And btw, I said to stop bringing up personal stuff that was off topic. Most of what has been said since then has been related to the discussions that have taken place ITT (in this thread). As long as it’s related to UMK3 and isn’t irrelevant personal stuff, it’s fine (to an extent).
Anyway, all this UMK3 talk has gotten me nostalgic about the golden era of UMK3.
God I wish they’d fkn rerelease this shit on current gen with GGPO netcode. I know I’ve been advocating for a rerelease for over a decade and I realize it’s never going to happen, but I still wish it would. Despite all its flaws and broken aspects, it’s nevertheless still such a genuinely fun and legitimately competitive game.
I also wish everyone was able to experience the game in the 2006 UMK3 XBLA era. This era will never be able to be recreated. Because it was back when there honestly wasn’t a TON of games to even play online, at least not a lot of good ones. So 2006 UMK3 had so many players, it was active 24/7. A concept that sounds so weird to me today. Imagine being able to hop online and play UMK3 with friends or many different random people at any time of day, and the connection not be too awful. Then all the rivalries and drama, most in which were related to umk(.)com. Everyone being in awe of just how good players like Shock and Crazy Dominican were, desperately wanting to play them knowing full well we’d get demolished. MKF30 getting 50-0’d by CD, the “new blood vs old blood” drama, the constant discussions about who were the best players, and that was just the tip of the iceberg. Then finally getting decent enough at the game to where randoms knew who you were. It was so cool, but bizarre, going into random lobbies and either hearing people freak out and say “holy shit, is that the real Juggernaut!??”, or “oh I’ve heard of this dude, I bet he’s not even that good”. Or going into lobbies where they’ve never heard of me and then them talking so much crap until it was my turn, then running the KoTH lobbies until they all went quiet and eventually kicked me, lol. I even did some shit back then that I wasn’t proud of, but at the same time I wasn’t even an adult yet. I was 16 and it was literally the first fighting game that I had ever played competitively. I didn’t know how to act, hell even my grammar and the way I typed was childish, lmao.
Anyway… man, so many amazing memories with this game and that era. It’s too bad I didn’t get REALLY good until most players started quitting. I was always pretty good, but wasn’t a top player or anything back then. I couldn’t beat the best players at the time like MistaKM, ShaneyMcGrady, DC Hustle, Crazy Dominican, Shock, Annihilator83, PajaroMayor (I think was his name), and more I’m forgetting. The only players I got to play after I got really good of these players was CD, Shock and DC Hustle, and luckily were able to play all 3 offline (played DC Hustle and Shock in the famous NEC UMK3 tournament).
Yeah… this thread made me watch old match footage and just got hit in the face with nostalgia, lol. Which is how I saw that ouijawarrior video. The golden era of UMK3, man, what a time to be alive that was. There was just soo much going on around UMK3 back then. And this was before NRS was even a thing, it was still Midway. Hell, MKvsDC came out during this era, back in 2008. That game led some of the UMK3 players to the forum “Mortal Kombat United”, aka “MKU”. Which is where I met STORMS, Krayzie, and essentially most of the people that ended up creating this forum. What a wild journey. And it still continued to be played after then, but UMK3 on XBLA started slowing down around 2009 or 2010 or so. And didn’t die off until around maybe 2013/2014? But that was from everyone playing pretty much every single day. Like, imagine having like 500 players with over 10k hours they put into the same game?
Agh, I could talk about this for awhile, so just gonna stop there.