I found Tao Feng: Fist of the Lotus in the bargain bin today, finally get the chance to play the forgotten child of Tobias.
I liked it. through all the flaws there were a lot of good ideads that fell short of the mark, mainly due to poor programing.
Pros:
Graphics were ahead of their time. character models were probably the best on the market and the characters are realistically proportioned more or less.
introduced real time character damage. bruises, cuts, torn outfits.
choreographed throw animations. throws like firey pheonix's were really well done.
some combos are motion captured.
interactive environments.
music.
I actually liked the concept of Neo-Hong Kong.
"rythmic" combo inputs that help you get the timing down. "listening" to the examples in training mode is how i learned to pull off the long combo strings. button presses are audible. by bleeps and bloops. really all you have to do is correlate the button presses with the audible prompts.
Iron monk.
Jet Li!!
Cons:
voice acting
game play: really stiff characters, physics that make no sense.
basically everything else.
It's a fun game to play and it offers a look at what mortal kombats "could" have looked like back in the day. it's a shame Boon and Tobias Split because i think the art direction was actually really good. Even if the character names were kind of bad.