Mike Schramm at Joystiq got the chance to play a little bit of Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe during the big E3 event this week:
The game looks really nice so far, but “so far” is the operative phrase there — the game is far from done. There are only six fighters in the game we played: Flash, Superman and Batman represent the comic book side, while Scorpion, Sub-zero, and Sonya are in from the MK series. Catwoman, Sheng Tsung, Captain Marvel, and Liu Kang have been announced as well, but Lebaron told us that Midway probably won’t have your favorite character Zatanna in the game — he says they’re sticking pretty mainstream with their character choices for now. And unfortunately, they don’t have full access to the DC Universe. “We can’t do Bizarro as an alternate costume to Superman,” he said as an example, “there are licensing things to deal with.” But the benefit there is that by sticking to the mainstream DC superheroes, they can make sure to get all the standard moves in there, and a few more.
Character shots for Catwoman, Flash, Sonya Blade and Sheng Tsung can be found after the jump.
*****
July 17th, 2008 at 1:04 pm
What licensing things? TIME WARNER OWNS ALL THESE CHARACTERS! Why do they keep limiting themselves like this?
July 17th, 2008 at 1:22 pm
Captain Marvel. Nice. Wonder which Green Lantern will make the cut.
July 17th, 2008 at 1:28 pm
AFAIK, Time Warner doesn’t own Midway Games, so yeah, there would be licensing issues.
July 17th, 2008 at 2:19 pm
Kelson, the licensing thing was about Midway’s ability to put Bizarro in as an alternate costume for Superman.
Evan, sometimes characters are tied up as exclusives in licensing already done with other companies. There could be a clause in a previous video game license that says a game company is the only one that gets access to the Superman rogues or particular characters, in order to give them some slight marketing advantage. So, if Bizarro was already part of licensing for the Superman Returns game with some long period of time before expiration, he couldn’t be used here.
July 17th, 2008 at 2:39 pm
True, but I’m not sure what “issues” would be involved for licensing Bizarro that wouldn’t apply for other character- I don’t know how much Midway paid for the license, but throwing a relatively minor character into the deal wouldn’t be beyond DC’s means.
July 17th, 2008 at 9:26 pm
FLASH RULES!!!!!!!