Mortal Kombat Round Table - Cheat Code Central

After each fight, the avatars in queue can rate the match from 1-10, which gives the winner respect points, and yes these are basically nothing more than bragging rights, but they are bragging rights that are fun to get. People will spam fireballs far less often if they know the crowd is booing them for doing so.

There will also be a fully implemented replay mode that allows you to record your matches online to watch offline. Players will be able to send their replays to other players over Xbox Live or the PlayStation Network.

Though the game only includes a stereoscopic mode on the PlayStation, the team still had quite a few issues when developing stereoscopic graphics. They found that a deep 3D image actually caused eyestrain or headaches when played for a long stretches of time. So instead, they dialed back the parallax effect to allow players to play for extended periods. This also allowed players sitting around the TV but not wearing 3D glasses to keep up with the action even though the image was basically doubled. In the end, the team focused on separating the action elements from the backgrounds in subtle ways, rather than making things on the screen pop out at you, and the graphical quality of the game was improved because of it.

Mortal Kombat Round Table

DLC

The team mostly kept their mouth shut about DLC, and with good reason. They assured us that absolutely no DLC for the game will be on disk. Every single DLC character, costume, stage, or whatever that comes out after the game's release will be have been developed after the game was complete. Right now the team is hard at work on developing Kenshi and Skarlett as their first two DLC characters, however they assured us that characters are not the only thing that will come through DLC. DLC updates to the single-player mode including new challenges and bosses are also a possibility, but no concrete plans have been made yet. They did say they are looking toward rumored and joke characters from the past for DLC characters in the future.

Speaking of characters on disk or on a hard drive, the MK team also addressed what would happen when one player has a DLC character and another does not. They were unable to comment on whether or not players will have to download an update or even the character data itself in order to be able to face players with a DLC character. However, they were able to say they developed a new system that no one had seen before that handles the character mismatch. "Expect good things," they told us.

The "Yes" List

Here are a couple other cool features the game will have.

Kombat Kodes will come back. By entering a series of symbols before a match, players will be able to active a number of goofy modes such as headless kombat or zombie kombat.

No character is off limits for DLC. All past Mortal Kombat characters are possibilities, including fake, rumored, and joke characters like Scarlett.

Kratos will have his own story in the game but it will not affect the Mortal Kombat canon.

Most stages in the game will have stage fatalities.

The game was balanced with tag mode in mind. Each character will have a specific "tag" attack that can be used in the middle of combos.

The "No" List

As always there were plenty of things that the team simply couldn't talk about, hadn't considered, or specifically denied. Here is a short list.

There has been no discussions about a possible PC version at this time.

There is no way to turn off the blood or gore to make the game more presentable at public events.

The team wouldn't comment about the ban in Australia nor would they comment on the possibility of making a censored version for those territories.

The team couldn't talk about specific Easter eggs or cheat codes. They did not confirm nor deny the existence of naked character skins.

The team could not confirm nor deny whether Liu Kang could drop an arcade machine on you as a fatality.

The team has not looked beyond this game in terms of where the story will go. They tried to make it a contained entity.

There will be no clones or palette-swapped characters.

Some X-Rays were cut down due to length. They took the players out of the action for too long.

There will be no unique tag team attacks.

Mortal Kombat Round Table

Well everyone. That's it. There's nothing left to do but wait for the game to come out next Tuesday. I don't know about you, but I will be waiting with blood-soaked bells on.

By Angelo M. D'Argenio
CCC Freelance Writer

*The views expressed within this article are solely the opinion of the author and do not express the views held by Cheat Code Central.*