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Mortal Kombat: Deception on the Xbox 360
By Patrick McCarron - November 20, 2005 Microsoft announced that Mortal Kombat: Deception would be one of the first Xbox games to be backwards compatible with their new console, the Xbox 360. While the Xbox 360 isn't due to be released until this Tuesday, TRMK has gotten a hold of the Xbox 360 early this weekend, and decided to try out Mortal Kombat: Deception on it. The game starts off with the intro video and main menu, which looks pretty crisp and clear being rendered at my Xbox 360's High Definition 1080i resolution on my 52" HDTV. All the game's Profile functions appear to work just fine, saving to my Xbox 360 Hard Drive without a problem, I had no Xbox 360 Memory Card to test though. I can also connect fine to Xbox Live and search for games. The Krypt and special Kontent areas all appear to be working as expected. Even the Area 51 Game Demo appears to work perfectly. I noticed the fonts are corrupted a little bit, see below screenshots, but it looks stylish in a way so most people won't notice this as a problem.
   Everything seems too good to be true, and unfortunately it is. I decide to fire up a game in Arcade mode, and am presented with the character selection screen followed by the tournment ladder. Immediately I can see the increased quality of rendering the game at 1080i in the details of the tournament ladder mountain and the characters. I was really excited until the game actually loaded up a fight scene. This is what I find:
  
Fight Video #1
Fight Video #2
Unfortunately, the fight scenes are emulated fairly poorly. The game camera keeps getting blocked by polygons that pop over the action constantly. The character I was playing with would develop some polygons stretching out past the camera view. It would only get worse the next round, as I find some stages are worse than others. The game started to slow down and redraw polygons across the camera surface, totally making the game unplayable. In one stage the screen was completely covered in a rainbow of polygons, so bad that I had to force a reboot of the system to quit out of the game. On a positive note, the details on the characters and surrounding stage backgrounds really stand out. Their rendering quality looks really great in High Definition 1080i. The graphics don't look quite realistic - more plastic like - but that's not necessarily a bad thing. Overall the upgraded graphics in Mortal Kombat: Deception were a welcomed surprise. Once all the bugs are fixed, it should look amazing. Below is the best shot I could get between the glitches with my camera.
 You can check out more photos here. So I quit out of Kombat mode and decide to take a turn at Konquest to see how that is. It started with more of the same, as there were more glitches in the intro training sequence. But once I passed that, Konquest ran pretty well and looked really crisp and clear. There was an occasional slow down and choppiness but it wouldn't last for more than a second or two.
 
Konquest Mode Video
Overall the emulation for the backwards compatibility needs some work. So much so I'm surprised this got past Microsoft's Quality Control department. But once the issues are resolved by Microsoft, all Mortal Kombat fans should be in business with the Xbox 360. There is a possibility that Microsoft has not released the latest emulation software for Mortal Kombat: Deception yet. I say this because there was a Halo 2 update that wasn't released until earlier today, despite being told it wouldn't be available until the console's release date on November 22nd. On a seperate note, I also tried out Mortal Kombat: Shaolin Monks and was presented with the standard error of not being able to play this game on the Xbox 360 at this time. But this could be resolved in future incarnations of Microsoft's Backwards Compatibility emulation engine, as Microsoft stated that they will be adding more Xbox games as they go. Stay tuned to our parent network site, RealmMedia.com's new Xbox 360 Exposed Feature for more photos and reviews of the newly released Xbox 360.
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