Mortal Kombat Online would like to present to you the fourth edition of our Kreate-a-Kharacter Tournament! After much work, we have finally launched the competition and are ready to crown a winner from a field of 32 MK fans. The goal of this tournament is to show off the creativity of the Mortal Kombat fanbase and recognize those individuals with active imaginations.

We have nice prizes to award to the top three members. First place is the overall winner of the tournament, second place is the runner-up and third place will go to the winner of the characters who lose in the semi-finals. All prizes are signed copies of Mortal Kombat: Armageddon from the MK Development Team themselves, obtained from the Fight Night 2006 chat event.

You, as a MKO member, can help our contest by voting on your favorite characters in each match, helping the judges of the contest to determine the official winner of each match. I encourage everyone on the site to participate and make this event successful, so that we might have future successful contest and give away more prizes. So at this time, I ask you to check out the creations from other members of the community. The characters can be found on the official site hosting this tournament; click here to go to the site and read about the characters our fellow MK fans have created. To read all the other rules and regulations, click here.

I would like to thank for assisting me with the contest and setting up the tournament site along with providing the webspace, for capturing images of the characters and all the members who submitted characters during the registration period. Thanks for making this happen; good luck to all the entrants and may the best character win.

Click here now to place your vote.

Hot on the heels of the official release of Mortal Kombat: Armageddon for the Nintendo Wii, the folks over at Midway have released an official list of Kreate-a-Fatality moves for the Wii remote and nunchuk controllers. Every single kreate-a-fatality move is listed, along with the motions needed on the controller(s) to use the move. (No button presses are required for any kreate-a-fatality move.)

To see the list in its entirety, click here.

Our thanks to our friends over at Midway for providing us with this list!

After months of waiting, the day has finally arrived! Midway has sent out a press release this morning announcing that they have released the Nintendo Wii version of their latest Mortal Kombat fighting game, Mortal Kombat: Armageddon! As promised by Midway, this version features motion-controlled gameplay via the Wii remote and nunchuck, and also features the female raptor Khameleon as a playable character! From the press release:

CHICAGO -- May 29, 2007 -- Midway Games Inc. (NYSE: MWY), a leading interactive entertainment industry publisher and developer, today announced that Mortal Kombat®: Armageddon™ for Nintendo's Wii™ home video game system has shipped to retail outlets nationwide and is available at a U.S. MSRP of $49.95. Mortal Kombat: Armageddon features a new control scheme, a completely revamped Endurance Mode, and a new kharacter - Female Khameleon.

"Mortal Kombat: Armageddon brings Midway's top-selling and award winning franchise to the Wii expanding the experience to a broader audience with its simple and intuitive gameplay," said Steve Allison, chief marketing officer, Midway. "The new control scheme makes it easy for the novice player or non-gamer to pull off special moves and fatalities just like a master martial artist."

The control scheme in Mortal Kombat: Armageddon has been completely re-tooled to take advantage of the Wii's unique WiiRemote™ and Nunchuk™ Controllers. With all of the infamous super moves and fatalities executed via the WiiRemote™, even the most novice gamers will be creating their own fatalities. Mortal Kombat: Armageddon also supports the Nintendo GameCube™ Controllers and Classic Controllers.

Mortal Kombat: Armageddon boasts new, exciting content for the Wii, including a new character, Female Khameleon, and, appearing for the first time on console, a deeply enhanced Endurance Mode which allows gamers to test their true fighting stamina. An advanced Motor Kombat mode, complete with super moves and death traps, allows players to utilize the latest in WiiRemote driving technology when playing in single-player mode or with up to 4 players. Mortal Kombat: Armageddon also includes a customized Kreate-A-Fighter Mode, a unique Kreate-A-Fatality System, and an entirely revamped and improved Konquest Mode.

The game should be in stores now, so if you are an owner of a Nintendo Wii, you should have no problem picking this game up.

To read the press release in its entirety, click here.

After a rather lengthy drought, a new bio from Mortal Kombat: Armageddon has finally been released! Apparently to coincide with the release of the game on the Wii, the exclusive character Khameleon is featured in the latest bio offering from Midway. The bio explains her activities during her initial MK: Trilogy appearance and what she has been doing since that time. Khameleon appears to retain her neutral stance, seeking out only revenge on Shao Kahn and his minions for nearly destroying her race. Interestingly, her male counterpart Chameleon is not mentioned here as being a member of the raptor race to her own knowledge.

Shao Kahn... He destroyed the realm of Zaterra — my home. My kind is all but extinct; I believe the only survivors are Reptile and myself. I have spent a lifetime hidden from view, searching for a way to kill the emperor for what he did to my world. It seemed I had been given my chance when Reptile agreed to join forces and slay him — but once again Reptile fell under Shao Kahn's influence and turned against me. I barely escaped with my life.

For a long time I had given up hope. It seemed that Shao Kahn was invincible. His allies served and protected him, and those who fought against him only seemed to make him stronger. It was as if he fed on kombat itself. I wandered the realms aimlessly, uncertain of what could be done to stop him.

During my journeys, camouflaged to conceal my presence, I learned from a gathering of warriors that a great weapon would present itself in Edenia. The victor of some skirmish would be granted immense power — like that of a god. More alarming was the mention that Shao Kahn himself sought this power.

The emperor will not acquire it. I will find this weapon and use it to punish Shao Kahn and those who have served him. He will suffer greatly for destroying the Raptors.

To view the bio on the official MK: Armageddon website, click here.

Thanks to MKO reader Snow for sending the lead in on this story.

WIth the release of Mortal Kombat: Armageddon for the Nintendo Wii coming next week, it's coming close to time for the first reviews of the game to appear. Today, IGN posted what we believe to be the first review of MK: Armageddon for the Wii! The two-page review spends equal time discussing aspects of the game that is common to both the Wii version and the previous version released for Playstation 2 and Xbox. However, they do go into detail about the differences seen in the Wii version. For example, they do describe how they found the Wii remote/nunchuk-based control system to work with the game; overall they found it worked well, with a couple of downsides. From the review:

The mechanics are responsive and the gameplay fun when you're playing with the classic controller or alternatively with the GameCube controller. Both are fully compatible with the Wii iterations and you can plug them in at any time and compete against friends who are using the Wii remote and nunchuk. For that reason alone, we could recommend Armageddon to Wii owners even if the remote controls were absolute junk. As it turns out, they're not.

The new gesture-simplified fights are for many going to be the main draw to this incarnation of the project and when they are working as you'd like them to they do indeed effectively make playing Mortal Kombat much easier. To perform special character moves with the Wii remote all you have to do is hold down the B trigger, make a left to right, or up and down, or half circle motion, and then release. Liu Kang will fly across the screen kicking. Raiden will dive at opponents. Bo' Rai Cho will vomit at their feet. The list goes on. We were somewhat surprised to find that the gesture system does feel good and is responsive. Using very minimal movements, you can flick out left/right motions and carve half circles into the air even as the Wii remote dangles from your lap. It is in a way refreshing to play Mortal Kombat this way and it is on some level intuitive, too. We're positive that gamers who didn't grow up with the franchise would prefer this method of play to the traditional one. And yet, there are some quirks. The game seems to understand and translate our motions 95% of the time, but occasionally our movements go unregistered, which is problematic given the nature of such high-speed battles where every move counts. The bigger problem is that standard high/low punches and kicks are performed with the D-Pad on the Wii remote, which is uncomfortable, to say the least.

The reviewer also laments the loss of online play, stating that Khameleon's inclusion does not make up for it. On the other hand, he points out that Midway is not to blame for the lack of online play. He also talks about the video quality, praising it save for one very minor detail. From the review:

It's too bad that - and this omission is sorely missed - Armageddon for Wii lacks an online mode altogether due almost certainly to Nintendo's slow start in readying an infrastructure and providing developers like Midway with the proper tools and documentation to utilize it. It's a good excuse, of course, but that makes little difference to consumers who want it and we have therefore been forced to ding the final score of the game because of its absence.

Armageddon on Wii looks about the same as its predecessors. Models are acceptably detailed and animation is quick and fluid; environments are pleasingly varied in design and they are also fairly interactive, which means you can toss opponents out of arenas and they'll crash through walls and windows, revealing other fight areas below. The particle effects, particularly for blood, are too spectacularly over the top for our tastes, but we're sure fatality seekers will love them. The whole experience runs at a constant 60 frames per second in both 480p and 16:9 modes on Wii, although Midway's version of widescreen is slightly faked; it cuts off the far sides of the screen.

In the end, IGN gave MK Armageddon for the Wii a score of 7.8, stating that the only reason it scored less than its PS2 and Xbox counterparts was the lack of online play. They also make a point to say that in their opinion, MK Armageddon is currently the Wii's best fighting game.

To read the review in its entirety, click here.

Our thanks to forum/chat member and frequent contributor for letting us know about this review!

Game Informer has released the first in a coming series of gaming articles titled "Beyond The Bits" that are designed to focus on some "unsung facets" involving video game creation. The first comes in the form of AI, artificial intelligence. This four page article featuring a number of respectable programmers from the gaming industry from a number of different genres, including Mortal Kombat's Ed Boon. Boon comments on the history of AI in the arcades as well as the current and future plans for Mortal Kombat's AI. Also included are smaller individual sections featuring most all video game genres.

Artificial Intelligence, or A.I., is one of the most important yet least understood aspects of modern game development. Depending on the type of game, developers may have entirely different goals when it comes to telling the computer how to play the game. Some say mimicking human intelligence is the goal. Others take a more pragmatic approach and say simply having the computer avoid doing too many stupid things is a solid benchmark.

“I think, initially, A.I. stuff was basically, I would describe it as simulating A.I.—kind of faking it,” says Boon. “You would program in kind of scripted sequences and randomly pick between them, and that kind of created the illusion of thought or something, as opposed to a random-number generator. Then, as the years have passed, certainly over the past 10 years, things have become more like an actual algorithm that scans the conditions of the game.”

“I think with a fighting game, the whole stigma is that you’re playing against a ladder, you’re playing against something that’s not as fun to play because it’s your one fighter against the other one fighter and there are far fewer variables involved,” Boon says. “So when A.I. is bad, it really stands out in a fighting game, and it also becomes more boring since people can predict things more. We’re definitely going to more toward the different classes of A.I. and personalities and whatnot as opposed to something that’s trying to make sure that you get through the first three fighters and not get through too many in a row—and have more of a personality with them.

To view more thoughts from Boon and many others, click here to read the entire article.

Thanks to forum member for sending in this article.

Gaming review/preview website Gamespot has released a handful of new images supporting the upcoming release of Mortal Kombat: Armageddon for the Wii! These screenshots all feature the games Endurance Mode, which was carried over from the PSP's Mortal Kombat: Unchained released near the original game's release date. A versus screen is shown with Scorpion facing off against multiple silhouettes along with a post match victory stance (also featuring Rain in another image) and finally a "rejuvenate" move which restored health between battles.

To view these images as well as Gamespot's entire library of images for this game, click here.

Thanks to forum member for being the first to send in this lead!

Cinder from the official Midway Boards has released a vs. screen picture of the female Khameleon vs. the male Chameleon. The Wii-exclusive Khameleon has transparent body parts much like her male counterpart.


To view the thread in which the image was originally posted, click here.

IGN has released the fifth video in the "Fighter of the Wiik" tradition, celebrating the upcoming release of Mortal Kombat: Armageddon on the Wii very soon. This video is all about the elusive, the exclusive, the reclusive.... Khameleon. Once again, there is commentary from MK team members Steve Beran, John Vogel, Ed Boon, and Shaun Himmerick as they discuss Khameleon's origins as a character who only appeared in the Nintendo 64 version of MK Trilogy [referred to as MK3 in the video]. Khameleon is described as the last remaining female survivor of Reptile's race.

Now, this is first time we can actually see Khameleon in action in MKA, and she does borrow moves from several other characters (for example, a fireball from Tanya and a Teleport Kick from Mileena). She does change colors just like the male Chameleon. One thing that looks really cool is that when she does a special move, her color changes to match the character she is currently imitating. Her hand-to-hand style is Eagle Claw, her weapon style remains unknown.

To download the video, you must be an IGN Insider member. However, anyone is free to view the video by clicking here.

IGN has released the fourth video in the "Fighter of the Wiik" tradition, celebrating the upcoming release of Mortal Kombat: Armageddon on the Wii next month. The next video is all about the supreme boss from MKA.... Blaze. Once again, there is commentary from MK team members Steve Beran, John Vogel, Ed Boon, Tony Goskie, and Shaun Himmerick as they discuss Blaze's origin as a background character from the Pit II, storyline as a creation from Delia, and of course, the Wiimote-exclusive special moves. Blaze is the first MKA character to have both a bio posted as well as a Fighter of the Wiik video dedicated to him.

To download the video, you must be an IGN Insider member. However, anyone is free to view the video by clicking here.

Thanks again to for getting in yet another News Lead!