Oh, mama, finally got my XBox. He#@ yeah! I was the happiest guy on the face of Earth this Wednesday when I went to Toys Ur Us and purchased the so-o-o longed after videogame console. I've been trying to get one for months now and it finally happened. Wow, I am so happy. Now the only thing left is to wait six more days till MKDA comes out. Arghh..

This XBox on the picture is not mine, but looks exactly like it, lol!

 (Image on the right is property of GameSpot).

GameSpot has a brand new video of Johny Cage performing his fatality in the PS2 version of MKDA. Hurry up and check it out since it will only be available for free for a limited amount of time, after that only subscribers will have access to it:

http://gamespot.com/gamespot/filters/products/media/0,11100,551915,00.html

Also, they have updated with more images from the XBox version and the PS2 version of the game. There isn't really anything new in the XBox images and the only new ones in the PS2 section are screen shots from the Johny Cage fatality movie. Still a pretty cool update though.

 (Image above is property of GameSpot).

• First off the guy outright says that MKDA is better than MK2 and for those of us who have been playing MK since the beginning it is obvious from that statement MKDA must really be a very, very good game.
• Second, it seems the character select screen will be different from what was seen at E3 this year, consisting of three vertical columns in the middle of the screen rather then two horizontal ones at the bottom.
• Thirdly, and this is something I am sure just about any MK fan out there will be happy about, the dial-up combo system from MK3 has been done away with, with more of a juggle-like combo system in place.
• Apparently the gameplay is slower this time around in the sense that it will more like MK1,2 rather than MK3,4, as far as I understand it. This also is very good news as many people in the past had complaints about how the gameplay speed in MK3,4 had taken away from the quality of gameplay.

• Johny Cage vs. Raiden
• Kung Lao vs. Raiden (1)
• Kung Lao vs. Raiden (2)
• Kung Lao vs. Raiden (3)
• Raiden vs. Scorpion (1)
• Raiden vs. Scorpion (2)

Here you go folks! Feast your eyes on these new in-game images of the Thunder God Raiden. He looks magnificent and his alternate costume is pretty cool looking too. Too bad none of his special moves were shown in any of the images. But I am sure they will be just as spectacular, and even cooler, as in any of the previous games. One thing I wonder about is whether or not he kept his teleport, considering Ed Boon mentioned in a recent interview for PSM magazine that they would be doing away with many of the magical type moves in this instalment of the series. (All images are courtesy of IGN).

Finally, after four long years, the Great Lord Raiden is coming back on a new MK game. It's never been secret that Raiden has always been my favorite MK character. I was teriffied when back in 2000, I think, Midway sources stated he won't be in the next MK game due to him becoming an Elder God after MK4. I then launched an exhaustive one man e-mail/message board campaign to bring back one of the seven original MK fighters to the new installment of the series. Now, I am not about to give myself credit for bringing back Raiden to Mortal Kombat once again, but whatever the reason the fact remains, he is back and I am so incredibly happy. Once again, the God of Thunder will take human form to compete in the immortal tournament called Mortal Kombat. Once again, he will unleash his unmatched powers upon the forces of evil. And once again, he will be the first one I select from the select screen (assuming he is available from the beginning, that is), the first one I beat the game with, and the first one whose fatality/ies I will learn. Ah, I can almost feel it, the controller in my hand and the Great Raiden destroying his opponents with devastating combos and then, a moment of intense silence, a few quick taps on the buttons and the D-pad, and the Thunder God launches into a furious new Fatality. No other game comes even close to being so .. perfect. I can not wait, a few more months only and me and Lord Rayden will once again lock into a mersiless fight with the Dark Side, i.e. Shang Tsung and Quan Chi and their minions.
I have to say that conceptual art looks just awesome. Whoever came up with it did a great job. It totally fits Raiden's personality and he looks a lot more God-like now. The costume stays true to his previous images, yet it improves and adds on already astounding looking character. I can't wait to see what he'll look like in action and what his new fatalities will be.
I just have one question though, why are they spelling his name with a "y" in that poster on their site? Aside from the home version of MK1, 2, 3, UMK3, and MKT, Raiden has always been spelled with an "i". Well, maybe they'll change that for the game release.
Whatever the case, he looks amazing and I just can't wait for that game to come out in the Fall. Oh, and just one more thing. Thank you, Midway!

Wow, check out this cool picture of Quan-Chi and the awesomest final boss in any game, Shang Tsung. I just got that from Midway in my inbox. Does it look good or what? Well, now we know who exactly the Deadly Alliance will involve, right?
Man, that realy looks amazing! And doesn't that ship in the background bring back warm memories from the first Mortal Kombat movie?

Things are looking better and better for us MK fans with each passing day. I am so hyped about MK: DA, I think the next 8 or so months till the fall will be the longest in my life.

Oh, and I almost forgot, click here to download this awesome new wallpaper from Midway. It looks really good.
And that is not all. According to the email I got from Midway, I quote "Midway and Gamespot have joined up to bring you "Fatality Fridays" for the entire month of February.
THE Content you've been waiting for is on it's way:

• Designer Diaries
• Exclusive story details
• World Premiere of the long awaited Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance preview video"

More MK news people. I got the March edition of the unofficiall PlayStation Magazine in the mail yesterday, which by the way is the only magazine I read, and they have quite a few new details about the upcoming Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance.
Here are some of them in no particular order:

•  Less Humour
•  Multiple Platform fighting
•  Greater use of 3-D movement
•  More sofisticated weapons combat
•  2 on 2 fighting

Today Midway Games officially announced that the title of the next MK game will be Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance. Other information released in the statement confirmed that the game should hit shelves in the Fall season of this year and it is for now scheduled for release on Microsoft's XBox and Nintendo's GameCube and GameBoy Adance. The article also gives a little bit of info and history on Mortal Kombat. To read the full text click here or here.
Notice that they did not mention anything about MK: DA being released on PS2. My next statement might shock some of you, especially considering that I am currently a PSX owner and big Final Fantasy fan, but for the sake of Mortal Kombat I hope they do not release the new installment of the series on PS2. Why? Simple arithmetics. Those of us who are hard-core gamers (and know a little bit about videogames design and development) and have been following the market and the videogame industry for the past couple of years know that, with a very few exceptions, the quality of a videogame is inversely proportional to the number of platforms it is released on. In other words, the more consoles a game is published for, the less likely it is it would be a good game. Case in point, recently Capcom withdrew its support of the Resident Evil series for the PlayStation game consoles in favour of Nintendo's GameCube. They did that for the sake of not compromising the quality of the RE games by developing for multiple consoles.
In short, I would rather have a quality MK game released on one or two consoles only, rather than no so good one for every single console out there(MK4, anyone?).

More MK news folks. As both MK5.org and TRMK report, on December 21, 2001, Midway has registered a new trademark, Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance. Having in mind the recent annoucements that a new MK game is in the works and that its name would most likely not be Mortal Kombat 5, it only makes sense that this would be the title of the new installment in the legendary fighting series. And what makes this sound a lot more like a fact as opposed to just another rumored is the info that, this time on December the 17th of 2001, Midway registered two new domains, http://www.mortalkombatdeadlyalliance.com and http://www.mkdeadlyalliance.com. Credit for this one goes to MK5.org again.
I have to say that I am not extremely excited about the name MK: Deadly Alliance, but if the game is good that shouldn't matter. Another thing I wanted to say was, ...just bring the %$#@ game already, we've been waiting for 4 long years(not counting MK Gold and MK: Special Forces, that is) for a real sequel of our favorite game and Midway better deliver this time otherwise there will be a lot of dissapointed MK fans and unhappy people are not very likely to reach deep in their pockets. :-)

Happy New Year, O great Mortal Kombat fans!!! Finally, the year in which one of the most anticipated MK games of all time will be released, is upon us. But there is more! How many of you are aware that 2002 is also the 10th anniversary of the birth of the greatest video game in history, Mortal Kombat. Yes, it was 10 years ago that the original Mortal Kombat was released. What a great decade it has been! So because of that, I thought it would only be well fitting to call 2002 the Year of the Kombat.
So, what I am going to try to do this year is update more often and hopefully have enough time to come up with a chronicle of sorts that would give a brief history of Mortal Kombat, leading up to the release of the new sequel in the series sometimes in the fall of this year (note: that's according to Midway).

Another picture of Quan Chi has appeared at Midway's MK5(??) site. Notice the question marks after MK5, that's because we don't yet know what the official name of the new Mortal Kombat game will be. I have to say it looks kind of blocky to me, the image that is. But maybe it's just me. Anyway, finaly some new MK info from Midway which is always good.
Also, there is a link on Midway's site where you can sign up to receive updates on the next MK game. Here is the link.
(The image above is courtesy of Midway).

At a recent event called Midway Gamers' Day 2001 which took place on the 16th of this month, Midway released the first two renders of actual in-game models from the next installation of the Mortal Kombat series in an in-game environment. Finally, exactly an year to the day I posted my enthusiastic report about MK5 being in development, we have the first real in-game images from the game. Hurray! Shown on the right is one of those images. Judging from the high detail in Quan Chi's model as well as the gorgeous surraroundings, the game will look fantastic, much better than anything we've seen on any platform so far. Let's hope the gameplay will be at least on the same level as the graphics, because a game is not complete without any of those components.
Rumour started at this year's E3 has it that the developers at Midway have changed their original plan to call the game Mortal Kombat 5. According to the same rumour, the reason for that is to give the next installment of the fighting series a name which would be more fitting to its purpose of reinventing the legendary videogame. One of the few known facts about the game so far is that it will be released some time in 2002, instead of as orginally planned 2001. This came from no other than Ed Boon himself in a recent chat session with him.
And on another note, there has been some interesting developments around the second one of the inventors of Mortal Kombat, John Tobias. Mr. Tobias left Midway two years back in the summer of 1999 and has recently resurfaced the gaming scene with a company of its own, called Studio Gigante. According to information from their website, "Studio Gigante, Inc. is currently contracted and developing a first-party next-generation console game." I have no knowledge as to what kind of game their are working on, but having in mind that the development team consists of John Tobias and a few other ex-members of the MK development team at Midway, I can't wait to put my hands on it.
(The image above is courtesy of TRMK).

Happy New Year everyone. It's been hectic four months for me, but I finally got around to updating again. For better or worse there haven't been any major developments in the Mortal Kombat Universe since my last update. MK5 is still under construction. There was a video interview with the MK5 development team late last year on MortalKombat.com in which a few new details about the game were revealed. The most important ones were that every character will now have somewhere around 10-15 moves they can perform with their weapon and that Scorpion and Sub-Zero (most likely) will be in the game. A second interview is scheduled to take place some time soon.
And on another note, the Second Annual Raiden's Words MK Tournament took place in late 2000 and it was very quickly won by the mighty warrior Xrahviperia. For those of you who missed the First Raiden's Words MK Tournament, the winner was another worthy MK warrior called Katalex. In this tournament I ask questions on anything related to Mortal Kombat and whoever answers correctly first wins. It is nothing fancy I am afraid, and yes, it is a shameless attempt at promotion on my part. And for those of you who are not familiar with who Xrahviperia is, she is one of the most active MK fans on the Internet and for some reason (it's weird, isn't it? -;) ) her MK web site is significantly more popular than mine, and can be reached at Kombat Dragon.

Rejoice MK fans, finally news about the 5th installment of our favorite fighting game have arrived. Everyone hurry to Ed Boon's site for the proof that Mortal Kombat 5 is in development. Please, forgive me if some of my sentences don't make much sense, but I can hardly contain my excitement at these great news. Finally, a new, real sequeal to the greatest game ever is being developed and will be in our hands some time in the near future. Yes, I realize it's just a flashing image of Scorpion's face placed in a large digit 5 and the words "in development" below it, but for the hardcore MK fan, hungry for a new and fresh MK game, that is more than enough reason for utmost joy and selebration. So, in this special for me day, I bring you the good news.
I have not been so excited about a MK game in a long, long time. MK4 was released in 1998, of course, and although quite decent, I have to say I excpected much more. It has been two long years since we MK fans have had a real reason to celebrate. Yes, it is a little premature now, but what the heck, I have been waiting for this moment for a long time and I am not going to hold back now. Yee-h-h-a-a!
Now, if they would just put Raiden in it, I would be the happiest MK fan in the world. I'll just keep my fingers crossed and hope that Ed Boon or John Tobias will somehow stumble upon my site someday. And speaking of John Tobias, you know what would make me really, really happy? If Mr. Tobias would return to Midway to work on MK5; then there will be no doubt in mind that MK5 will be a masterpiece.

                      ......these are the words of Raiden
(The image on the right is courtesy of Noob.com).