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Post by Bobinator on Apr 28, 2013 12:04:28 GMT -5
Yeah, seriously. I've never been able to get in a single kombat kode ever since I've been playing MK. It might be easier to do in MK9, where it takes longer to load, but I dunno.
Sooner or later I'll write up a couple of things for cameos and ask Derboo if he wouldn't mind putting them in.
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Post by TheChosen on Apr 29, 2013 18:59:41 GMT -5
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Post by nerdatcomputer on May 4, 2013 4:42:51 GMT -5
I love everything about this article except one part which I actually hate: MortalKombat4 review. It follows the popular misconception that MK4 is "the begging of the bad MK games". You should look better into the facts, and you will notice why I call it "a misconception". For starters, the article author seems to be unaware for the reason behind "War Gods". In a moment of lucidity Midway became aware of it's own limitations, and realized they knew nothing about making 3D fighting games. Instead of endangering their cow-franchise as they had done in the past ( and as they would do repeatedly in the future), they decided to practice with a new Intellectual Property. Thus they created a cheap carbon-copy MK rooster in order to feel free to commit mistakes, and "War Gods" was born. This explains why the game feels in many ways like a "3D version" of MK III, and why there was so little interest in designing good characters. It also explain why they allowed themselves to make so many flawed design decisions. (Just take a look at this excuse for a game) However, this experience was extremely good for them, and help them decide what direction they wanted to take MK4. At that time the best 3D fighting games were 'Tekken 3', 'virtua Fighter 3' and 'soul edge'; and even them were kind of slow and clunky. 3D usually includes more realistic movement, in which a good punch can take more than a couple of frames to be thrown. Midway didn't like how slow the pace of those games was, so instead they made animations shorter and more akin the original Mortal Kombats. Punches have 4 or 5 frames, instead of 20/40. In addition they noticed that movement on the new axis made the game felt extremely inconsistent. (Bare in mind that until Soul Calibur, pretty much no game was able to get 3D right). So they fixed it by adding extremely limited 3D movement to the game, which is not that different than KoF dodge move.
It's true that game was weak in certain aspects, particularly the character rooster. Many important characters (like noob saibot and kitana) were set aside for improvised champs (reiko and tanya), and in certain cases it was lame (Jark was a lame excuse for Kano). Many important characters like Baraka or the Cyborgs went completely missing for no apparent reason. The final boss was not badass + horribly easy and Goro was only included in the ports. The ending animations are so cheesily bad that they deserve an spot of their own. All this combined with an unfitting plot and lame development.
However, those poor choices do not outweight the many right choices the game made. Returning to the middle east/medieval atmosphere of the original game, giving important spot to old characters (including the ninjas and Johnny Cage), reducing ridicule from the fatalies (this includes removing animalities/friendships/brutalities/etc), the aforementioned mechanical choices, having weapons as an important (yet not invasive) addition, etc, etc, etc.
If you look at the reception of the game, it was actually quite beloved after it's release. Only in recent years people have started saying it was a bad game, and I believe the reason behind it is lack of perspective. Every 3D game that came after Mk4 sucked to a certain deegre, and more often than not "2d-to-3d transitions'' failed. All this combined with the fact that after Mk4 the whole franchise started to languish quickly. To quote Wikipedia...
So I would highly suggest you revise the MK4 section of this article. I believe it lacks from perspective and quickly falls into the erroneus-yet-commonly-accepted idea that Mortal Kombat 4 was when the franchise "jumped the shark", when it actually was a reasonably good game between one huge mis-step (MK3) and a terribly huge mis-step (MK:DA).
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Post by Bobinator on May 4, 2013 15:40:51 GMT -5
Sorry, but I'm doing this from a more modern perspective, along with my own subjective opinion. Sure, the atmosphere might have been an improvement, but the whole weapon gimmick was entirely unnecssary. Not to mention the 3D dodge was really the ONLY thing besides the weapons that made MK4 anything more than a reskinned MK3. Fun Fact: At one point, I would have actually included War Gods as a part of this article, but I figured it'd work better as a seperate article. I still have the file on my hard drive. I concluded that while the art design was pretty lame, and the gameplay wouldn't match up to your average Tekken game, there were some nice new features that should have been included in NK4, instead of what we got.
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Post by nerdatcomputer on May 5, 2013 3:37:36 GMT -5
Sorry, but I'm doing this from a more modern perspective, along with my own subjective opinion. Sure, the atmosphere might have been an improvement, but the whole weapon gimmick was entirely unnecssary. Not to mention the 3D dodge was really the ONLY thing besides the weapons that made MK4 anything more than a reskinned MK3. I see where you are coming from, however, a modern perspective should be able to recognize that it's divorced from the timeframe it is looking at. "The game hasn't aged well and looks ugly" is a whole different statement than "The game is ugly and difficult to look at". In that same note, it's not the same judging that "MK4 was an unremarkable and somehow unnecessary 3D reskin of MK3" than outright stating it's " the jump-shark point of the franchise". This is particularly true when most of the complains are about things that were not expected from game at the time of it's release. (Like an smooth 3D movement, a thing that even games advanced-for-its-time like Tekken didn't have) Fun Fact: At one point, I would have actually included War Gods as a part of this article, but I figured it'd work better as a seperate article. I still have the file on my hard drive. I concluded that while the art design was pretty lame, and the gameplay wouldn't match up to your average Tekken game, there were some nice new features that should have been included in NK4, instead of what we got. I'm really interested in seeing your opinion about what things of 'War Gods' you think should have been in MK4. (No sarcasm here, I truly mean it) I actually feel the other way around this subject. (lol ) Making MK4 extremely similar to the first 3 'Mortal Kombat's was a great idea from Midway, playing safe and not taking too many risks. After all, other franchises had had horrible results when trying to obtain good 3D games, such as 'Street Fighters' or 'Fatal Fury'. The 2D-to-3D transition had to be smooth or else it would fail. 'War Gods' proved that Midway was not yet ready to release a smooth 3D fighting that deviated a lot from the original MK formula, so instead they decided to work on what they were good at doing. MK4 looks like the first step in a path for future 3D MK game, setting a base for things to come. This formula just had to be worked and improved until perfected in future releases: Making the weapon-system far less gimmicky and more practical, making the 3D-dodge far more smooth and increasing a little the control the player has over the 3D environment, creating better 3D arenas, having a less lame rooster, etc. Instead they decided to scratch most of this and start fresh with MKDA, making a game more similar to 'War Gods', which history has proven was a huge mistake. It's no coincidence that MK9 was the first Mk in many years to be proclaimed good. If you ask me, there are 3 things that made the Mortal Kombat franchise into a huge hit (besides Gore), all the successful games had them, MK4 being no exception:* Realistic graphics for it's time. (Those '3D Models' looked more realistic than 'Stop Motion sprites' with 'drawn backgrounds') * Good Atmosphere. (We both agree in this point about MK4) * It should be easy to play and characters should feel similar. (MK4 plays like MK3, and is extremely easy to play)
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Post by lanceboyle94 on May 10, 2013 0:53:24 GMT -5
You know that Kombat Kode I mentioned that was supposedly a hint for Theatre of Magic? Well, it is a hint, but for another pinball: Jack*Bot. And apparently, doing what that hint tells you (holding both flippers at the beginning of a Casino Run) might give you a MK3 hint (there's a chance it might not, apparently)
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Post by derboo on Jul 15, 2013 9:45:59 GMT -5
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Post by jorpho on Jul 16, 2013 23:13:15 GMT -5
Nifty. I had never heard of most of those.
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Post by Gendo Ikari on Jul 17, 2013 10:55:57 GMT -5
I hope some words will be added about the PC version of MK9. It came out with little fanfare (right now only on Steam but a boxed version will come) and it seems to have some unfortunate technical issues, especially an inconsistent framerate - reportedly, a fight may start much faster than normal, to the point of dialogue of in-engine cutscenes partially skipping, then get to normal speed and finally go in slow motion, and vice versa - and bad movie compression. Since it came over two years later than the console version, such lack of optimization is hardly excusable.
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Post by Bobinator on Jul 17, 2013 16:19:01 GMT -5
I hope some words will be added about the PC version of MK9. It came out with little fanfare (right now only on Steam but a boxed version will come) and it seems to have some unfortunate technical issues, especially an inconsistent framerate - reportedly, a fight may start much faster than normal, to the point of dialogue of in-engine cutscenes partially skipping, then get to normal speed and finally go in slow motion, and vice versa - and bad movie compression. Since it came over two years later than the console version, such lack of optimization is hardly excusable. I currently don't have it, (I plan to sometime down the line, depending on how the Steam summer sales go) but I know Snarboo and EksFactor do, and I haven't heard of any issue from them. Maybe the complaints are coming from people with older computers?
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Post by Gendo Ikari on Jul 18, 2013 12:01:37 GMT -5
No, even people with good PCs report problems. On an Italian forum, I read of one who has the game usually stable on 60 FPS, but when some graphical effects happen (like the flames during Scorion's winning pose), it has a momentary drop to 30 or less. Another solved all by just deactivatin g Vsync but other say they had not the same luck. Some arenas are heavier than others on the system, but that doesn't explain why one may see the fighters go too fast, then in slow motion during the same fight. The lack of problems of some people may be due to video card models or who knows what else - testing on PC serves to ensure compatibility on a variety of configurations (contrarily to the fixed console hardware), and it looks like they skipped on it. Considering how the game is scalable now, and how its grahpics are not so exceptional to be so heavy... it's just one more sloppy console-to-PC port. I hope for some patches.
Some fans have released an higher-res movies pack.
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Post by jorpho on Jul 18, 2013 16:03:36 GMT -5
I think there's still a 30% off coupon for MK9 at GreenManGaming at the moment. At this rate it doesn't look like Steam is going to discount it before the sale is over.
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Post by Gendo Ikari on May 8, 2014 10:16:01 GMT -5
Just an heads up to tell that the PC version of MK9 is currently priced at just €5 (roughly $7) on the Humble Store.
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Post by moran on May 8, 2014 11:05:12 GMT -5
The cameo list is missing MLB Slugfest. There is a code to play as an all Sub-Zero or all Scorpion team.
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Post by derboo on May 8, 2014 11:22:46 GMT -5
No, you got the game service exchange rates all wrong. EUR5 = US$5 on Steam and Humble.
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