Mortal Kombat on PlayStation Vita Gets First Details

Last week we heard that the very impressive Mortal Kombat fighting game, after its release last year for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, is set to appear on the PlayStation Vita handheld device. Now, the creative director of developer NetherRealm, Ed Boon, has revealed quite a lot of details about the game and its features.

Mortal Kombat impressed and delighted millions of fighting game fans last year by returning to the franchise’s gory roots. Now, after confirming that a Mortal Kombat Komplete Edition will appear for home consoles, NetherRealm and Warner Bros. have also presented a PlayStation Vita version, which is out in spring.

In order to present a few more details about the game, NetherRealm Creative Director and Co-creator of the series, Ed Boon, talked with the PlayStation Blog.

During his interview, Boon confirmed that almost all of the content from the PS3 edition, from its story mode, to the DLC, or even the extra characters, like Kratos, were included in the Vita edition. While some changes were made to make the game run on the Vita, Boon ensures that the game is very impressive and maintains a 60fps framerate.

“We did have to reduce some of the polygon counts from the backgrounds and characters, but that screen is so bright, and it’s got such high pixel density….when I saw Scorpion and Sub-Zero fighting on the Living Forest for the first time, I was amazed,” Boon said. “A number of our internal people proposed running it at 30 frames per second — “we could do this and this and that” — but we knew it would feel different. We didn’t want it to feel sluggish or unresponsive.”

The biggest new feature that the Vita version of Mortal Kombat as opposed to its home console editions is the appearance of a second Challenge Tower, which allows players to try out their skills.

“The mobile gaming experience means shorter bites of time. We identified the Challenge Tower as a perfect fit for mobile sessions, so we expanded it greatly for PS Vita. There are actually two Challenge Towers in the PS Vita version, and the new one has 150 challenges that are exclusive to PS Vita. A number of those challenges use PS Vita’s hardware features: the touch screen, the accelerometer,” the developer revealed.

Last but not least, Boon also confirmed that the touchscreen was also used throughout gameplay, although it was completely optional.

“In terms of gameplay, we’ve always wanted MK to be as accessible as possible. For example, you can touch your X-ray meter to execute an X-ray attack. For fatalities, you can “slash” the screen with the appropriate inputs — say, away, away, up — to execute the fatality. It makes some of the more difficult fatalities easier and it’s fun to slash at your screen to fire off a fatality.”

Mortal Kombat for the PlayStation Vita is scheduled to appear in Spring.