GameCity ‘07: Rare talks Viva Pi

NOTTINGHAM–Viva Pi

Ultimate Mortal Kombat Preview

Soon Midway will further its quest to bring classic Mortal Kombat games to every imaginable platform with Ultimate Mortal Kombat on the Nintendo DS. It’s become woefully evident in the past few years that improved hardware doesn’t necessarily equate to proper emulation of classic arcade games, so we were a little wary of how well this one would play on a system as relatively simple as the DS. Luckily, it seems our concerns were misplaced because it looks like Midway has managed to efficiently cram the entirety of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 (and then some) into this cart.

This is a surprisingly playable version of the classic arcade fighter. Did we mention it fits in your pocket?

In fact, this doesn’t seem like a simple emulation job at all. UMK on the DS runs so fast and so smoothly that we have to assume the game was actually ported to the DS hardware from the ground up rather than rigged to work with emulation of the original arcade machine. When you start up, you can jump into the standard Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 arcade game, allowing you to pick from all the characters of the arcade version, choose your difficulty, and then fight it out against the arcade game’s famously lousy artificial intelligence. As far as we can tell, the game preserves pretty much all of the characters’ animation frames from the original, and there’s no slowdown whatsoever.

The gameplay is spot-on with the DS controls. Anyone who spent time playing any MK on a Super Nintendo pad will feel right at home here, and even if not, it won’t take you more than a few minutes to get up to speed. As veterans of UMK3 ourselves, we were able to jump on then start whipping out combos and fatalities almost instantly. And even if you forget how to do any of your characters’ special moves and finishers, you’ll see a display of all your moves on the other screen throughout any match. (Which screen displays the fighting and which one shows the move list is configurable in the options.) The bottom line is that we’re amazed at how much this game feels like the original arcade game; it’s a surprisingly high-quality version of UMK3, from what we’ve played so far.

You’ll also get a smattering of multiplayer options for the arcade mode. You can do local versus with two carts and get full support for all characters. There’s also a download play option that loads up surprisingly fast. But it’s obvious why it’s so fast when you get to the character select because only Scorpion, Reptile, Kitana, and Jade will be playable in this mode. Finally (and most surprisingly), the game will support full online versus play, though with only one preview version of the game, we were unable to test it out as of press time.

Then you’ve got Puzzle Kombat, a rudimentary clone of Super Puzzle Fighter that has appeared in recent console iterations of Mortal Kombat. The game has you and your opponent dropping blocks of four colors onto your respective boards then trying to eliminate groupings of each colors with like-colored gems that occasionally drop down instead of the blocks. This mode lets you select from one of six characters, each of whom has a special power that can be used occasionally during a match. For instance, Sub-Zero’s freeze move will freeze the opponent’s board, preventing him or her from eliminating any blocks for several turns.

The onscreen moves list helps jog memories which have rusted since 1995.

Finally, there’s a bit of extra content in the game that you can unlock. You can get a few additional characters for play in Puzzle Kombat, and the three hidden characters from the arcade version of UMK3 can be accessed in the traditional manner (that is, by inputting the correct “kombat kode” during a game over screen). In addition to the unlockable characters, you can unlock a few other light extras, such as a demonstration of all the fatalities in the game back-to-back or an endurance match that pits you against all five of the game’s characters in one brutal endurance match.

Ultimate Mortal Kombat’s high level of playability certainly surpassed our expectations the first time we tried the game out. We’ll bring you a detailed review of the package’s lasting appeal closer to its November 12 North American release date.

-If Its Games

Ninja Jajamaru-kun Review

Getting the chance to download and play games that weren’t originally released in the West is one of the better perks of the Wii’s Virtual Console service. However, not all of the imports that companies put up for sale on the service are worth your time or money. Case in point: Ninja Jajamaru-kun, a simplistic 2D action game for the Nintendo Entertainment System that’s downright shoddy even when evaluated by 1985’s standards.

In the game, you play a young ninja named Jajamaru who’s trying to rescue his kidnapped girlfriend. The quest involves a looping sequence of 24 separate stages, each containing four floors and spanning roughly two screens wide by one screen tall. Within each stage, there are eight enemies running around, which you need to eliminate in order to move on to the next stage. To that end, Jajamaru can run, jump, and throw shurikens straight ahead. The whole idea is to bash ceilings with Jajamaru’s head and move from floor to floor shooting enemies without getting shot in the process. Occasionally, the bricks you knock out of the ceiling will leave behind power-up items, which you can grab for bonus points or to make Jajamaru invincible.

The joke’s on Jajamaru. No matter how many stages he clears, he never gets the girl.

The game’s biggest problem is that there’s basically nothing to it. The background decorations change and the enemies absorb more shots as you go deeper into the game, but the actual stage layouts and artificial intelligence behavior remain the same. On top of that, the enemies don’t do much apart from run back and forth and throw knives at you when you approach. Every stage feels the same. That’s bad, considering the game’s whole dynamic involves playing through as many stages as you can in order to rack up a high score.

As you’d expect for an NES game produced in 1985, the graphics and audio are rather crude. Jaleco did manage to squeeze some atmosphere out of the music, at least, by organizing the beeps-and-pops output by the NES into a couple of genuinely interesting pieces of Japanese classical music. The sound effects are just a collection of ticking noises, though. Regarding the graphics, the tiny character sprites barely animate, and every background consists of a single splash of color, some bricks, and some ugly-looking trees. Not that you’ll be able to pay attention to any of those details, because the scrolling and character movements are so jerky that your eyes will begin to blink, water, and exhibit other signs of physical discomfort after barely a minute of playtime.

Ninja Jajamaru-kun is tedious and ugly, and it actually induces physical discomfort. You’d have to be crazy to dole out six dollars to subject yourself to this kind of pain.

Undertow pulls in upcoming XBLA lineup

Although Microsoft typically reveals its weekly Wednesday addition to Xbox Live Arcade on Mondays, the publisher will occasionally tip its hand on the upcoming lineup. Today, Microsoft did just that, revealing seven more games that will be added to Xbox Live “in the coming weeks.”

Undertow, the Unreal Engine III-powered action game announced in April, will soon be swimming to Xbox Live. In addition to a 15-level single-player campaign, the game includes competitive multiplayer for up to 16 players, as well as two-player co-op play.

Microsoft has a pair of gravity-influenced puzzlers slated for imminent arrival. N+, which began as an Adobe Flash freeware game according to its developer, Metanet Software, is an action platformer in which players attempt to escape a level before time runs out. The game includes multiplayer modes and a level editor. In Sierra Online’s Switchball, players guide a ball through labyrinthine courses. To add a layer of complexity, the ball can be morphed into various forms to change how it interacts with the different levels.

For those who prefer their puzzles of the pen-and-paper variety, InterServ International is creating Word Puzzle, a word-search style game that offers single-player and online competitive modes. Lastly on the puzzle tip, Activision will release Shrek-N-Roll, which will sport more than 20 characters inspired by DreamWorks’ family-friendly film franchise. The publisher did not reveal further details on the game.

As noted last week, THQ will be entering the downloadable console-game market with SpongeBob SquarePants: Underpants Slam, as well as Screwjumper. In Underpants Slam, players raid Krusty Krab’s kitchen, the Flying Dutchman’s ship, and an armory in Atlantis in search for 99 pairs of elusive underpants. In Screwjumper, players nosedive into mine shafts to destroy alien mining gear in both single- and multiplayer modes.

Microsoft also announced today that demos for the Doritos Unlock Xbox Challenge are available for download. From now until November 18, Xbox 360 owners can play the user-inspired demos and then vote for their favorite at Doritos’ Web site. The winning demo will be fleshed out into a full XBLA game.

GameCity ‘07: Smith disassembles Lego Star Wars

NOTTINGHAM–It’s not every event that you walk into to find stormtroopers patrolling the cinema and Darth Vader sitting in the audience. Jonathan Smith, Lego Star Wars producer at TT Games, had obviously felt the need for some backup as he discussed the latest incarnation of the successful Lego Star Wars franchise, Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga.

Don’t point that gun at me, sonny.

Coming out on November 9 in the UK on the Wii, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, and DS, the latest game will let gamers play through all six Star Wars movies in a mash-up of the first two games, along with some new surprises.

Smith started the event by explaining that some members of the press had become confused about what was coming in the demo. He told If Its Games, “This press release came out, and I think people heard what they wanted to hear. It said something like, use your Wii Remote as a lightsaber… It’s no secret that your character has a lightsaber and you fight with it, but I think many people took that to mean that we’d created a new peripheral.” Not wanting to let those people down, Smith said that he would be trying something in the talk to see if it would work.

Darth didn’t seem all that interested in the talk, and left part way through.

He duct-taped his son’s lightsaber to the Wii Remote. “Here is the Wii lightsaber, TM,” He joked. “Anyone can make one of these at home.” The experiment seemed to work with a surprising amount of success, but Jonathan soon separated the two. He explained why, sadly, he thinks that a Wii lightsaber peripheral might not work. He said, “In the real world it’s much easier to use the original Wii Remote because it’s much lighter and it doesn’t make your arm hurt… There are design reasons why it might not be great, because you’d miss a lot of the time–you’re not going to be able to fight with style. You’re not a Jedi, you know. So, we very, very quickly thought that it’s not going to happen in this game.”

The new game will be big, expla