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
Well despite having several years of chances now, most peripherals for the current generation of consoles have been either useful or at least worked how they were meant to, although there are still a few things that have could rival the Power Glove
So with that in mind, here’s my run through of 5 7th gen peripherals that just shouldn’t have been made
5:Chat pads
Ok so they do work and they help with things like web browsing on the PS3 and MSN on the 360 but I don’t know a single person (myself included) who has bought one of these for either console and used it enough to justify the price of buying it. For a start, both consoles feature voice chat which is far easier than having to stop and type out a message in the middle of a firefight and secondly, it’s cheaper to get a usb keyboard if you’re planning to use it with PS3′s web browser
4: PS2 to PS3 Memory Card Adaptor
This is a strange one because the Playstation 3 no longer has any PS2 backward compatibility so unless you’re looking for an elusive second hand 60gb model, there is absolutely no point to buying this. Second of all, the Playstation 3 has a virtual memory card creator so the only reason anyone would ever buy this wo
uld be if they had a 60GB PS3 and a memory card full of PS2 save games. In the long run it would’ve been cheaper to buy an 80GB PS3 and a second hand PS2…
On the other hand, the Nyko PS3 USB Media Hub (pictured) is a great idea, adding two extra USB slots and a card reader to the PS3
3:Wii Sports Accessories
What is the point of these cheap, plastic and often useless “accesories”? just because I get to swing a controller like a golf club, doesn’t mean i want to pay between £5 and £20 for a piece of plastic to put on the end of my Wiimote.
Seriously, if dodging and diving around on my bed like a lunatic while playing Wii Sports wasn’t bad enough, You can now buy Wii boxing gloves to really make yourself look like you’re on a day trip from the mental home.
2:Wii Wireless Sensor Bar
Yet another Wii peripheral on the list (surprise, surprise. The console is full of useless things like this). Now I can understand people buying this if they have their Wii too far away to get the sensor bar near the telly but if they cant get the sensor bar to reach, how the hell are they getting the AV cable to stretch because out of the two, the sensor bar has the longest wire! On top of this, there hasn’t been a single wireless sensor bar released for the wii that hasn’t had reports of a poor wiimote detection and the ability to chew up AA batteries like a fat kid in a sweet shop.
1: Xbox 360 HD DVD player
OK, so it’s not so much useless, infact it was a really good alternative to Bluray, but it was never going to win the battle and most people knew it from the start. Only a handful of studios backed it and hardly anyone bought it until stores started discontinuing and selling it for around £25. HD DVD’s could only really be found in specialist shops and online even at the peak of the HD-DVD’s life span, compared to Bluray which could be bought in most stores with a DVD section and the initial add-on pricing of around £120 meant people could have bought a Playstation 3 with built in bluray player for another £50 or so more than the Xbox and HD-DVD drive combined.
Hello kiddies, It’s great to see nothing has happened in the five minutes since my last post, so with that in mind, here’s part two of my gamespot copy-a-thon, entitled “Lucky number 7(th Generation).
After having an fight over the pros and cons of the three 7th generation consoles with a bunch of xbox fanboys and getting nowhere, I decided to post up my opinions on here….
Graphics
360: Looks the best out of the 3 so far
PS3:On paper it blows the other two out the water but in reality, the cell proccessor is still causing problems for developers
Wii: Basically a suped up gamecube so doesn’t come close on technical graphics although it is much better for artistic graphics.
Controls
360: best for shooters. has a rubbish d-pad though
PS3: the best (not including arcade pads) for fighters but the sixaxis was lame and it took sony too long to get dual shock in it.
Wii: basically a pointer from an interactive white board and a mediocre motion sensor shoved into a controller. Granted it was marketed really well because it even fooled me into thinking it was revolutionary at first, but then after playing wii for a few months I realised how wrong I was.
Games:
360: lots of exclusives. Most of them are good but only a few are excellent
PS3: Has lost a lot of exclusives because they pumped too much money into the console and not enough on keeping exclusive rights. It still has MGS and GT (for now) though.
Wii: well for a start my old nintendo favourites, like mario and zelda, have been done much better on previous consoles and the third party games are either based too much around mini games or are only fun for 10 minutes at a time.
Online:
360: Slightly more reliable than psn but not £40 a year more reliable. It does feel like more of a community than the others although most of that community is made up of pre-pubescent boys who think constant high pitched singing during a game is fun…..
PS3: well it’s free but it isn’t as stable as live. It can also support a lot more players in a game because of the dedicated servers it uses but resistance 1 and 2 are the only games so far to really take advantage of this. the online shop is also a lot better as it doesn’t require you to buy points before getting what you want and there’s a free web browser.
Wii: I can honestly say I haven’t played it much online but the times I have, it hasn’t really been anything special. The shop is alright and the idea of having weather and news channels is good plus it has a web browser if you’re willing to spend 500 wii points
Right, since I’m new to WordPress I figured I’ll cheat a little and copy some of my newer blogs over from my gamespot account (don’t worry, there’s only two).
So here is the first blog entitled “job roles”
Picture the scene, it’s Sunday afternoon and freezing cold outside but I’m in a warm game shop, looking for something to play in between dead space during the occasional underwear changes and there I see it. The ultimate anti-dead space, Viva Piñata: Trouble in Paradise. I own the first game and love it so I walk up to the counter, box in one hand, a small child in the other so I have a legitimate reason to buy the game. The lady behind the till puts the game in the box, I pay, give the child back to its rightful owners and run home (well ask my mum for a lift) to play Viva Piñata 2. Imagine my disappointment when I get home, open the box and find that the woman behind the counter had put the original game in the box instead. And this is where the point of this blog starts….
Is it just me or are all games shops hiring people purely because they look young and stylish? I’ve been to several games shops over the past few months asking about certain games only to get blank looks or be told “I didn’t know [insert game here] was even out yet”. I even heard one employee say to their friend “I don’t even like computer games, I just need the money” in the middle of the shop. Now I can understand that in the current economic climate, jobs are like gold dust but a niche store like a game shop needs employees who actually know about what they’re selling. If I went into a butcher asking for a lamb mince, I wouldn’t expect them to say “I thought mince only came from cows” so why when I go into a game shop should I have to hear “I didn’t know Bioshock was available on PS3″?
Update: It’s the weekend again so I decided to brave the cold and get the right disc put in my viva box, although I get to the store I bought it from only to be told they don’t have any left so now I have to go back up tomorrow with the card I bought it on to get a bloody refund
