After playing thousands of games in the course of three short days at E3, it is a diehard fact that only a select few stand out as being truly impressive. Mortal Kombat Online would like to congratulate Midway Games and the entire development team of Mortal Kombat: Deception for their outstanding victory in winning three separate awards for Best Fighting Game of E3! 1up.com, Gamespot, and IGN XBox have all awarded Mortal Kombat: Deception this outstanding recognition.

From IGN Xbox:

After 2002's surprisingly sound 3D rendition of Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance, Midway has taken its time to dig deeper into the MK chest of goodies. Mortal Kombat: Deception adds to the combo carnage by bringing expected new characters and moves, but it's upped the ante with brutally punishing environmental traps, and it's rounded out the fighter with solid, likeable side games giving players secondary and tertiary reasons to goof around. The fighting itself is still skill-based, combo-laden and tighter than ever, and the wealth of moves and character rivalries brings new life to the aging series. Mortal Kombat may be an old series, but the new engine and tireless work on Midway's part to hone it have shown us the spine-ripping beast of a brawler still has all the right moves.

Be sure to check out what each of these publishers had to say about the next installment of Mortal Kombat, and stay tuned here to Mortal Kombat Online as we bring you the latest coverage!

We are excited to present you our final hands on impressions of the E3 Build of Mortal Kombat: Deception! After four days straight of playing this game, it's safe to say we didn't come home disappointed. Mortal Kombat: Deception is here once again to revolutionize the fighting game genre. From our four-page review:

Initially, playing Mortal Kombat: Deception is incredibly similar to playing Deadly Alliance. The familiar elements of three-styles per character, style branch combos, and a slew of special moves remain in tact. Digging deeper, however, it is obvious that the team has spent considerable time under the hood. Increased game speed, level-based weapons, and death traps were all present for us to make use of.

The overall game speed upgrade is not nearly as drastic as Street Fighter 2 to Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo, but it is evident that the characters move with an increased amount of adrenaline. This factor makes the game play a notch more difficult, as it is now trickier to run through a variety of the combos. To instinctively pull of a style branch combo will result in a bit of a shock, as the game registers the hits much quicker. I particularly enjoyed this, as it made me work my brain a little harder to actually pull of seemingly insignificant three-hitters. On the defensive side, combo breakers and reversals were not yet present. However, the block function seems to have changed in order to pave way for more in depth fighting. In Deadly Alliance, after your opponent executes a special move that fails to connect, they are incredibly vulnerable to your incoming attack. In Deception, this is particularly true because though character movement is much fast, the “hang-timeâ€? is still the same length. This allows the offensive player to quickly come in for a kill, and definitely makes the defender think twice about executing a projectile that is not likely to connect.

You can read the entire review written by our new Mortal Kombat Online staffer, Mobster4Christ, by clicking here. With that, we would like to thank everyone who helped us with this year's coverage of the Electronic Entertainment Expo! Special thanks goes out to Mobster4Christ, RivetSPOOn (also her mom!), and everyone at Midway Games for all the help and support that they've given us during our coverage. This has been one of our greatest experiences on the site thus far, and we look forward to future trips to E3! This concludes our coverage, if you've missed out on any of the coverage check out our E3 2004 coverage section. Thanks for making Mortal Kombat Online the top source for all of your MK related needs!

While at the Electronic Entertainment Expo this year, we tried to get the most important media assets out to you first while in Los Angeles. Now rested, we are releasing some assets that we didn't have time to get up while on our trip. First, we have some exclusive assets from Midway Arcade Treasures 2. While at the MK Party and at the Midway Booth, we had some time in between our matches of MK: Deception to play some old school Kombat. Unfortunately, only the original Mortal Kombat was playable in this demo build. However, we had a great time reminiscing the older days of blood-shed yore. Not much in room of assets was released for this game, but here is the official trailer that was showcased at E3. We also have raw footage of the game straight from Midway's press kit.

• Midway Arcade Treasures 2 Trailer
• Midway Arcade Treasures 2 Raw Play-Through

Moving on to Mortal Kombat: Deception, we are now releasing two exclusive trailers of the game, as well as an interview with series co-creator Ed Boon that was passed out to various media outlets, including ourselves. We would have brought this to you sooner, but we had our own interview to post during the week of E3. As for the two trailers, one of them is an updated version that was shown on a display of sixteen TVs that were outside of Midway's Booth. Last, check out our exclusive face-off between ]{0MBAT and Scott-Howell, that you won't find anywhere else!

• Press-released Ed Boon Interview
• E3 official Mortal Kombat: Deception Trailer
• ESRB official Mortal Kombat: Deception Trailer
• Exclusive Mortal Kombat Match!

A lot of these videos have already been seen, save the last one, but we at least now have them in one central location. Tonight concludes our E3 2004 coverage as we release our final hands-on review of Mortal Kombat: Deception!

The Puzzle Kombat Mode in Mortal Kombat: Deception is quite simple, yet quite addictive. Many people have described it as feeling like Tetris, Columns, Puyo Puyo, or Dr. Mario. The truth is, this game is a lot more like Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo.

The game is not like Tetris in that you need lines, or other puzzle games in that you want 3 or 4 of a similar kind in a row. You can gather up many many different blocks of a similar color (say red), and then when you get a red dragon koin color, that will wipe out every red block connected to it. Dragon koins are fairly rare, giving the game an interesting challenge while not making it impossibly hard. As you obtain the dragon koins and knock out your blocks, you can do combos along the way, and this will charge up your super meter.

Once in a while, you can get an item such as a bomb - This knocks out every single block of the color your set your bomb down on, whether it's connected to the other squares or not. Using your bomb in a combo charges up your Super Meter faster. Of course, every time you get rid of a bunch of your own blocks, you're also sending a bunch of extra blocks to your opponent's screen. One of the other things we noticed (thanks to some very good playing skills, and a little luck) is that when you clear your screen all the way down to the bottom, you get a little notice saying "EXCELLENT!" and it bumps up your Super Meter as well.

While you're playing Puzzle Kombat, you have caricatures of the normal MKD fighters representing how well you're doing - and as you do your combos they will do a special move. Each special move that your fighter does affects the blocks in a different way, so which character you picked comes heavily into play. For instance, if you do a combo while playing as Scorpion, it will jumble your opponents blocks around. Not all of these specials are aggresive, as Mileena has a drill for her special that will destroy two columns of her own blocks. Still another special in the game will group your own blocks by color.

Your fighters are also pushing each other to the corner of the screen, so when one person's blocks are all the way up to the top, that person has also been pushed all the way to their corner into a deathtrap - FATALITY! Each background in Puzzle Kombat has its own unique Stage and therefore Stage Fatality, as well.

Like regular Kombat, it is best 2 out of 3, so you still have a shot at it regardless of what happens in the first round. The best strategy that seems to work for us while at E3 was to stack up all the blocks of the same color in a row (as best we could) in order to knock a bunch of them out at once when the dragon koin arrives. Doing this in a way that sets up combos would be ideal (for instance, destroying a pile of red blocks, which in turn destroys a pile of blue ones). Remember, doing a combo is what activates your special move, giving you the real upper hand in the game!

Like Chess Kombat reviewed yesterday, Puzzle Kombat will be one of the modes that can go online. In fact, in the video, you can see Mortal Kombat Online's own DArqueBishop and Scott-Howell battle it out over a LAN! Click here to download the Puzzle Kombat video.

Mortal Kombat: Deception's Chess Kombat might seem uninteresting at first, but once you've played it it's hard to put down. For starters, this game is not exactly like chess. If you've never played chess, don't let the name fool you because you will be able to pick this up relatively easy. It's more like that game Archon, but you don't have to have played that before in order to start Chess Kombat either.

When you first start, you can elect to play against the computer, a second player, or someone online. Next, you will be asked to assemble a team of 5 characters. That's five different characters, you can not pick the same characters over and over. You may, however, use the same characters that your opponent is using. This is good, because it forces you to master many different fighters and not just stick to one.

The Leader is your most important fighter; if your leader dies, you lose. This is kind of like the King in chess. Your Champion is the most powerful fighter; it can move farther than your other pieces can. Your Sorcerer (you have 2 of these) is interesting, as you have access to 8 different spells such as imprison, resurrect, etc. If you lose one of your Sorcerer's, then you only have access to 4 spells, so try to be careful. Then we have the Shifter. When you fight as the Shifter, you turn into the person you're fighting against. Last, but not least, we have the Grunt. Your grunt is like chess's pawn, you will have the most of this piece and will do most of your fighting as the Grunt. Make sure you really know how to use the fighter you select here.

Once you begin, you will notice 2 pieces on the board highlighted in green. These recharge the health of all your fighters if you manage to get your piece on that square. You also have one piece reserved as your trap, you can set it anywhere on the board you like. You want to be aware of where your opponent set their trap, so you know to avoid that square.

Now when you begin your first move as the Grunt, you can move one space diagonally or 2 spaces vertically (you can move horizontally if that space is available to you). Different pieces will be able to move farther, or shorter, depending on the piece. When 2 pieces land on the same square, that's when the good ol' MK fighting begins. Whoever lands on the square second is considered the attacker and starts with a 10 point bonus (slightly more health). The battles go pretty quickly, faster than a normal MK battle since your health starts out very limited. When you win, you are given the opportunity to finish your opponent with a Fatality - it really wouldn't be Chess Kombat without it!

The best part about Chess Kombat? The classic, retro, MK backgrounds redone in 3-D! We've already seen the pics of The Courtyard (which can be seen in the video below), The Dead Pool, The MK3 Champions, and The Portal. And the game's not even finished! Who knows what old-school stages will end up returning? These are definitely a treat for the long-term Mortal Kombat fans. The monks and Shang Tsung's guards are enough to make any MK fan start salivating. In the E3 version of the game, you had one stage as the background for the entire game. It remains to be seen if this will be true for the final version.

So, check out this exclusive, direct-feed video of Chess Kombat.

Also, as a special treat to the Mortal Kombat fans as to what E3 was like, there was a huge set of 16 TV screens right outside Midway's booth. Here is a special video of one of the MK: Deception trailers being displayed across all these TV sets at once. Enjoy!