Mortal Kombat. n. (1) 1st Official Entry in the fighting series Mortal Komab created in the early 1990s for the Arcades by a company called Williams, featuring 7 playable characters and 2 unplayable boss characters.
Mortal Kombat Armageddon. n (1) 7th Official Entry in the fighting series Mortal Kombat created in late 2006 for the home consoles by a company called Midway, featuring 62 playable characters and a kitchen sink list of modes that only a Midway executive could love.
Mortal Kombat "Fan". n (1) People who are incredibly whiny, insatiable, petulant and spoiled rotten. Usually, they have trouble keeping their expectations in the realm of reality and enjoy going off on random tangents based on general public relations puffery.
Mortal Kombat Armageddon ("MKA") is the latest entry in this landmark fighting series. While much has been made of the likeness MKA shares with its predecessors this generation, MKA is a worthy update to the MKA mythos and is most definitely worth your time. What MKA does not offer are the following: New Costumes for characters featured in Deadly Alliance and Deception (with at least one notable exception being Reptile). It does not feature computer generated images endings for all 62 playable characters. It does not feature three different fighting styles for each of the 62 playable characters.
It is quite simple why a design team could not do this in the one year hiatus between Shaolin Monks and MKA (or the 2 year hiatus between Deception and MKA). For the lack of costumes (unfortunately), Midway opts to keep the fans happy. 62 costumes, nay 128 costumes is on par with a Hollywood movie production. Consider series like Street Fighter, where character costumes rarely, if ever, change. Now consider how many iterations the Midway team has taken for MKA in the past 4 years since Deadly Alliance was released. It's hardly a valid complaint to request ANOTHER 128 costumes, when some of these costumes are perfectly tailored to the characters.
For the other "omissions," Cost and time are reasons for no 62 CGI endings. 3 x 62 fighting styles is unrealistic for any design team to implement into a piece of entertainment, be it Namco or Bruce Lee himself.
Now, with some preliminary discussions out of the way, onto the more important discussion of what IS in the game. MKA has 58 playable characters out of the gate. While the roster may seem familiar to the player of Deadly Alliance of Deception, the characters are actually much faster and many sport new moves, as an improvement to Deadly Alliance's limited special moves. In addition, the fighting system has a new parry move, which challenges you to keep from holding back and block the entire round, as the parry does not make you invulnerable. The wake-up system is a much needed change, giving you the option to avoid that fireball or hellfire that if timed right could hit you every time in Deception and Deadly Alliance. Additionally, the toning down of the style branching to 2 styles makes it all the more easier to navigate between them effectively. Give MKA a whirl, it's fighting engine is an improvedly honed version of the previous entries.
Konquest mode has also been greatly improved. While many fans claim that the kata endings of Arcade mode do nothing to shed light on the Armageddon of MK, Konquest mode does the job nicely. Featuring a more linear approach, somewhat a cross between Shaolin Monks and Deadly Alliance's Konquest, you venture from point A to point B, getting new insights into why certain characters are back in the fray after a 10 year hiatus. The ending may not give you the satisfaction of seeing 62 characters burn in effigy to the game's title, but Konquest is a fun ride, switching quickly between the 3rd person action game and the Arcade mode battles with the selection of major characters from the game's roster.
The Krypt has a much needed overhaul. When you collect all of Konquest mode's various relics (a fun little tribute to each character), you unlock everything in the Krypt. Everything (or is it really everything?). Quite a nice feature, for those who remember unlock 26 x 26 rows of items in Deadly Alliance (what a pain in the *** that was).
Motor Kombat is a nice little diversion. It's a small kart racer, on par with some of the lesser, non-Mario Kart entries into the genre (Bombad racing comes to mind).
Kreate-A-Kharacter is a great way to give the fans a way to create dream match-ups. While some omissions seem to be related to possible copyright infringement (no pulse blades, George Lucas?), the features are varied and give you the ability to create most comic book, fighting game and movie characters you could want. There is even the hint at more with the super locked question mark box in the Krypt.
Kreate-A-Fatality ("KAF") is at first glance, a step down from the likes of Sub-Zero's Deception fatality. But when you consider how terribly repetitive most of the fatalities get (considering that there may be only so many ways to show a character be killed in 10 seconds), giving the fans the ability to transfer their favorite fatalities between characters is a nice change. KAF gives you the option of doing a simple ender when you want to get on to the next round OR to map out a list of moves and transitions and punches to rack up some Koins for Kreate-A-Kharacter mode.
To wrap up, MKA is a feature-rich enhancement of the last two Mortal Kombat games, Deadly Alliance and Deception. It does have the kitchen-sink mentality, meaning the developers seem happy to throw quantity at you more than quality. But, if you take the game for a spin and pay attention to the details, you'll realize that this is a rightly and finely tuned version of this fighting engine. It may still not be up to par with Soul Calibur, but it's less clunky than the last two games. Everything from the slick menus to the arena death traps have been tweaked well enough for me to stick to Armageddon for the next few years while Midway readies a completely (hopefully) new Mortal Kombat.