Day: June 2, 2014

I tried to make site changes, but they didn’t work too well.

D'Arque Bishop

Well, that last post about Mortal Kombat X didn’t work out nearly as well as I wanted it to.

The biggest reason was because after the announcement from Ed Boon and the posting of the teaser trailer, I was focusing more on the function of my own site than reading the press release or looking at the new website. I was having trouble with the comment system, and wanted to get that fixed first.

My site currently uses Disqus for its comment system, just like a lot of other sites. I didn’t have a problem with it; it’s worked pretty well for what I wanted to use it for. However, a couple of days ago I learned of an add-on for WordPress called Jetpack, which supplements a self-hosted WordPress install with functionality from WordPress.com. Among the additions given was an improved comment system over the original one WordPress comes with, so I decided to go ahead and give it a try, installing it on Saturday and deactivating Disqus.

Part of my thinking was that with the new Jetpack features, including the comment system and the better cross-post to social media functionality, I could start using my site more for posts that I would normally keep on Facebook, Twitter, and/or Google+. I also wanted to make it easier for people to comment on my posts.

Unfortunately, the Jetpack comment system failed to appear. The comment system remained just like the old default WordPress comment system, no matter what I tried.

I finally did some research this morning, and found the answer: my theme is too out of date. With version 3.0, WordPress changed the internals of the comment system, and themes needed to be updated in order to take advantage of the new features. I had no idea at the time, as I had already migrated to Disqus by that point. Changing it by myself was not something I could do, as I’m practically worthless when it comes to CSS and PHP coding. I tried switching to the Twenty Fourteen theme, but was not happy with it. For a bit, I was unsure what to do.

The answer, as it was, came via a simple question: “Who comments on my site, anyway?” :-)

In the end, I decided to keep Jetpack installed, along with several of its add-ons. I went ahead and disabled the comment add-on, and went back to using Disqus. For what I need, it works pretty well and I never had a real complaint with how it works. In fact, when looking closer at Disqus, it already did everything I wanted the Jetpack comment system to do anyway.

As for the site itself, I’m going to go ahead and try to post more to it. The Mortal Kombat X post kind of deflated my sails a bit, but I’d like to use this site for a bit more than the occasional post that is longer than what I would put on Facebook/Twitter/Google+. It looks a bit lost and abandoned when I don’t keep it up-to-date.

We’ll see what happens.

Mortal Kombat – X Marks the Spot?

D'Arque Bishop

Over the past month, Ed Boon has been posting a countdown on Twitter, with “zero hour” coming today. At 8 AM, he made his big announcement.

Shortly afterwards, the first teaser trailer for Mortal Kombat X was unveiled.

At first thought… well, I’m not sure what to think.

The trailer itself gives a good indication of what we can expect, gameplay-wise, with moves and attacks similar to what we saw in Mortal Kombat (2011), but with new features like using the environment against your opponent. The character designs are pretty respectable as well; for example Sub-Zero looking like he pretty much always does, with the added feature of his eyes glowing ice-blue. Scorpion looks more like the design used in Injustice: Gods Among Us, with his mask harkening back to the plain yellow face-covering used in the old games, and the hood being looser and not as form-fitting.

However, for me, the teaser is nowhere near as comprehensive as the teaser for the last game. For example, we still don’t know what the plotline is; while chances are the game will start at the new timeline’s version of Mortal Kombat 4, there’s no hint of Quan Chi, Shinnok (the Big Bad of Mortal Kombat 4), or indeed anything from the last game. In fact, the teaser raises an interesting storyline question. In the previous game, the older Sub-Zero was killed and transformed into the specter Noob Saibot. The younger Sub-Zero was transformed into a cyborg, and died at the hands of Sindel; his soul is now enslaved by Quan Chi, but retains the cyborg appearance. Was he given a new body, and if so, why is he fighting Scorpion (who also serves Quan Chi)? Could this be a brand new Sub-Zero?

Also, is the X in Mortal Kombat X a reference to the letter or the Roman numeral?

EDIT: Patrick McCarron of TRMK just pointed out to me that it’s the latter.

https://twitter.com/lover_of_tacos/status/473480913012002816

Don’t get me wrong. I’m really interested in the game, as while Mortal Kombat 4 was my least favorite of the arcade titles, I also thought it had a lot of storyline potential. Hpwever, unlike the other games in the series, we’ve never had a really good look at how the events of Mortal Kombat 4 played out. While some of the endings were concise and were quickly shown to be canon (Raiden becoming an Elder God, Scorpion learning Quan Chi killed his family), some were so vague that it took a couple of games before anyone understood what the hell was going on (I’m looking at you, Johnny Cage and Reiko). Some more clarity into what happened would be welcome, even with the game being part of a drastically altered timeline.

I’m also hoping that Shinnok gets much more development this time around; while he’s supposed to be one of the most powerful adversaries in the series (stronger than either Raiden or Shao Kahn), his appearance in Mortal Kombat 4 was not handled very well. He was almost “Diet Shang Tsung”, as he had no moves of his own and copied the moves (but not appearance) of other characters. Hopefully, in this game, we’ll see something more akin to his Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub-Zero implementation: a very powerful character that transforms into a demon larger than Goro or Kintaro when provoked enough.

The other big observation I made is that if the graphics of the teaser are an indication of the game itself, we should not expect it to come out on Xbox 360 or Playstation 3. It makes sense, as WB Games has already started the push to exclusively next-generation with Batman: Arkham Knight. I doubt we’ll see a PC version of Mortal Kombat X come out at the same time as the console versions, which means for me personally that unless I get an Xbox One or a Playstation 4, I won’t be getting the game at launch. EDIT: As my friend Matt pointed out on IRC, the official site has it listed as coming out for Xbox 360 and Playstation 3. I guess I don’t have to wait for the PC version or a new console after all. :-)

As it stands, this is only a glimpse of what is to come; it’ll be another year before the game itself is released. Until then, I’m going to wait and see; hopefully it meets my expectations, and hopefully I’ll be able to play it on launch.