#1184 Mortal Kombat 1 Boss Hack (SNES) Bosses (1/2): Shang Tsung playthrough

Channel:

AdmiralMcFish - Bosses and Hidden Characters

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Published on May 10, 2021 6:41:22 PM ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CgRM2_XqIAY

Game:

Mortal Kombat (1992)

Category:

Let's Play

Duration: 20:44

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A playthrough of the boss Shang Tsung in Snark-4918’s boss hack/Champion Edition hack for the SNES version of Mortal Kombat 1.

(To select yer boy Shang Tsung in this here mod, highlight Li Kang, hold select, and then press any button)


Shang Tsung’s moves:
Fireball – All directions except for Forward
Morphs
• [HP] – Kano
• [Select + HP] – Sub-Zero
• [LP] – Liu Kang
• [Select + LP] – Goro
• [LK] – Raiden
• [Select + LK] – Sonya
• [HK] – Johnny Cage
• [Select + HK] – Scorpion
• [Block] - [Cancel Morph]


Yeah, not quite an arcade hack yet, but it wouldn’t surprise me if that happened relatively soon.

This hack was brought to my attention by a user called Mr. Nelman, who’s been following the channel for a while. I’d seen a few videos about boss hacks for the ports of MK1, but I hadn’t really paid it much mind, especially considering one of the videos was from a guy who not only used to chat shit to me, because also demanded $100 for the hack. Yeesh, some people, man.

Snark has done an absolutely brilliant job with this hack and, as of this time of writing, plans to improve it even further. Shang Tsung, Goro and Reptile are all playable, however I already covered MK1 Reptile in the arcade version so I’ll just being doing vids on the two main bosses for the time being.

MK1 Shang Tsung is one of those anomalies which has always fascinated me. His sprite is practically incomplete, has little in the way of animation (looking choppy as anything in the process), and I don’t believe it even appears again in the 2D MK series, even in MKTrilogy. As early fighting game bosses go he’s really fascinating, and obviously quite influential on later bosses like Dural and Salamander. See, the idea is that Shang Tsung steals souls of the opponents he has defeated. Through these souls, he is then able to transform into the person and use all their powers. I think retcon this a bit in later games, but this was how it originally worked, hence, the souls of all the fighters leaving Shang Tsung’s body upon his defeat.
What this means is that Shang Tsung has access to every single moveset in the game, including Goro’s no less, and unlike later variants he can use these as long as he wants to. He’ll morph into the game and be able to use all their moves, and can cancel the morph at any time. Not only this, but his only regular attacks in his main form are his single fireball and triple fireball attacks, the latter of which can take off over 50% of the opponent’s health if they fail to block them all.

I’ve said this before about MK bosses, but they’re definitely made to be spectacle fights rather than as characters who should legitimately be played as. The SF2 bosses or Fatal Fury 2 bosses were all pretty damn powerful, but they all played like legitimate characters, just with various boosts and changes over the regular playable characters. The MK games have nearly always just thrown this out of the window however, creating bosses who are ridiculously powerful and cheap innately, and so overpowered to the point that playing as them is satisfying at first, but quickly loses its appeal as the game becomes a bit too much “Press X to win” for my liking, and this is coming from the guy who had fun playing as The General. I think its main appeal comes from getting your own back against the AI, and it’s almost surreal how the bosses for the original trilogy turn otherwise difficult games into cakewalks. They’re much gimmickier and more basic than most other bosses you have to hack, and it would take until MKX for all games for them to create a boss who was powerful, but still felt like something on par with a legitimate character.

MK1 Shang Tsung is so fascinating however because he just never appears again. Even in Shaolin Monks, his model was only a cutscene model and you never got to fight him. Even if you hacked him, he had no moves, and you had to hack the game further if you wanted to be able to do something with him. He’s this weird, tiny blip of an anomaly in an expansive, consistent series, and it’s so weird because the MK Team loves to reuse beloved characters or ideas over and over again, and yet this version of Shang Tsung was put on the back-burner so soon. Oh sure, he does have a boss variant in MK9 which is reminiscent of this, with a unique costume and the ability to morph into any character, but that’s still essentially just a costume boss a la Siegfried in SoulCalibur V. Otherwise, this variant was very much put by the wayside.

[Continued in a pinned comment]

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