Mortal Kombat Kollector’s Edition: Prima Offical Game Guide
Mortal Kombat Kollector’s Edition: Prima Offical Game Guide
• All content from regular edition book
• Exclusive theme song from Teenage Riot Records
• Behind the Music – Exclusive interviews with the theme song artists
• Tournament caliber strategy for the serious tournament players
• Inside NetherRealm Studio feature
• Massive concept art section
• Laminated move reference cards for all characters
• Embossed Hardcover with special foil logo
List Price: $ 34.99
Price:
3 Responses Leave a comment
Utter lack of content and usefulness,
Simply put, this guide is poorly designed, poorly written, and lacking in almost every respect. Most frustrating to me is its incompleteness. For example, in addition to Fatalities, this game has Babalities as well. However there is absolutely no mention of them in the entire guide or move lists. Strategy and detail is severely lacking in all sections. The “tournament caliber” strategies amount to a basic and general description of each fighter’s play style, comprised of at most one or two tiny paragraphs. The “Fatality gallery and warrior evolution” feature listed in the product details is COMPLETELY missing, by which I mean it’s not even an exaggeration, it’s literally not present. There are screenshots of one Fatality for each character in their move list section, but that’s it. No gallery, no evolution. That was one of the things I looked forward to the most, seeing their progression from game to game, but it’s not there. Frame data and combo damage statistics are completely omitted, under the guise that “it could be patched and make our info wrong so we just won’t include it at all.” Gee thanks, now I don’t even have an idea of RELATIVE speeds or damage statistics for moves and combos. Oh, there are trophies/achievements for discovering secret battles as well, and there is absolutely no mention of them or how to find them.
The quality of the guide is poor. Even just skimming I found typos all over the place, from using the wrong “its” to “ration” instead of “ratio” to writing “BMG” instead of “BGM” for background music unlockables in the krypt. The game basics section is clumsily written, and even having played the demo and understanding the mechanics pretty well, I found myself re-reading some explanations (such as for overhead attacks and some of the mix-up info) trying to figure out what the author actually meant. And it doesn’t help that even the first Fatality I tried to use a reference for had the distance listed wrong and I had to look in-game anyway (and many Fatalities in the guide don’t even tell you the distance at all). To top it off, the print quality is pretty bad. The paper quality is okay but the ink is sticky, grainy, and smells bad even.
In the end, the only thing the guide is really useful for is its table of krypt unlockables. Even the extra interviews at the end are painfully boring (and this coming from someone who enjoys reading that kind of thing), and have very sparse and tiny artwork sprinkled throughout. Now, if you’re like me, one of the reasons you want to buy this guide in the first place is to have all the information in front of you and see nice pictures too. Unfortunately, this doesn’t really provide. I would say a good 80-90% of the pages are taken up by excessive screenshots of all the moves and combos. Each special move has three or four progressive screenshots showing the move in action, but they’re so small that it’s hard to enjoy them. One much larger picture would be so much more satisfying. And why do we need sequential screenshots of the combos? It’s pretty ridiculous when you have a 16-picture sequence of a combo, since it’s not visually entertaining nor helpful for the actual execution of the combo. All it does is fill page after page that could be telling you how to actually apply the moves or more strategy. And corner combos aren’t even mentioned.
If you ignored all the people saying fighting game guides are pointless like I did because you wanted something nice to leaf through, I’m sad to say this isn’t that. Save your money and put it toward something else.
EDIT: I have continued to try using the guide and I just discovered that the ENTIRE combo section for Liu Kang has the correct pictures but the button inputs for KANO! STAY AWAY FROM THIS MESS!
Was this review helpful to you?
|Another Buy Confirming about The Shady Quality of this Guide,
I buy strategy guides just to have move sets printed out for characters of the game. The additional combos are just bonuses to me. However, this strategy guide is not only full of typos but the character inputs for various character is switched. No quality assurance was made prior to printing these guides, and it is easy to identify. Granted the book was nicely made in terms of construction, but I am ranking this guide a 1 star simply because it does not accomplish the main thing all guides should do (especially fighting games!): accurately represent in-game command inputs. I spent $20.00 for something incomplete, and I made sure to return it the next day.
Was this review helpful to you?
|Waste of money,
I bought this book having high hopes, but this book was a rushed, sloppy mess created to cash in on information you could find for free online. I like having a nice colorful book in front of me rather than a sheet of paper with move sets printed off the internet, but I was disappointed in the utter lack of polish in this book.
The book basically takes the move lists for each character (that you can get for free), and then fills the pages with tiny blurry screenshots of said moves. As for concept art, and the pretty pictures for which I bought the book for? There aren’t many. The book is literally one picture of each character, and blurry screenshots of their moves and combos.
Also (as other reviewers have noted) advertised sections of the book are missing. I suppose that they hit some sort of deadline, and cut their sections out for some reason, but they are advertised as FEATURES OF THE BOOK, so that’s classic false advertising. Features that don’t exist include:
- Tournament caliber strategy for the serious tournament players. Only if by “tournament caliber” you mean “simple and obvious”. Did you know Baraka is best used up-close? Did you know Raiden could teleport behind people? Wow what “tournament caliber strategies”.
- Massive concept art section. Maybe Prima thought it was Opposite Day, because there is no concept art section at all, and what little there is sprinkled in the “Inside NetherRealm Studio feature” cannot be described as “massive” by any thinking person.
- Character histories with Fatality gallery and warrior evolution. This section simply doesn’t exist. This would actually be a really cool feature of the book, but it’s nowhere to be found. They show blurry screenshots of one fatality per character in the book, and that it. No “character histories” aside from a basic bio, and no “warrior evolution” whatsoever.
So why 2-stars? Well the book is sturdy and well made. The production value is outstanding, so I couldn’t give it a 1-star rating. However, do not buy this book under any circumstances even if you’re a die-hard Mortal Kombat fan. I actually think a class-action lawsuit might be in order to teach Prima a lesson about false advertising.
Was this review helpful to you?
|