PlayStation 2

Mortal Kombat: Deception

Trumping its predecessor with a barbaric decapitation and sending a clear-cut message to other developers that the bar of excellence for fighting games has officially been raised, Mortal Kombat: Deception emerges as the consummate fighter and one of the most ambitious releases of the year. The gameplay has evolved to a frightening degree, and exacting painful death upon your opponent is only the tip of the bloody iceberg. Ed Boon and his Midway team have fine-tuned the fray, implemented a legion of amazing new characters, and even turned their gaze to other genres to expand upon the experience even futher.

Mortal Kombat fans have a lot to be grateful for today. Deadly Alliance was a huge hit and a great game and made Mortal cool again. The planned third is still stuck in development hell and I think we can all agree that's a great thing after the abysmal Annihilation. And last year we got Mortal Kombat: Deception, a game that improves on Deadly Alliance in nearly every way and has online play to boot.

Each mode is a blast to play, although most feel like they are designed for play in small increments. But considering how many different things there are to do here, that's hardly a complaint. Deception delivers a lot of game, and it' all killer stuff.

Mortal Kombat: Deception ist ein gelungener Nachfolger zu Deadly Alliance und spielerisch sehr abwechslungsreich. Sieht man über die nicht perfekte Steuerung hinweg, passt hier eigentlich alles und dank der Krypt wird man auch lange beschäftigt sein.

Mortal Kombat?s been one of the most popular fighting franchises since its humble arcade beginnings, and love it or hate it, it deserves props for enduring against such seasoned competitors like Soul Calibur, Street Fighter, and Tekken.

When you think back on some of the video games of old, there are certain ones that you never forget. In my teenage years I worked for the local video game store, right about the time the Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo wars were hitting their full tilt. I remember it well because at that time the big fighting game war also had just begun. On the one side, you had Street Fighter II, which came along from the arcade (back when people actually went to arcades to play the latest and greatest games), and caused a revolution in the way fighting games were played.

For 12 years, these two words have summed up a controversial franchise that changed the gaming landscape. Fighting games had existed before MK hit arcades, but the concept that Midway delivered with the Mortal Kombat series redefined the entire genre (and indeed gaming) for the better. Simply put, here was an "adult" game that didn't shy away from blood and carnage (it was set in a brutal fighting tournament, after all). What's more, each installment was significantly darker, with fatalities and themes of conquest, revenge and betrayal. Simply put, this was a game whose fate was precariously left in the balance, with a player's choice of character tipping the scale towards good or evil.

After a downward spiral that took the Mortal Kombat series to places it never wanted to go, Midway's number one franchise finally made a comeback in 2002 with the release of Deadly Alliance; a completely revamped and re-envisioned interpretation of John Tobias and Ed Boon's arcade fighting vision. Finally moving beyond the presentational aspects that had both endeared and reviled it in the eyes of casual and hardcore fighting fans alike (this time only under Boon's supervision), Deadly Alliance did something that the earlier Mortal Kombats had never done before -- it put gameplay before glamour. As a result the fans responded overwhelmingly and it didn't take long before Deadly Alliance was quickly regarded as one of the strongest fighting games of the season.

You probably expect me to open this review with a statement about how the series made its grand return in 2002. You’re half-right. While I’m not going to actually come out and say it, I did manage to sneak the comment in there (hehe).

The latest in Midway's influential and long-running fighting game series, Mortal Kombat: Deception, picks up where 2002's Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance left off by featuring lots of new and returning fighters, a variety of surprising new modes of play, and, perhaps best of all, the ability to play online. The strangest part about Deception is how it includes several completely off-the-wall modes, the likes of which you'd never expect from a fighting game. These include the single-player konquest mode, which is a story-driven adventure; puzzle kombat, a competitive Tetris-style puzzle game that's an unabashed homage to Capcom's Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo; and chess kombat, which is inspired by the classic computer game Archon. The konquest mode is disappointingly bland, while these other two modes are at least amusing. However, the core one-on-one fighting action--whether you play it offline or online--is easily the best part of the game.

Thanks to the extra game-modes MK:D is a game that has added life-span. Somebody willing to unlock everything will have to invest time, and then some more time. Funny are the cute characters and fatalities in Puzzle mode, all the rest takes itself a bit to serious... without being too serious. an MK game wouldn't be the same without ridiculous amounts of blood and gore! Although I enjoyed playing it, I must say I've played better Beat'em-ups. To me the Tekken series, thanks to it's controls and graphics, is still the game to beat in this genre and sadly MK:D doesn't come close. Graphics could have been a bit better, but the PS2-GPU probably has something to do with that...

Para os fãs de longa data, "Deception" é um verdadeiro sonho. Mas como nos casos dos duelos citados no começo desse resenha, a série "Mortal Kombat" é questão de gosto: quem prefere o refinamento de jogos como "Virtua Fighter", "King of Fighters" e "Street Fighter" não vai mudar de idéia agora.

There's an extremely easy test to see if you should buy Mortal Kombat: Deception -- play the Konquest mode for five minutes. Konquest -- a training adventure where you go through a story, learn combos and techniques from other fighters, and do random tasks along the way -- showcases the best and worst parts of Deception.

It’s been a heck of a week here at GR. My Dead or Alive CD started skipping, a game called Cornhole is apparently sweeping the nation, and, much to our West Coast hippy chagrin, another kind of cornhole was re-elected president. Our misery stacked like pancakes.

The Mortal Kombat series is possessed by an odd sort of charm that probably has a lot to do with nostalgia. Back when you could count the number of extant fighting series with one hand, MK occupied a vital place in that pantheon. The games were over the top in presentation, rich in mythology (however hamfisted and convoluted), and wrapped in myriad secrets that had players talking and thinking about them long after they'd last stuck quarters in their slots.