Pads & Panels

#9 Mortal Kombat (PS3, 360)

Publisher: Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment – Developer: NetherRealm Studios

Who would have thought that all this franchise needed to return to the top was to take things back to its roots? The ninth iteration of the notorious franchise ditched the comic crossovers and the gimmicky create-a-character modes and returned to form in spectacular fashion . The fighting returns to a 2D space, the fatalities are even bloodier and more over the top than in recent memory, the graphics are better than ever, but more importantly, the controls are rock solid and have that easy-to-pick-up, hard-to-master feel for which the series was once known. (more…)

Mortal Kombat Movies Go Hi-Def, Still Pretty Bad

By Bill Jones

For damn near two decades now, video game film adaptations have been serving as more of an embarrassment to the industry than anything else. And at the cusp of that movement in 1995 was Mortal Kombat, the New Line Cinema adaptation of the now-defunct Midway’s popular fighting series, following by Mortal Kombat: Annihilation in 1997. Now, in time for the release of the latest installment of the video game franchise, the Mortal Kombat movies hit high-definition Blu-ray for the first time.

But no amount of lines of resolution can make the Mortal Kombat movies good. The first helped launch a career of crappy movies (including more game adaptations in the Resident Evil series) for Paul W.S. Anderson, and the sequel is made not less than four times worse by the high-definition output, as its effects were horrendously bad, and the clarity does them no justice here. (more…)

.

I’ve been thinking about this for a while, pondering even. Over the past few years, we’ve been given an increasing amount of movies based on comics. Is this necessarily a good thing? You may be thinking to yourself, “Definitely! I need my Marvel fix on the big screen!” The thing is (besides Michael Chiklis), we’re being told the same story a minimum of three times!

Take the 1989 Batman, for example. When the movie was released and shown to be a cash cow prime for the milking, DC began releasing more comics, more cartoons and more video games based on the character. Some of these turn out good like Spider-Man for PS2. Most of them turn out bad…Iron Man bad. (more…)