Reports from Illinois reveal that the City of Chicago is helping Midway expand their offices to accomodate the almost daily addition of new development team members. Because Midway generates numerous high-tech job opportunities for the City of Chicago, the city has decided to help the company by spending $2 million towards the cost of new office space.
TRMK has been informed that Mortal Kombat Special Forces is still under development for Sony PlayStaion. Despite many reporting that the total demise of Mortal Kombat Special Forces came with the cancellation of the Nintendo64 version, the PlayStation version is still alive and significantly better than before. Ever since the depature of the game's main developers, MKSF has endured a major overhaul. For instance, back when MKSF was being developed for both N64 and PSX, the cinematic cut scenes were real-time scripted sequences in order to keep parity between both versions. Now that the N64 version has been cancelled, full motion video cut scenes now replace the scripted sequences. In addition to FMVs, significant changes have been made to the camera system, the in-game fighting system has been drastically improved, and special effects have been upgraded. With these new changes come more development time. Mortal Kombat Special Forces has indefinitely been delayed from its last known release date of Spring 2000.
It seems like there is some controversy surrounding the money Midway is recieving. The Chicago Tribune seems to be all over this story. The recent story is that someone on the board of directors at Midway is a "politically-connected business and civic leader."
Unfortunately, the author constantly uses Mortal Kombat as a hook and an eye opener in order to get people to read and form an opinion, even though Mortal Kombat has no relavancy to the situation other than it is a product of Midway. The situation is about the city grant, not about video game violence and how it affects children, as the author would like you to believe. If you would like to read these stories, here are the links to the online editions.
The controversy continues. The Chicago Tribune is reporting that yesterday in Chicago about 2 dozen people marched from the Art Institute to City Hall, then to a downtown Toys R' Us in protest against the Grant given to Midway Games for expansion of their North Side offices. Some of the protestors came from as far away as Vancouver, CA and were "in town to be trained in methods of fighting violence." Click below to read more.
The Associated Press (AP) released a news story on the protest containing a picture of the protest. Click on the link below to read the story and see the picture.
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href="http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/ap/20000106/us/mortal_kombat_grant_1.html">Mortal Kombat Grant Under Fire
Since we last heard that Mortal Kombat Special Forces has gone under some major modifications ever since the first look we got at last year's E3, we've gotten hold of some more information regarding what has been changed since the departures of several key team members, including project leader and MK co-creator, John Tobias.
Since the series' main storyteller is gone, the ambitious storyline evisioned by the creator has proved to be an arduous task for the remaining development members. Those complexities proved to be too much without the storyteller himself, so everything has been simplified.
In the version shown at E3, the first level involved a great deal of jumping on boxes and climbing up ladders. There was even some areas where Jax had to swim from room to room. Even though these portions of the game worked fine, with exceptions to the jumping system, they have all been removed. Now all the characters can do is run, shoot, and fight, which is designed to speed up gameplay.
As far as the camera system goes, the one implemented at E3 had some flaws. Apparently, there were some sorting problems with the system and those problems seemed to be too much to fix. They decided to scrap the previous system and adopt a new system similar to the system used in Metal Gear Solid; however, word is that the game is still suffering with sorting issues. The new camera system was also supposedly to help speed up the game's frame rate; nevertheless, it hasn't seemed to have helped.
Although the outlook may seem grim for Mortal Kombat Special Forces, it is still too early to be concerned. Having to practically start over during the middle of development is a very difficult task. Because of all the changes and additions being made to the game, it will take a lot more time to bring the title up to release quality. From what we've heard significant progress is being made, which is good to know. With the closest possibility of release being this fall, the current development team still has quite a bit of time on their hands to get everything running up to the standard we expect from Midway's games.
We would like to inform all you guys that there is currently a code posted up on GameSages (also on IGN Dreamcast) about a code to play as Kintaro in Mortal Kombat Gold. This code does not work. We just wanted to let you all know before you start emailing us about it not working or informing us of it. All the code will do is select Reptile.
Update: This code has been removed from GameSages.
