IainWell it’s no small secret that Soul Calibur IV has arguably the best create-a-character features of any fighting game on the current generation of consoles, possibly even any fighting game ever. The biggest factor in making Create-a-Soul such a great feature is all down to the ability to recreate such a wide array of comic book, computer game and film characters to battle your friends with. Pretty much everyone who’s played Soul Calibur IV has either The Joker or Darth Maul screaming “copyright infringement” from their created character list but the main attraction seems to be recreating characters from other beat ‘em up franchises. In this blog I’m going to look at one franchise in particular. Moooortal Kombaaaaat! (Cue techno theme music)
Right, the premise of this blog is simple; I have decided to try my hand at recreating the 7 playable characters available in the original Mortal Kombat. Here’s how I got on…
Sub Zero
Let’s start with the coolest of the two ninjas (get it?), Sub Zero. As you can see, I’ve gone for the palette swap ninja style for Mr Zero. On the whole it looks very close although the blue on the ninja mask could only be applied above the eyes rather than below. Namco were obviously aware of the legal ramifications linked to the latter colour option.
Scorpion
Next on the list is everyone’s favourite undead ninja. I figured making another palette swap would almost be cheating so I decided to make Scorpion a bit more personalised by removing his sleeves and adding a single pauldron. Unfortunately the pauldron was on the wrong side but at least I tried.
Kano
Kano was easily the most difficult for one reason and one reason alone. His face plate. The only thing that even came close to looking right was the masquerade mask and even then it only looked right from the side. Everything else looks pretty much how it should though.
Raiden
On the whole I was pretty impressed with the Christopher Lambert look of the head and hair mixed with the computer game clothing. This is probably one of the closest matches in most areas. In fact you could say I was shocked (I am sorry) to see how close I got it…
Sonya
Mortal Kombat’s very own busty beauty is up next. The hair is nearly spot on but the army cap is a completely different style unfortunately. The shirt and trousers come pretty close to the Mortal Kombat version except MK has more cleavage and midriff on show. What a hussy.
Johnny Cage & Liu Kang
The reason I’m putting both of these characters together is because they’re both shirtless, they both practice martial arts and they are both very generic looking. It seems that any male character without a shirt can be turned into one of these two as long as they have either short blond hair and sunglasses or long black hair with a red bandanna.
So there you have it. It’s entirely possible to create all seven of the original Mortal Kombat characters to varying degrees of success. Some bits may be a little off but I guess that’s just Namco’s back up for when Ed Boon’s lawyers come knocking on their door. Why not give it a try yourself, or maybe if you’re feeling adventurous, have a crack at making the MK vs DC roster
