Probability

What's this?
I hear you scream.
Two entries in a row? What is this madness?


Knuckling down to start some probability today I paused to reflect on that word.
Probability, somewhat unassuming no? However if your childhood was filled up with playing SNES with all the kids in the neighbourhood a different meaning might pop up. That being: Pro - Babality.
What is a Babality you ask? I scoff in return. *scoff*
But gather round so I may weave you a tale.
Mortal Kombat, a game that took up most of my childhood behind Super Mario Land and pretending I was a butterfly, was a Fighting Game for the SNES, or Super Nintendo Entertainment System. Like many other fighting games you spent most of your time memorising difficult combos to stack up a 17 hit streak or just used the same cheap move over and over again (I am looking at You Sheeva and your Up-Down combo, and you too Shang Tsung and your fireballs of death). However unlike conventional fighting games at the time like Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat was exceptional violent. While winning a round in Street Fighter would leave your character doing a victory pose, winning two rounds consecutively in Mortal Kombat would give you a chance to FINISH THEM wherein you would enter in an incredibly hard combo to preform a FATALITY which were incredibly gruesome. To give you an idea here is a short compilation below.


Random Fatalities

So while Street Fighter just ended with an unconscious opponent in Mortal Kombat you ended with a dead one.
This sparked outrage in Parent's Groups, this game was just too violent and well....it was just too violent. They were angry at the Fatalities in particular so Midway chose to do something about it.
In their next title, the originally named MORTAL KOMBAT II, Midway introduced new forms of Fatalities. These ranged from Animality, where your character would turn into their animal counter part and destroy your opposition to Brutatlity, which is essentially a massive combo of hits that end in your opposition exploding with a gratuitous amount of blood and organs.
However Midway took the concerns of the Parent's Groups very seriously (Read: Sarcasm) and as such entered in new forms of fatalities just to mock or spite them.
A personal favourite of mine is Babality (see the connection?) where the hapless victim would be transformed into his/her baby counterpart.


Babality

Another form of fatality they put in the game was Friendship where the person performing the Fatality, instead of ripping out their spine or igniting them on fire would do something nice for a change, like go bowling or give a present. Some are shown below.



Friendship


So know we all know what I think of when anyone says probability and I now hope you think of that as well.

To study?