The thread isn't pointless. Does the game need them? Yes, but only for marketing. The fatalities are there as a marketing gimmick. That's what they were in the beinning and that's what they are now. But, I would agree with Vulcan, and say that they've taken a wild turn from where they started and are now just sadistic.
The original fatalities in MK were completely in-line with the Kung Fu/Grindhouse feel of the old Kung Fu flicks that inspired Big Trouble. The deaths in those movies are comical and over the top, with bright red, cartoon blood spewing everywhere, which is what MK1,MK2, and MK3 had.
MK9 isn't trying to be comical. It's trying to depict torture and not just violence. The beautiful twist in the digitized MK games is that in spite of them using real actors to portray the characters, the designers also pitted them against obvious claymation figures, and had the blood and fatalities cartoony and related to the same type of violence you'd see in a Looney Tunes cartoon or in a movie, like a Kung fu movie, Temple of Doom, or Raiders. Many kids had already seen faces melt, limbs torn off, and hearts get ripped out. When Baraka was shown, Kids could instantly relate him to T-1000. The old games had pop cultural cues to the violence. The new games don't.
The new games are all about torture, and watching the other character suffer as they die. It's not enough to just kill them in today's games. The swiftness of the old fatalities also added to their humor. Who really wants to see Wile E. Coyote get blown up by one of his ACME devices and then languish on the ground with one leg and a torso, and then get shot in the face, decapitated, and then disembowled? That's Itchy and Scrtachy type violence, which is supposed to be totally sadistic because it's a satire of the old violent cartoons which had more straightforward violence, but were violent nonetheless. Yes, many people can laugh at the violence of the new games, but if you are sick, and enjoy violent torture I think the new games feed that as well, which wasn't really the intent of the old games. I'd say Scorpion's MK2 fatality and Baraka's MK2 fatality were the closest thing to torture in the old games, but they still had legs standing after death and buckets of bright red blood oozing to keep them silly.
