MaeFae Fills a Long Shader Wait with Piano and a DJ Set, Then Starts Her First Mortal Kombat

AEGIS-LINK — MaeFae, a streamer with Aegis-Link’s 1a1st Generation REM:NANT, played Mortal Kombat 1 for the first time, but the game had to wait. After she launched it, a shader build held the title screen for about 17 minutes, and she filled the time with piano and an improvised DJ set on her keyboard, including a turn with the series theme “Techno Syndrome.” The progress bar reached 99 percent as the song ended.

The game had been the plan for a Halloween-season run of fighting games, and she had spent the first hour and a half talking with chat before it. She showed photos from a recent Renaissance fair, including a ride on a horse and a haul of tea, and introduced her mother’s new pet box turtle, Pina. She also said she was a guest at an upcoming Toronto game expo.

“I’m watching paint dry right now.” — MaeFae, while the game’s shaders compiled

Once the game was ready, she skipped the tutorial, picked Easy and went straight into story mode. Mostly a Tekken player, she played on a leverless arcade-style controller and spent the opening fights hunting for the block button, which sat under her pinky. She lost an early fight against the ice ninja Sub-Zero before finding her bindings. “WELCOME TO MORTAL KOMBAT MAE,” one viewer wrote.

She called the story cinematic and said it felt like a movie, and asked chat for lore as new characters appeared. She landed Johnny Cage’s ball-buster move after several failed attempts, and she was disappointed that fatalities were rare in the story, saying she felt cheated out of the gruesomeness. She asked which Mortal Kombat to try next, and chat suggested the ninth, tenth and eleventh games. A button-mashing sequence at a door cost her a try at about the four-hour mark, which prompted “you lost to a door” in chat.

Near the five-hour mark her microphone began to crackle and distort, and viewers flagged it within seconds. A fix did not hold, and she ended the stream, saying she had been ready to stay up until 2 a.m. She said she would return to the game and that she would not stream over the weekend.