Recently, Mortal Kombat has been making another push into the consciousness of gamers everywhere. Two weeks ago, a video was released based on the treatment for a movie revamp that would reimagine the series’ story as more urban and somewhat more down-to-Earth. Then a few days later, a new trailer was shown for the new game, simply entitled Mortal Kombat. Much like Street Fighter IV, it’s an attempt at a nostalgic return to glory by emphasizing the franchise’s best game.

While the footage has a definite Mortal Kombat II feel, it’s actually a skewed retelling of the first three games thanks to divine time travel. You see, sometime after Mortal Kombat: Armageddon, Shao Kahn curbstomps Raiden so hard that Raiden realizes how screwed the entire series has gotten. I mean, before the DC crossover, the game’s story was about an over-inflated cast having to climb the Aggro Crag. So he sends a message back to his younger self to cause a massive butterfly effect (butterfly effekt?) and redo history right this time. It’s like the last episode of Mighty Max but without Bull from Night Court being eaten by a giant spider. Or maybe it does have that. I don’t know. The game won’t be out for a year.

I’ve always been a fan of the series. It’s cheesy, violent fun and – as stupid as it sounds – I’ve always loved the mythology that comes with it all. From the beginning, it’s been Enter the Dragon mixed with Big Trouble in Little China mixed with Iron Fist with a dash of Godfrey Ho. I’ve been following the series far longer than I have comics and I’ve experienced many of the nuances of its excessive success. I remember when digitized actor Daniel Pesina rebelled against Midway by appearing in a magazine ad in support for the game Bloodstorm while wearing full Johnny Cage gear. I remember the Mortal Kombat GI Joe figures. I remember the awful knockoff videogames like Way of the Warrior, War Gods and the never-released Tattoo Assassins. I remember how the ARCADE version of Mortal Kombat 3 got its own nationally televised commercial. I remember the Mortal Kombat 3 Kombat Kodes that weren’t even worth the effort. I even read that mediocre prequel novel where Scorpion was revealed to be the ghost of a murdered ninja merged with his son’s body.

That said, I’ve seen the weird stuff come out of the trademark that still causes me to scratch my head. I figured a trip through the stranger and more unfortunate pieces of output from the Mortal Kombat series might be worth the time. Though first thing’s first, I’m not going to go the gameplay route with this list. I don’t care about how it lacks the refined tournament play of Virtua Fighter 5 or how the Run button is the Holocaust in videogame form or how Human Smoke has an infinite. I really just do not care.

Let’s start off the list by getting the most obvious one out of the way.

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Last night I got back from yet another three days of awesome CHIKARA King of Trios action. For those out of the loop, CHIKARA is an amazing and super-fun indy wrestling federation that I follow the way hippies follow Phish. Every year, they do a tournament of sixteen teams of three, stretched over three shows in a weekend. Like every year, I had a complete blast.

I got to see a 6’8″ masked viking crush a midget dragon. I got to see the legendary Curry Man team up with CHIKARA team Los Ice Creams. I went to the fan conclave, where I got to defeat a guy dressed as a Ninja Turtle in Connect Four, sing “New York, New York” on karaoke with a turn-of-the-century baseball player (worth noting: Soldier Ant covering his ears in agony), and have a prom photo taken with wrestlers Jimmy “Equinox” Olsen and Jigsaw as I’m instructed to cradle a half-finished jug of orange juice in my arms like a baby and look at it “like a proud father”. On the last night of the show, Tommy Dreamer made a surprise appearance to put over the company and challenge Eddie Kingston to a match for next month.

But one of the biggest thrills I got came from the end of intermission. You see, these days, CHIKARA is being dominated by a stable of wrestlers called Die Bruderschaft des Kreuzes (“Brotherhood of the Cross”, BDK for short), made up of those who are angry at the company for one reason or another… as well as a giant viking guy. They’re such a force to be reckoned with that it seems like the tecnicos (good guys) and rudos (bad guys) will have to eventually join forces. Yet before intermission could end, the lights went out and this appeared on the big screens.

If you’re wondering, the wrestlers in the foreground are Worker Ant, Private Eye, Sumie Sakai, USApe, Mr. Zero, Blind Rage, Lance Steel, and Jervis Cottonbelly. I’m so down for this.

Nothing much is up so far on the CHIKARA: Rudo Resurrection website, but hopefully not for too long.

Who wants a Marvel vs. Capcom 3 trailer?

Okay, I see Deadpool’s there during the Marvel silhouette. Bring in Cage and Iron Fist and we’re all good.

If you’re running late on your Valentine’s Day shopping (shame on you, by the way, we’re all very disappointed), your pals at 4thletter! got you covered. We’ve had these Street Fighter Valentine’s Day cards kicking around on the hard drive at 4l!hq forever, but they date back to the good ol’ days of 1992.

Print one out, throw a quick inscription inside (make it sheepish to avoid a fight), and hand it over. That’s how you save Valentine’s Day. You’re welcome in advance.

Originally, I was going to write up a silly post comparing Conan O’Brien and Jay Leno to the Thor vs. Superman fight from JLA/Avengers, but halfway into that write-up it hit me how it was too stupid, even for me. With that botched, I feel the need to post something.

Many of you know of Something Awful and their Photoshop Phridays. Recently, they did a two-parter with the theme being “Movies + Video Game Names”. The concept is taking a movie poster/DVD cover/whatever and altering it so that the title is that of an existing videogame. For instance, changing the title of Footloose to Dance Dance Revolution or changing Hell Comes to Frogtown to Battletoads. It’s simple and lacks excessive Photoshop skill (or Paint Shop Pro skill in my case), but leads to some very funny and creative images. Here’s part one and part two.

A couple of my entries made it in, which rocks, but in the end I had way too much fun making these and couldn’t stop myself. Here’s a gallery of what I’ve done to waste my time.

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Me reading a Captain N comic didn’t happen because someone suggested it to me. Nobody told me that there was a Captain N comic. I didn’t stumble upon it or come across an issue in a bin anywhere. It’s just that one day I randomly reminisced about the cartoon and thought to myself, “Was there a Captain N comic book? I bet there was.”

Lo and behold, my instincts were correct. You know I had to get my mitts on this one. The five-issue series came out over the course of 1990, released by Valiant Comics. They released the Game Boy comic around that time, which I’ve reviewed months back.

To fully understand the comic and what makes it worth talking about, you have to understand the TV show. Captain N: The Game Master is a cartoon about a teenager named Kevin Keene who is so good at playing his NES that he and his dog Duke are pulled into his Nintendo by “the Ultimate Warpzone”. It’s there that he exists in a multiverse of videogame franchises, even if they weren’t Nintendo-owned. Armed with a controller belt buckle and a zapper gun, Captain N fights for the original character Princess Lana along with existing videogame heroes Kid Icarus (aka Pit), Mega Man and Simon Belmont. Those three are probably banded together due to their shared success in having awesome theme music. The main villain is Mother Brain from Metroid, commanding over the Eggplant Wizard, King Hippo, Dr. Wily and the Count (they couldn’t call him “Dracula” for whatever reason). Donkey Kong’s there too, but he’s more of a wildcard villain, like the crocodile from Peter Pan.

In concept, it’s a videogame fanboy wet dream. Unfortunately, there were some snags to the show, such as the character designs for the preexisting heroes. Kid Icarus is a midget who won’t stop adding “icus” to the end of his sentences, yet he’s the least problematic. Mega Man is also a midget, only pudgy and more annoying. They saw how dynamic and cool his 8-bit sprite was and came up with that? Then there’s Simon Belmont. Jeeeesus. Instead of a badass vampire hunter, he’s a doofy narcissist with pilot goggles. I get that these guys are all based on early 8-bit designs that lacked characterization, but as a marketing ploy, I can’t imagine any kid was thinking, “I want to play as that annoying, scratchy-voiced toddler in the green tights!” It got even worse in the third season when they introduced Alucard, re-imagined as a totally radical skater dude.

It’s like if Poochy wanted your blood.

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I spent most (all) of last week sick and asleep, so I didn’t get much done overall. However, I did get a chance to play a little of Champions Online, though, and it’s pretty neat.

I like the character creation system quite a bit. It’s pretty in-depth, but also very easy to use. I ended up making a guy wearing a black and white suit, with black boots, and a bald head. I added an all-black skull mask for effect, gave him martial arts and gun powers, and bam: Spaceman Piff was born.

Combat is pretty simple, and about what you’d expect. Attacks are mapped to number keys, you can move with WASD, etc, etc. If you’ve played an MMO or a computer game before, you know how it goes. Mousing controls the camera, WASD controls movement. I saw options that say you can use a controller, too, which may be a slightly more comfortable way to play.

It seems pretty cool overall. I didn’t get to play much (benefit of a PC with an older video card and being a Mac-fan in general), but I liked what I saw. Getting around and finding missions was easy-peasy. The level of customization involved is also pretty attractive. You really can design the superhero you’ve always wanted, and there are enough familiar bits and pieces that you can finally make that Hawkgirl+Wolverine combination you’ve been dreaming about lately.

It’s the kind of game I could see myself fooling around with every once and a while. Character creation is actually pretty fun, and it’d be pretty easy to create a gang of gun-using pop culture-inspired characters. Donnie Blasto, Spaceman Piff, Stabber Lee, etc etc. I think the end result of all my tinkering would be a bunch of guys with superspeed, hand to hand weapons, and guns. I’m a child of the ’90s, what can I say. Punching people in the face is pretty awesome.

It drops September 1st, a week from tomorrow. Pre-order it on Amazon or from any of their retail partners, including UK, French, and German outlets. Their archive of online screenshots is pretty thorough and should give you a good idea how of the game looks.

Developer interview after the jump!
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Back in the early 90’s, the comic company Valiant struck a deal with Nintendo. Over the next two years or so, Valiant would release a multitude of series based on Nintendo franchises. There were a couple that felt natural. Super Mario Brothers and Legend of Zelda each had their own cartoons at the time, so they would get picked up. Captain N: The Game Master would also get his own comic, though transformed due to the inability to use videogame characters outside of Nintendo. There was even a series called Nintendo Comics System that acted like an anthology of stories featuring those I mentioned and miscellaneous games like Dr. Mario and Punch Out.

Around that time, Nintendo’s Game Boy was still fresh on the scene and they wanted to do whatever they could to get the word out. Sure, advertising was easy for the Nintendo Entertainment System. Captain N was one big commercial for the console and all its games. Well, all the games that weren’t on that crappy knockoff cartoon Power Team (anyone else remember that? It had the monster truck Bigfoot, a basketball player and a talking tomato). Anyway, outside of commercials and magazine ads, how do you advertise what is essentially a lesser NES that you can carry around with you?

With the Captain N cartoon, they eventually introduced a Slimer-like character named Game Boy who was one, big, annoying Game Boy levitating around. With Valiant, they went in another direction. They gave it its own comic book.

I’m sure by now you’re already asking the million dollar question: “How exactly does a Game Boy comic work?” That’s a very good question and having found out the answer, I just had to get my hands on this 4-issue series.

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Recently, Street Fighter 4 came out for the PC. Because of that, people have been able to hack into the game and change the character appearances. For some it means giving Akuma a pink gi and Dan’s moveset. For some it means nuding up the female cast. For one awesome guy, it means making Zangief into Mr. T. But for now, check these out.

I also saw Sagat as John Stewart GL (when we all know Sagat would be a Red Lantern) and Cammy as Psylocke, Arachne and Harley Quinn.

On a similar note, hopefully sometime tonight I should have a new article up that’s also about comics and videogames. No, not Street Fighter or any of its ilk. Rather, it’s something more mainstream and yet far more out of left field.

Plus Ultimatum #5 comes out this week. We all know what that leads to.

I’m coming at you guys with a few short blurbs this week. I’ve got a few things on my mind that aren’t really topics for longer think-pieces, but we’ll be back to the normal 4thletter! format next week.

In both the comic book community and the video game community, the release of monthly sales figures is a newsworthy event. One look at the comments on Newsarama or an NPD thread on the NeoGAF forums reveals the incredible level of importance that fans give to the raw data, even without any sort of analysis from journalists in their respective industries. What I’m stuck puzzling out, though, is what these numbers mean to people who aren’t invested in cheering on one company or another. Are they worth anything beyond a passing moment of happiness when you see that something you like sells well?

It’s tempting to just write off sales figures as nothing more than fanboy bait, mere fodder for endless arguments about which consoles, characters, and companies are better than others. That’s mostly what they’re for, after all, when you’re just looking at the commentary that follows the postings. Let’s not let the fanboys ruin things for us, though. There’s important information to be found if you’re a huge nerd about industry trends, success stories, and the difference between products that are immediate blockbusters and those with “long tails” (things that become successful, sales-wise, over a long period of time).

Admittedly there’s not a lot there for someone who isn’t invested in either comics or games, but don’t write sales off as something boring. Sales figure data is what leads to really interesting stories and analysis, enabling discussion about why nobody but Nintendo can sell games on the Wii, or why Justice League of America is still a top 15 book, or why Chris Claremont keeps getting his own series (brand recognition, name recognition, and built-in fanbases, respectively and collectively).

David and I have both been replaying Final Fantasy 7 since its release on the PlayStation Network last week. It’s got me thinking a lot about how RPG design, or at least Japanese RPG design, hasn’t really changed significantly since its original release in late ’97. Final Fantasy 7 was a watershed moment for me, the first RPG I ever played through, and since I was 12 at the time I did it, the game left a lasting impression on me. This impression, I think, is what makes me feel like just about every JRPG I’ve played since has just been a refinement of that “modern formula,” with everything post-FF7 and post-move-to-3d playing incredibly similarly.

This is clearer to me in the current generation of games than it has been in a long time. Games like Eternal Sonata, Infinite Undiscovery, Tales of Vesperia, and Star Ocean: The Last Hope, once you get past the novelty of their respective combat systems and graphical styles, all feel like variation on the same tired themes. They’re not bad games, for what they are, but there’s nothing innovative about them at all, to my eyes.

Am I completely wrong about this? In the PlayStation and PlayStation 2 era, RPGs were the games that I cut my teeth on, the genre I delved into more deeply than any other. It might just be that I’m jaded, but outside of, say, Final Fantasy 12 and the recent Persona games, it’s like the quote about there being “nothing new under the sun” is actually completely true for the genre. Please, someone tell me I’m wrong about this. I’d love to be able to play a new game instead of going through Final Fantasy 7 for the 5th time, no matter how fun it is, and how nostalgic I am.

I know I talked about this last week, but how good is inFamous? I’ve played more of it since the last time I wrote, and despite warnings that the missions would get repetitive, it hasn’t lost a single bit of its charm. I know people don’t want to read me harping on this game again and again, so this’ll be the last time I mention it, but it’s the best game I’ve played all year and anyone who has a PlayStation 3 and 60 bucks to spare has no excuse for not playing it. It’s got good combat, great platforming, and a story that’s engaging

Finally, I want to conduct an informal straw poll of the 4thletter! readers… Video games are a new topic for 4thletter! (longtime readers don’t need to worry about it taking over, It’s just me and my weekly post), so I really have no idea what kind of things you actually want to read about. So far I’ve just been winging it and assuming that my audience isn’t one full of enthusiasts, and I’ve been trying to aim my thoughts accordingly. If this is the wrong assumption to make, leave a comment or send me an e-mail. Let me know what kind of articles you guys want to read, enthusiasts or people who could not care less about games, and I’ll get to work filling that niche.