore is both deep and cliched. If you care enough to read up on his background you will learn that Goro is the Prince of the Shokan race and the Mortal Kombat champion for 500 years. He serves Shang Tsung, the Mortal Combat grand champion, who in turn serves Shao Kahn, the ruler of Outworld who is hell bent on defeating the Earthrealm (i.e. us).

At the time of its release, Mortal Kombat was famous for it's digitised combatants. Goro was also digitised, but from a 6" tall claymation model. This meant he moved like a Ray Harryhausen model in Sinbad or some other 60s fantasy adventure flick. Atari went on to use this technique for all of the prehistoric combatants in their own digitised beat 'em up, Primal Rage, in 1994.

I will be honest and admit I'm not much of a Mortal Kombat fan. For me, it was a pretty primitive game compared to Street Fighter II, King of Fighters or Fatal Fury. Nonetheless, the four-armed monstrosity, Goro, was a suitably ridiculous boss and one which, on paper, was a pretty intimidating figure to have to fight. If you are dumb enough to get within range of his massive arms, Goro will pick you up with his lower limbs then batter you with the upper ones, an act that will rob you of a decent chunk of your health bar. If that wasn't bad enough, Goro can also fire over-powered magical projectiles. Despite these facts, in the original game beating Goro was not as difficult as his forbidding appearance would have you believe. Simple sweep kicks are enough to defeat him. If you play a character that has their own projectiles he's even easier. Sub-Zero always seemed pretty effective to me, as this video demonstrates:

To end this month's boss fight let's take a look at Goro in the terrible Mortal Kombat motion picture. Despite being quite frankly shit, the film is still considerably better than Jean Claude Van Damme's Street Fighter film. This sequence sees Mortal Kombat's movie star Johnny Cage take on Goro and show the brute what happens to people who break his stuff.

MTW