When I think of crossover games, I think of Marvel vs Capcom. This game was pretty awesome. The cartoon-ness of the characters and the insanity of special moves worked really well together. When Capcom and SNK did games, damn they were sweet. Again, the King of Fighters, Samurai Shodown, Darkstalkers and Streetfighter worlds blended perfectly. In these were a great balance of good guys and bad guys.

When I heard of the next MK game coming out I was a little less than excited. The last time it was revealed that they would add new styles of fighting, they took out fatalities and replaced it with the kreate a fatality system. With Mortal Kombat 8, I don’t know what to think. Oh actually, pure disgust pretty much sums it up. Crossing over franchises can be a great thing if done well. Crossing over the harpoon wielding, flaming skull-having, vengence machine from hell, Scorpion with say The Dark Knight, is NOT a good crossover. DC is not a good match for MK. I will admit I have never read a lot of comics and always preferred cartoons, after all if a picture tells 1000 words, then 25 frames per second must tell 25000 words. In the cartoons and movies, Batman does kick ass, but relies on cars, building edges and bat-branded tools to win. Scorpion relies on pure violence. The fact that DC actually convinced Midway to take out the fatalities so no one can dismember or bloody up Batman or…. ech, “Aquaman”, just tells me that their characters weren’t made to deal with the MK brand of aggression. So, they are essentially making a 3d fighter, with random characters, that isn’t Mortal Kombat. *slow clap*

Midway staff are mentioning a ‘whole new fighting system’. Looking back, hey have changed it every game since MK2, and even then, there were subtle changes for example, crouching punches, air throws and adding more fatalities. MK3 played the same, added a run button and a pile of other finishing moves. MK4 was essentially a 2D fighter in a 3D world, kinda like that Streetfighter game. MK5 was the big change up adding styles, weapons and really bringing 3D into it. 6 and Armageddon, well they arent too far apart. The funny thing is, Armageddon’s main appeal was to be able to play 60+ characters and the Fatality system(which flopped badly). Instead of learning from their mistakes Midway are throwing in a bunch of other “famous” characters and taking out the only thing that set it apart from other games of its time.

Midway, harden the fuck up.

Okay, here’s 6 more for you bloodthirsty net people. 3 of them were submitted by people that came across the site and the other 3 I did because NightKobrage asked me so nicely. They are:

• Nightwolf
• Kobra
• Johnny Cage
• Sub Zero
• Scorpion
• Motaro

I downloaded the Devil May Cry 4 demo from the playstation store the other day, and I am damn impressed. The usual flaws with games like this is the inability to lock on. When the character uses a weapon like a spear or sword, trying to change enemies is a real issue, but you can actually lock onto an enemy to reveal their life remaining. It would have been nice to see this bar all the time, but hey, its not that important. You can charge your sword up to have a quick devastating flurry of attacks, and he can hang in the air almost forever shooting round after round into the baddies. You also have a demon arm, which you can use to grapply areas, throw the enemies, or grapple towards enemies. R1 seems like a power up, as in, you can hold it for more powerful attacks, which is really cool.

The game is unbelievably pretty and the videos I do could never do it justice. The ‘only’ thing that kind of annoys me is that you have to hold the powerup button to dodge. Not really an issue at all. The camera does well to follow your character around, but can get a bit behind in the action if things get really frantic and you start dodging and jumping around.

Anyway, on with the show:

This fight are against these pleasant chappies called Frosts. They aren’t particularly difficult to kill and don’t put up much of a fight. You can throw them into each other, cut them up and generally shoot the crap out of them easily enough.

This is the Berial fight. You face Berial just after the battle with 3 Frosts. I haven’t played Devil May Cry games before, but if Berial is the boss they will release in the demo it usually means he will be the first level boss. In saying that… oh em gee. This guy is a freakin titan. Imagine the Balrog from Lord of the Rings, if it had 4 legs and looked a tiny bit more insane. It took me quite a few goes to bring him down as his moves are just nuts, and having a huge, flaming, 6 limbed beast that has a gigantic flaming sword and somewhat aggressive attitude is very distracting. Like I said, the video cant to it justice so go and download the demo.

Okay, I feel pretty stupid about this. I found out this morning that there was a whole array of moves I hadn’t yet tried out. I am still playing through the career mode with my own guy, and this morning I casually set up a table. I am a hardcore-type superstar, I had a stored finisher and my meter was full again. I usually set up a table to gutbust or outsider’s/razor’s edge someone through before going for a pinfall. However, as I set it up, the ‘press triangle for finisher’ came up on the screen. to begin with I just assumed it was just to put someone through it via a nice piledriver, but the other guy wasn’t anywhere near the table. After hitting triangle, my superstar struck a match and lit the table on fire.

Apart from looking awesome, it doesn’t seem to do a hell of a lot. The table disintegrates after its had someone put through it, and from what ive gathered, stays alight till its been broken. If you throw someone into it they react in the same way as if you threw them into an exposed turnbuckle, ie stagger away after the impact. I tried doing this with most of the other weapons and you can also set the barbed-wire wrapped 2×4 on fire, making it a flaming, cutting weapon. However, you can’t do any more grappling moves, which would push the flaming, spiky mass into their face, but instead you can just swing it like the usual attack moves. As far as I have tried, this is only available with hardcore-type superstars, and looks awesome.

So there you go, flaming tables.