Over on fellow Mortal Kombat website TRMK, Patrick McCarron has posted a review of Midway's fighting game Mortal Kombat: Deception on the Microsoft X-Box 360. As reported earlier, X-Box 360 performs its backwards compatibility via software instead of hardware, so each game requires a specific download of compatibility code. Despite Microsoft's assurance of certification, it doesn't appear that MK: Deception fared too well in translation. From the article:

The game starts off with the intro video and main menu, which looks pretty crisp and clear being rendered at my Xbox 360's resolution of 1080i. All the game's Profile functions appear to work just fine, and I can connect fine to Xbox Live and search for games. The Krypt and special Kontent areas all appear to be working as expected. Even the Area 51 demo appears to work perfect. Seems too good to be true, and it is.

I then decide to fire up a game in Arcade mode, and am presented with the character selection screen followed by the tournment ladder. Immediately I can see the increased quality of rendering the game at 1080i in the details of the tournament ladder mountain and the characters. I was really excited until the game actually loaded up a fight scene.

The fight scenes are emulated fairly pretty poor. The game camera keeps getting blocked by polygons that pop over the action constantly. The character I was playing with would get some polygons stretching out past the camera view. It would only get worse the next round, because as I find some stages are worse than others. The game started to slows down and redrawns polygons across the camera surface. Totally making the game unplayable. A positive note is while the screen was clear the details on the characters and surrounding stage really stand out, their rendering quality looks really great in High Definition 1080i. It was a welcome surprise, that should look amazing once the bugs are all fixed.

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Overall the emulation for the backwards compatibility needs some work. So much so I'm surprised this got past their QC department. But once the issues are resolved by Microsoft, all MK fans should be in business with the 360.

Provided Microsoft patches their backwards-compatibility code releases, as McCarron stated, this shouldn't be a problem. However, in the meantime, it's obvious that MK: Deception should not be considered a perfect translation in the interim.

To read the original article in its entirety, click here.

Our thanks to forum members _JRF_ and Shinnokxz for the heads-up on this news story!