First, a brief interview with Ed Boon:
And now, the new teaser trailer for the game:
More stuff to come, soon!
Tuesday, August 31, 2010
Saturday, August 28, 2010
Bits and Pieces.
There's going to be an arcade update to BlazBlue: Continuum Shift called BlazBlue: Continuum Shift II. It's a minor update featuring two new characters to the arcade version, Valkenhayn R. Hellsing and Makoto-Nanaya. Hellsing is going to be the next downloadable character for the console version, and Makoto already being available. Continuum Shift being the updated version of BlazBlue: Calamity Trigger, which is the one I have. I wasn't aware there was another out already. I'm slipping.
Two more characters were added to the Marvel vs. Capcom roster in Dormammu for the Marvel side, and Viewtiful Joe for the Capcom side. I don't quite get the Dormammu inclusion, but I suspect it'll be explained in the game. There are other flamey-headed characters from Marvel that are known to a larger audience, like Ghost Rider, than this guy, but I guess he'll work out just fine. So far the roster includes: Captain America, Deadpool, Dr. Doom, Dormammu, Hulk, Iron Man, Super-Skrull, Thor, and Wolverine from Marvel; and Amaterasu, Chris Redfield, Chun-Li, Dante, Felicia, Morrigan, Ryu, Trish, and Viewtiful Joe from Capcom.
Street Fighter X Tekken will probably be out sooner than the two years that Yoshinori Ono claimed it would be. Harada said that Street Fighter X Tekken will probably be out before the Apocalypse of the Mayan Calendar, and Tekken X Street Fighter will be out after. I should really post these videos and such, but I'm lazy, eating, and getting ready for more gaming right now, so there. We also got to see what Ryu might look like in Tekken X Street Fighter (which is centered around Tekken's visuals and gameplay methods) and it looked pretty nifty! A teaser image for the game shows not only Jin and Ryu, but also their darker aliases: Devil Jin and Satsui no Hadou ni Mezameta Ryu.
There might be some new characters for King of Fighters XIII, which is shaping up to be the KOF game that KOFXII should have been, complete with a boss character. Already in the line up are: Kyo, Iori, Ash Crimson, Terry and Andy Bogard, Joe Higashi, Ryo Sakazaki, Kim Kaphwan, Benimaru, Robert Garcia, Clark, Ralf, Athena, Duo Lon, Shen Woo, Leona Heidern, Raiden, Kensou, Chin, Elizabeth Blanctorch and Mature from the previous installment. Joining them are K', Takuma Sakazaki, Mai Shiranui, King, Yuri Sakazaki, Kula Diamond, Hwa Jai and Saiki, with Saiki being the endboss of the game. We also might get Chang, Malin, Momoko and Oswald as a more recent blog post over on SNK/Playmore's KOFXIII blog details the producer asking what those characters would look like with the KOFXIII design.
Yep. Lots of fighting games on the way.
Two more characters were added to the Marvel vs. Capcom roster in Dormammu for the Marvel side, and Viewtiful Joe for the Capcom side. I don't quite get the Dormammu inclusion, but I suspect it'll be explained in the game. There are other flamey-headed characters from Marvel that are known to a larger audience, like Ghost Rider, than this guy, but I guess he'll work out just fine. So far the roster includes: Captain America, Deadpool, Dr. Doom, Dormammu, Hulk, Iron Man, Super-Skrull, Thor, and Wolverine from Marvel; and Amaterasu, Chris Redfield, Chun-Li, Dante, Felicia, Morrigan, Ryu, Trish, and Viewtiful Joe from Capcom.
Street Fighter X Tekken will probably be out sooner than the two years that Yoshinori Ono claimed it would be. Harada said that Street Fighter X Tekken will probably be out before the Apocalypse of the Mayan Calendar, and Tekken X Street Fighter will be out after. I should really post these videos and such, but I'm lazy, eating, and getting ready for more gaming right now, so there. We also got to see what Ryu might look like in Tekken X Street Fighter (which is centered around Tekken's visuals and gameplay methods) and it looked pretty nifty! A teaser image for the game shows not only Jin and Ryu, but also their darker aliases: Devil Jin and Satsui no Hadou ni Mezameta Ryu.
There might be some new characters for King of Fighters XIII, which is shaping up to be the KOF game that KOFXII should have been, complete with a boss character. Already in the line up are: Kyo, Iori, Ash Crimson, Terry and Andy Bogard, Joe Higashi, Ryo Sakazaki, Kim Kaphwan, Benimaru, Robert Garcia, Clark, Ralf, Athena, Duo Lon, Shen Woo, Leona Heidern, Raiden, Kensou, Chin, Elizabeth Blanctorch and Mature from the previous installment. Joining them are K', Takuma Sakazaki, Mai Shiranui, King, Yuri Sakazaki, Kula Diamond, Hwa Jai and Saiki, with Saiki being the endboss of the game. We also might get Chang, Malin, Momoko and Oswald as a more recent blog post over on SNK/Playmore's KOFXIII blog details the producer asking what those characters would look like with the KOFXIII design.
Yep. Lots of fighting games on the way.
Wednesday, August 25, 2010
MORTAL KOMBAT
What would a fighting game revival be without Mortal Kombat?
Mortal Kombat was like the more brutal, older cousin of the other fighting game franchises that all burst on the scene in the early 1990s, and the one that drew a lot more attention (a lot of it being negative). Boasting a simplistic fighting engine and digitized actors instead of hand-drawn sprites, Mortal Kombat appealed to the growing fans of the genre that liked things a little more realistic (at least when it came to most of their characters) and things a lot more gorey. The sheer idea of being able to finish off your opponent with a killing blow of some sort or another wasn’t only unique, it was fitting. How many martial arts films has there been where in a tournament like structure, there were killing blows delivered? Probably hundreds, but the two I’m thinking right off the top of my head seem to have influenced not only Mortal Kombat but almost every fighting game that was ever released: Enter the Dragon starring Bruce Lee, and Bloodsport starring Jean-Claude Van Damme. It just made sense.
Mortal Kombat has gone through its own battles as well. Not just within the game, but externally as well. After three strong efforts, especially on the arcade scene, there was a drastic shift in how video games were being made. Two-dimensional games were on the outs, and three-dimensional games were coming in. Suddenly, the two-dimensional fighters had to worry about a new source of competition and that competition kicked them in the ass something fierce. 3D graphics seemed to come out of nowhere and the direction of video game was heavily influenced by the home console market rather than the arcade market with the release of Sony’s PlayStation and Sega’s Saturn. Games like Resident Evil and Tomb Raider were pushing the games into different directions that previous consoles weren’t capable of, and fighting games were being driven in the same direction thanks to Sega’s Virtua Fighter and Namco’s TEKKEN. Mortal Kombat jumped into the transition with both feet and landed harshly with the fourth effort in the Mortal Kombat series and its updated follow up, Mortal Kombat Gold. The characters, their fighting styles, and even the fatalities didn’t transition to the three-dimensional playing field all that well.
Then the arcades dried up in the States. You’d be challenged if you were asked to find an arcade around here that wasn’t struggling to stay afloat and had enough new games coming in to keep costumers happy. Following the demise of the arcade scene we had a five year draught of anything and everything Mortal Kombat.
The fifth entry in the series, Deadly Alliance, was released to consoles only – a first in the lifespan of Mortal Kombat, not including the mishmash game that was Mortal Kombat Trilogy – and offered another attempt at making the transition from the two-dimensional playing field to a three-dimensional one. Deadly Alliance offered a lot in terms of playability and entertainment, but it, too, failed to capture the feel, vibe and atmosphere that had been already created by the original three games. What it did offer was a rather interesting storyline that meshed the frail plots of the fourth game with the somewhat decent plots of the first three. It was almost a revival of the franchise, but even as playing it I felt as though the game wasn’t finished; that this was a rushed effort on the part of Ed Boon and his team.
Deception was released two years later, and while it added a lot of polish on the Deadly Alliance engine, it still suffered from the same rushed feel that Deadly Alliance had. It wasn’t what it could have been, though it did offer an excellent attempt at a fighting game styled RPG that also worked as a tutorial for how to play the game. But it offered a lot of lackluster visuals at the same time. Gone were the interesting, yet gorey fatalities from the previous entries, replaced with very disappointing results (at least none of them were as laughable as Quan Chi’s neck-stretch fatality from Deadly Alliance, though). It seemed that the fans of creativity weren’t waving in the direction of the flames that lit the fire underneath Mortal Kombat’s designers.
Armageddon was the last effort of the last generation of consoles (Nintendo’s GameCube, Sony’s PlayStation 2, and Microsoft’s Xbox). It offered a somewhat decent storyline and a fun go-cart racing game inspired by Mario Cart, but it lacked in any sort of revision of the already established fighting engine that premiered in Deadly Alliance. It was once again cluttered with a lot of palate swapping motion capture, unfitting martial arts, and no depth to be offered in terms of the fighting engine, combo system, and recognition. The characters had the same special moves that they always had, but without any concrete grounding in a specific martial art, they could have been anyone at any time. That was one of my biggest complaints about the second set of games Boon and company had delivered, the console only games. A character might fight one way one game, and then his martial art was changed in the next game and nothing seemed concrete.
The last game could have been the death knell for Mortal Kombat: an attempt to cross over with another company that has only had a passing attempt in the fighting game genre similar to the crossover games that Capcom had done in the past. But while Marvel’s flamboyant characters seem to mesh rather well with Capcom’s characters, the DC characters seemed drastically out of place going toe-to-toe with the more brutal and homicidal characters of Mortal Kombat. Everything that Mortal Kombat was known for had taken a back seat simply to showcase a bunch of DC’s aging characters’ martial arts skill sets.
It wasn’t the death knell for Mortal Kombat, however. In 2008, Capcom broke an almost ten year length of silence in the fighting game genre by releasing Street Fighter IV to arcades in Japan (and some select ones in the States, if they could afford the cabinet). In 2009, Capcom released it on the home consoles, and the fighting game genre seemed to breath a new air of life into its decaying lungs that were being propped up by Namco and some efforts that most folks never looked at from SNK. The new air of life brought with it a second issue of Street Fighter IV in Super Street Fighter IV; brought with it the long awaited Tekken 6; brought with it a brand new King of Fighters XII, with an entirely new set of hand-drawn sprites, but lacked an involving single player experience; brought with it a new franchise called BlazBlue; and brought with it a slew of announcements for new games.
A new Mortal Kombat was one of those announcements. After the release of Mortal Kombat vs. DCU there were rumors going about that Ed Boon and company were already at work at a new installment for the series and that it would be taking Mortal Kombat back to its dark, gore-splattered roots. Then Midway fell apart and Mortal Kombat came under the ownership of Warner Bros., who also happens to own DC Comics. I know that I, personally, was scared that we’d more than likely see another crossover game between the heroes of the DC Universe and the fighters of Mortal Kombat than a proper Mortal Kombat game. But the rumors persisted.
A week before E3 2010 came about a video clip hit the web featuring the Mortal Kombat characters in a possible movie-like inspiration that seemed to be a reboot of the entire franchise. That heated up the buzz for Mortal Kombat going into E3 and while the video itself turned out to be nothing more than one filmmaker’s pitch to Warner Bros. for a potential film, the excitement it generated didn’t calm down once the newly announced NetherRealm Studios unveiled the newest installment of the Mortal Kombat franchise that was exactly on par to what Ed Boon had been stating it would be. It was dark, it was brutal, and it, too, seemed to be a reboot for the franchise.
In the few months since E3, lots of new information has been provided to us from NetherRealm in regards to their Mortal Kombat game. The first and foremost thing is that this game is not being rushed, unlike the previous installments. According to Ed Boon, Midway had rushed the Mortal Kombat games in and out of production, which is why they felt unfinished and ultimately unpolished. This game is not being handled that way, and Warner Bros. has given the team the time to make the game they’re satisfied with.
What do we know about the new Mortal Kombat game?
First, the studio listened to the fans and seemingly took another play out of Capcom’s playbook. Two-dimensional fighting games have yet to make the transition to a full three-dimensional playing field without there being a lot of wear and tear on the characters and the universe they operate in. The last four Mortal Kombat games and the Street Fighter EX series stand out as the most notable efforts. This new Mortal Kombat will boast three-dimensional graphics but, like its rival before it in Street Fighter IV, will operate on a two-dimensional playing field. This frees up the processors, as quoted by Hans Lo, to give us more detailed backgrounds and character designs; as well as providing us with a very amped up game play that’s been missing since Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3. I’m not sure I agree with the detailed environments and character designs as several other fighting games that do operate in a three-dimensional playing field offer some of the more elaborately detailed stages and characters in fighting games, both of which come from Namco in Soul Calibur and Tekken. But he’s a game designer, and I’m just a game player, so he’s words trounce my beliefs. The amped up game play, however, can be seen in the few bits of game play footage that we’ve seen so far. This is a very fast fighting game, and it reminds me very much of a combination between Mortal Kombat II’s more free-flowing combat system matched with the insane speed of Mortal Kombat 3.
The button mapping is a bit different from the rest of the Mortal Kombat games. Instead of the traditional high-low punch/high-lo kick mapping that we got in the first three games, and then whatever it was that was used in the last four or five, NetherRealm Studios has borrowed a play out of Namco’s playbook and has given us four attack buttons, one for each limb a la Tekken. I saw borrow instead of “steal” or any other inappropriate terms because that’s what happens in the fighting game genre: studios borrow elements from other fighting games be it a block button, attack movements, or in game elements like hidden characters – an element that began with Mortal Kombat. It’s a simple effort of evolution through inspiration. After all, every fighting game has the forward/down/down-forward plus attack button movement of the Shoryuken.
They’ve also implemented a new super-meter of sorts that fills up when attacks are connected (probably by you and your opponent as is with most fighting games) that offers the chance for super-attacks (similar to Street Fighter IV’s EX moves), combo breakers which has been a staple of the MK series since Mortal Kombat 3 if I remember correctly, and a newly added “X-Ray” combat system that looks absolutely amazing. It actually reminds me of the opening promo real for UFC Unleashed, a program on Spike TV dedicated to displaying the more memorable fights from the Ultimate Fighting Championship. In that promo real, however, when some of the punches and kicks connect on an opponent, it shows an X-Ray view of the fighter being kicked or punched and what it might look like on the inside. I thought that this feature might actually show up in one of THQ’s UFC-based games, but it looks like NetherRealm jumped at it first, and it seems more appropriate for a Mortal Kombat game. When put into effect, the camera zooms in and offers a break in the fast paced hectic nature of the fights and shows an internal view of what you’re doing to your opponent. The X-Ray view shows bones being broken or even shattered and internal organs collapsing or being punctured or rupturing and all that gore-driven goodness. This, and the subsequent fatalities to come, is one of the features I’m looking forward to seeing the most.
The gore itself is also making a huge comeback in this Mortal Kombat effort as you will see real time damage on the character’s bodies and faces (much more elaborately so than previous efforts) and blood will splatter onto you from your opponent and decorate the stages and darken over with time as the blood coagulates. This devotion to gruesome details is what originally got me to pay attention to Mortal Kombat and it’s almost a shame that it took them this long to really elaborate on it or pay attention to it; but it’s also ultimately satisfying.
The plot of the game – yes, I’m one of those fighting game players that pays attention to the plots of the games – is also rather interesting in a total reboot sort of way. Apparently, at some point in a yet-to-be-determined future Shao Kahn is seconds away from killing the Thunder God, Raiden. In retaliation, Raiden sends a brainmail message back in time to a somewhat younger version of himself (the same version that appears in the original Mortal Kombat game), thus changing the outcome of everything that happened through those first three games. Does Scorpion kill Sub-Zero? Does Liu Kang win the tournament of the first game? That weird comic book styled retcon opens up a lot of possibilities for the plot to trample through, and that almost has me just as excited as the game play and gore does. Boon has been quoted as saying he wants roughly twenty-six characters in the final edition of the game, with potentially more being developed post-release and offered as DLC in the future. So far the known characters are: Cyrax, Johnny Cage, Kitana, Kung Lao, Mileena, Nightwolf, Reptile, Scorpion, Sektor, and Sub-Zero. Raiden and Shao Kahn made appearances in the game’s announcement trailer, but there’s nothing here nor there about their inclusion in the final game. As expected, however, I’m sure there will be several hidden characters decorated throughout the game as is the usual for Mortal Kombat, as well as a monstrous boss and/or sub-boss character. Boon has already stated that this Mortal Kombat will have more unlockables than previous games, and will actually put the rest to shame. It will also have the Krypt, which has served as the base for the unlockable content since Deadly Alliance, and it will have an elaborate and sophisticated unlocking system.
And before I stop talking and just post the trailer from E3, I have to say one of the things they’ve talked about recently that I really like is that they’re leaving open hooks in the programming to further tweak the characters in their online mechanics to balance them out post-release without the need of downloading a patch here and there. This is what has been missing from the online fighting game scene since it was born. This insures that Mortal Kombat won’t have a Sagat-like character from Street Fighter IV who proved to be very powerful in online play, and Capcom couldn’t tweak him without releasing a whole new game (of course that whole new game was worth the purchase, but you get my point I hope).
Mortal Kombat was like the more brutal, older cousin of the other fighting game franchises that all burst on the scene in the early 1990s, and the one that drew a lot more attention (a lot of it being negative). Boasting a simplistic fighting engine and digitized actors instead of hand-drawn sprites, Mortal Kombat appealed to the growing fans of the genre that liked things a little more realistic (at least when it came to most of their characters) and things a lot more gorey. The sheer idea of being able to finish off your opponent with a killing blow of some sort or another wasn’t only unique, it was fitting. How many martial arts films has there been where in a tournament like structure, there were killing blows delivered? Probably hundreds, but the two I’m thinking right off the top of my head seem to have influenced not only Mortal Kombat but almost every fighting game that was ever released: Enter the Dragon starring Bruce Lee, and Bloodsport starring Jean-Claude Van Damme. It just made sense.
Mortal Kombat has gone through its own battles as well. Not just within the game, but externally as well. After three strong efforts, especially on the arcade scene, there was a drastic shift in how video games were being made. Two-dimensional games were on the outs, and three-dimensional games were coming in. Suddenly, the two-dimensional fighters had to worry about a new source of competition and that competition kicked them in the ass something fierce. 3D graphics seemed to come out of nowhere and the direction of video game was heavily influenced by the home console market rather than the arcade market with the release of Sony’s PlayStation and Sega’s Saturn. Games like Resident Evil and Tomb Raider were pushing the games into different directions that previous consoles weren’t capable of, and fighting games were being driven in the same direction thanks to Sega’s Virtua Fighter and Namco’s TEKKEN. Mortal Kombat jumped into the transition with both feet and landed harshly with the fourth effort in the Mortal Kombat series and its updated follow up, Mortal Kombat Gold. The characters, their fighting styles, and even the fatalities didn’t transition to the three-dimensional playing field all that well.
Then the arcades dried up in the States. You’d be challenged if you were asked to find an arcade around here that wasn’t struggling to stay afloat and had enough new games coming in to keep costumers happy. Following the demise of the arcade scene we had a five year draught of anything and everything Mortal Kombat.
The fifth entry in the series, Deadly Alliance, was released to consoles only – a first in the lifespan of Mortal Kombat, not including the mishmash game that was Mortal Kombat Trilogy – and offered another attempt at making the transition from the two-dimensional playing field to a three-dimensional one. Deadly Alliance offered a lot in terms of playability and entertainment, but it, too, failed to capture the feel, vibe and atmosphere that had been already created by the original three games. What it did offer was a rather interesting storyline that meshed the frail plots of the fourth game with the somewhat decent plots of the first three. It was almost a revival of the franchise, but even as playing it I felt as though the game wasn’t finished; that this was a rushed effort on the part of Ed Boon and his team.
Deception was released two years later, and while it added a lot of polish on the Deadly Alliance engine, it still suffered from the same rushed feel that Deadly Alliance had. It wasn’t what it could have been, though it did offer an excellent attempt at a fighting game styled RPG that also worked as a tutorial for how to play the game. But it offered a lot of lackluster visuals at the same time. Gone were the interesting, yet gorey fatalities from the previous entries, replaced with very disappointing results (at least none of them were as laughable as Quan Chi’s neck-stretch fatality from Deadly Alliance, though). It seemed that the fans of creativity weren’t waving in the direction of the flames that lit the fire underneath Mortal Kombat’s designers.
Armageddon was the last effort of the last generation of consoles (Nintendo’s GameCube, Sony’s PlayStation 2, and Microsoft’s Xbox). It offered a somewhat decent storyline and a fun go-cart racing game inspired by Mario Cart, but it lacked in any sort of revision of the already established fighting engine that premiered in Deadly Alliance. It was once again cluttered with a lot of palate swapping motion capture, unfitting martial arts, and no depth to be offered in terms of the fighting engine, combo system, and recognition. The characters had the same special moves that they always had, but without any concrete grounding in a specific martial art, they could have been anyone at any time. That was one of my biggest complaints about the second set of games Boon and company had delivered, the console only games. A character might fight one way one game, and then his martial art was changed in the next game and nothing seemed concrete.
The last game could have been the death knell for Mortal Kombat: an attempt to cross over with another company that has only had a passing attempt in the fighting game genre similar to the crossover games that Capcom had done in the past. But while Marvel’s flamboyant characters seem to mesh rather well with Capcom’s characters, the DC characters seemed drastically out of place going toe-to-toe with the more brutal and homicidal characters of Mortal Kombat. Everything that Mortal Kombat was known for had taken a back seat simply to showcase a bunch of DC’s aging characters’ martial arts skill sets.
It wasn’t the death knell for Mortal Kombat, however. In 2008, Capcom broke an almost ten year length of silence in the fighting game genre by releasing Street Fighter IV to arcades in Japan (and some select ones in the States, if they could afford the cabinet). In 2009, Capcom released it on the home consoles, and the fighting game genre seemed to breath a new air of life into its decaying lungs that were being propped up by Namco and some efforts that most folks never looked at from SNK. The new air of life brought with it a second issue of Street Fighter IV in Super Street Fighter IV; brought with it the long awaited Tekken 6; brought with it a brand new King of Fighters XII, with an entirely new set of hand-drawn sprites, but lacked an involving single player experience; brought with it a new franchise called BlazBlue; and brought with it a slew of announcements for new games.
A new Mortal Kombat was one of those announcements. After the release of Mortal Kombat vs. DCU there were rumors going about that Ed Boon and company were already at work at a new installment for the series and that it would be taking Mortal Kombat back to its dark, gore-splattered roots. Then Midway fell apart and Mortal Kombat came under the ownership of Warner Bros., who also happens to own DC Comics. I know that I, personally, was scared that we’d more than likely see another crossover game between the heroes of the DC Universe and the fighters of Mortal Kombat than a proper Mortal Kombat game. But the rumors persisted.
A week before E3 2010 came about a video clip hit the web featuring the Mortal Kombat characters in a possible movie-like inspiration that seemed to be a reboot of the entire franchise. That heated up the buzz for Mortal Kombat going into E3 and while the video itself turned out to be nothing more than one filmmaker’s pitch to Warner Bros. for a potential film, the excitement it generated didn’t calm down once the newly announced NetherRealm Studios unveiled the newest installment of the Mortal Kombat franchise that was exactly on par to what Ed Boon had been stating it would be. It was dark, it was brutal, and it, too, seemed to be a reboot for the franchise.
In the few months since E3, lots of new information has been provided to us from NetherRealm in regards to their Mortal Kombat game. The first and foremost thing is that this game is not being rushed, unlike the previous installments. According to Ed Boon, Midway had rushed the Mortal Kombat games in and out of production, which is why they felt unfinished and ultimately unpolished. This game is not being handled that way, and Warner Bros. has given the team the time to make the game they’re satisfied with.
What do we know about the new Mortal Kombat game?
First, the studio listened to the fans and seemingly took another play out of Capcom’s playbook. Two-dimensional fighting games have yet to make the transition to a full three-dimensional playing field without there being a lot of wear and tear on the characters and the universe they operate in. The last four Mortal Kombat games and the Street Fighter EX series stand out as the most notable efforts. This new Mortal Kombat will boast three-dimensional graphics but, like its rival before it in Street Fighter IV, will operate on a two-dimensional playing field. This frees up the processors, as quoted by Hans Lo, to give us more detailed backgrounds and character designs; as well as providing us with a very amped up game play that’s been missing since Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3. I’m not sure I agree with the detailed environments and character designs as several other fighting games that do operate in a three-dimensional playing field offer some of the more elaborately detailed stages and characters in fighting games, both of which come from Namco in Soul Calibur and Tekken. But he’s a game designer, and I’m just a game player, so he’s words trounce my beliefs. The amped up game play, however, can be seen in the few bits of game play footage that we’ve seen so far. This is a very fast fighting game, and it reminds me very much of a combination between Mortal Kombat II’s more free-flowing combat system matched with the insane speed of Mortal Kombat 3.
The button mapping is a bit different from the rest of the Mortal Kombat games. Instead of the traditional high-low punch/high-lo kick mapping that we got in the first three games, and then whatever it was that was used in the last four or five, NetherRealm Studios has borrowed a play out of Namco’s playbook and has given us four attack buttons, one for each limb a la Tekken. I saw borrow instead of “steal” or any other inappropriate terms because that’s what happens in the fighting game genre: studios borrow elements from other fighting games be it a block button, attack movements, or in game elements like hidden characters – an element that began with Mortal Kombat. It’s a simple effort of evolution through inspiration. After all, every fighting game has the forward/down/down-forward plus attack button movement of the Shoryuken.
They’ve also implemented a new super-meter of sorts that fills up when attacks are connected (probably by you and your opponent as is with most fighting games) that offers the chance for super-attacks (similar to Street Fighter IV’s EX moves), combo breakers which has been a staple of the MK series since Mortal Kombat 3 if I remember correctly, and a newly added “X-Ray” combat system that looks absolutely amazing. It actually reminds me of the opening promo real for UFC Unleashed, a program on Spike TV dedicated to displaying the more memorable fights from the Ultimate Fighting Championship. In that promo real, however, when some of the punches and kicks connect on an opponent, it shows an X-Ray view of the fighter being kicked or punched and what it might look like on the inside. I thought that this feature might actually show up in one of THQ’s UFC-based games, but it looks like NetherRealm jumped at it first, and it seems more appropriate for a Mortal Kombat game. When put into effect, the camera zooms in and offers a break in the fast paced hectic nature of the fights and shows an internal view of what you’re doing to your opponent. The X-Ray view shows bones being broken or even shattered and internal organs collapsing or being punctured or rupturing and all that gore-driven goodness. This, and the subsequent fatalities to come, is one of the features I’m looking forward to seeing the most.
The gore itself is also making a huge comeback in this Mortal Kombat effort as you will see real time damage on the character’s bodies and faces (much more elaborately so than previous efforts) and blood will splatter onto you from your opponent and decorate the stages and darken over with time as the blood coagulates. This devotion to gruesome details is what originally got me to pay attention to Mortal Kombat and it’s almost a shame that it took them this long to really elaborate on it or pay attention to it; but it’s also ultimately satisfying.
The plot of the game – yes, I’m one of those fighting game players that pays attention to the plots of the games – is also rather interesting in a total reboot sort of way. Apparently, at some point in a yet-to-be-determined future Shao Kahn is seconds away from killing the Thunder God, Raiden. In retaliation, Raiden sends a brainmail message back in time to a somewhat younger version of himself (the same version that appears in the original Mortal Kombat game), thus changing the outcome of everything that happened through those first three games. Does Scorpion kill Sub-Zero? Does Liu Kang win the tournament of the first game? That weird comic book styled retcon opens up a lot of possibilities for the plot to trample through, and that almost has me just as excited as the game play and gore does. Boon has been quoted as saying he wants roughly twenty-six characters in the final edition of the game, with potentially more being developed post-release and offered as DLC in the future. So far the known characters are: Cyrax, Johnny Cage, Kitana, Kung Lao, Mileena, Nightwolf, Reptile, Scorpion, Sektor, and Sub-Zero. Raiden and Shao Kahn made appearances in the game’s announcement trailer, but there’s nothing here nor there about their inclusion in the final game. As expected, however, I’m sure there will be several hidden characters decorated throughout the game as is the usual for Mortal Kombat, as well as a monstrous boss and/or sub-boss character. Boon has already stated that this Mortal Kombat will have more unlockables than previous games, and will actually put the rest to shame. It will also have the Krypt, which has served as the base for the unlockable content since Deadly Alliance, and it will have an elaborate and sophisticated unlocking system.
And before I stop talking and just post the trailer from E3, I have to say one of the things they’ve talked about recently that I really like is that they’re leaving open hooks in the programming to further tweak the characters in their online mechanics to balance them out post-release without the need of downloading a patch here and there. This is what has been missing from the online fighting game scene since it was born. This insures that Mortal Kombat won’t have a Sagat-like character from Street Fighter IV who proved to be very powerful in online play, and Capcom couldn’t tweak him without releasing a whole new game (of course that whole new game was worth the purchase, but you get my point I hope).
Mortal Kombat HD Kollection.
Imagine if you will sliding a disc into your current console of choice and being taken back in time to the early 1990s. You're half expecting the digitized sprites of real actors to look dated and ugly, but instead you see eye-popping digitized sprites in high-definition there for you in all their brutal glory.
If what TRMK.org is telling us is to be believed, then it's almost inevitable.
Following the pattern of Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix released a couple of years ago or so, it seems the folks at Warner Bros. are pushing their rather recent acquirement of the Mortal Kombat franchise in the direction that it needs. First, we're getting a real Mortal Kombat game that isn't being rushed out the gate by the folks at Midway, and second, a little pet project that puts three classic (and only really decent MK games out there) into the hands of fighting game fans everywhere.
Not to be outdone by rival company Capcom, Warner Bros. isn't settling with upscaling of pre-existing sprites or drawing over the same sprites with flashy new HD looks for their characters. Oh, no. TRMK.org is telling us that Warner Bros. is hiring new actors and actresses to stand before a camera in the MK costumes and re-enact the moves frame by frame to get the digitized actor effect that the original games had. They're redoing the sprites from the ground up using much more modern high-definition technology. And I imagine that accompanying these new actors and actresses would be re-drawn animations for the blood and gore to make the game one bloody HD experience.
While there hasn't been an outright confirmation from Warner Bros., NetherRealm Studios, or the developers behind this interesting effort, we'll have to take TRMK.org's confirmation with a regrettable grain of salt.
Needless to say, I for one am hoping this game is real.
If what TRMK.org is telling us is to be believed, then it's almost inevitable.
Following the pattern of Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix released a couple of years ago or so, it seems the folks at Warner Bros. are pushing their rather recent acquirement of the Mortal Kombat franchise in the direction that it needs. First, we're getting a real Mortal Kombat game that isn't being rushed out the gate by the folks at Midway, and second, a little pet project that puts three classic (and only really decent MK games out there) into the hands of fighting game fans everywhere.
Not to be outdone by rival company Capcom, Warner Bros. isn't settling with upscaling of pre-existing sprites or drawing over the same sprites with flashy new HD looks for their characters. Oh, no. TRMK.org is telling us that Warner Bros. is hiring new actors and actresses to stand before a camera in the MK costumes and re-enact the moves frame by frame to get the digitized actor effect that the original games had. They're redoing the sprites from the ground up using much more modern high-definition technology. And I imagine that accompanying these new actors and actresses would be re-drawn animations for the blood and gore to make the game one bloody HD experience.
While there hasn't been an outright confirmation from Warner Bros., NetherRealm Studios, or the developers behind this interesting effort, we'll have to take TRMK.org's confirmation with a regrettable grain of salt.
Needless to say, I for one am hoping this game is real.
Sweaty Joystick Knobs.
The days of going to the local arcade and sweating profusely as you got your ass whipped or did some ass whipping at whatever fighting game of preference are long done and over. The coming of the PlayStation, the XBox, the Dreamcast, and their sequel machines helped destroy the arcade scene here in the states.
But what they didn't do was kill the genre. After almost ten years of near stagnation (the only constants for the longest time seemed to be unfinished Mortal Kombat games and the Tekken series) we've got fighting games coming out left and right and I, for one, couldn't be any happier.
To celebrate the fighting game revival that began last year (thanks Capcom!), I've created this little blog to mix my passion for writing and my passion for all things fighting games. For the longest time I've wanted to keep a blog going, but I kept losing interest in whatever it was that I was trying to blog about. Thus I picked a topic I'm always excited about and I'll keep it going for as long as I can afford to play video games.
The sweaty joystick knobs are back, and while it may or may not be against someone you're standing (or sitting) next to, it can be done from home against someone half the world away.
Fight.
But what they didn't do was kill the genre. After almost ten years of near stagnation (the only constants for the longest time seemed to be unfinished Mortal Kombat games and the Tekken series) we've got fighting games coming out left and right and I, for one, couldn't be any happier.
To celebrate the fighting game revival that began last year (thanks Capcom!), I've created this little blog to mix my passion for writing and my passion for all things fighting games. For the longest time I've wanted to keep a blog going, but I kept losing interest in whatever it was that I was trying to blog about. Thus I picked a topic I'm always excited about and I'll keep it going for as long as I can afford to play video games.
The sweaty joystick knobs are back, and while it may or may not be against someone you're standing (or sitting) next to, it can be done from home against someone half the world away.
Fight.
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