Re: Goro
I agree on the proportions thing. The original figure's elongated torso always looked a bit awkward to me so I see little need to recreate that entirely faithfully. I think the current proportions are alright (better than in the original MK at least) but I'm not sure making the legs shorter was an improvement in the first place.
I also echo the sentiments that the details look a bit soft. His abs could stand to be a bit more chiseled, and I think his legs could be a bit more defined as well. His back feels a bit unfinished in my mind, I would expect his lower set of shoulder blades to look a little more distinct and perhaps more importantly I think some detail on the scales on his back should be present in the sculpt. Oh, and what about the spikes on his forehead?
All in all he's looking great. Glad to hear you've got the facial animation bit covered as well.
Bleed, nice to hear about the solution for turning around animations, I had actually been thinking a bit about it as well. I agree that multiple/animated normal maps could be used to really great effect. If you have any more or less finished examples using this technique (ie the turning animation) I'd love to see it in motion.
On another note, there was a bunch of discussion way back about animation and framerates. Here's my two cents: constant 60fps animation would (in theory) look amazing, but apart from the technical issues explained by interloko, there are other issues. Namely, transitioning between animations. If everything is moving in 60fps, that means that the actual movement between each frame of animation is extremely miniscule - and because of that the bigger jumps that happen when going from one animation to the next is going to stand out more. By comparison, if, say, the first frame of a kick animation is no more different from any frame in the idle animation than how different the idle animation frames are from each other, for all intents and purposes the transition will feel perfectly smooth. Essentially, the smoother the animation, the more noticeable the "jump cuts" between animations become - at some point they may become more noticeable than the smoothness of animation, defeating the purpose entirely. It's for this exact reason that many modern games are capped at 30fps - a game running in 30fps occasionally dipping into the 20s feels much more consistent (hence smoother) than one constantly going back and forth between 25 and 50fps.
I think the process you yourself described, Bleed, is probably ideal. Make everything reasonably smooth, but decrease or increase the amount of frames wherever appropriate. I'm sure the animation could run at well below 60fps and still come across as super smooth, so long as the right care is taken with it, and that the amount of frames is concentrated on where it's necessary. I suppose I would recommend looking at games like SF3 and possibly Killer Instinct for reference. See how many frames something needs to feel "smooth", and see what types of motion requires more or less frames to achieve the desired effect.
While on the subject of animation, here's a question I'd like to hear other people's input on. How would you feel about having more unique animations for the fatalities?
What I mean by that is, the original game is using a fair amount of shared animations for different types of reactions, and a few characters have no unique animation for their fatalities either. Some of it I think is perfectly fine (the same headless body falling over animation in any decapitation type fatality, Johnny Cage performing his regular uppercut), but other times it looks a little awkward (no particular animation for getting one's heart ripped out, Sonya blowing a kiss towards the opponent's feet, the spine kind of popping up out of no-where in Sub-Zero's fatality, etc). I personally think it would be great if more care could be taken to make each individual fatality look as good as possible, both on the part of the character performing it, and the character who's on the receiving end. Basically, make each and every fatality feel like a treat, and not something pieced together with whatever graphics happened to be available. (Additionally, I'd really like to see every character getting a specific animation for getting impaled on spikes, where only Kano had it in the original game)
It wouldn't necessarily be a whole lot of extra work and obviously it's not something that would impact the gameplay, but I think from a presentation standpoint it could really elevate things. Slight graphical flourishes like that I don't think would remove any of the appeal as a remake of MK1, but I'm curious to hear what you guys think.