I just rented this last night, and I love it. Fully compatible with 360 - no patch needed. I'm a big fan of the older MK games, and I've never played any of the 3D ones until now. There are a CRAPLOAD of characters and so many martial arts styles, plus you can create your own fighters. I would be surprised if someone on here doesn't find the martial art they're training in There are also weapon styles for each character as well. I train in hapkido, and lo and behold, that's what Scorpion's unarmed style is. But I think I had the most fun using Crane style with Chameleon. The game isn't too difficult to learn. Only a handful of "special" moves for each character, and then a bunch of different attacks. I'm sure mastery of the game will take a while though. There's even customizable combo fatalities, where you can break an arm, rip something out, etc before finishing them off. I think I still prefer the older games, but nonetheless it's good old gory MK fun.
I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with Mortal Kombat (as I seem to do with many fighting games). I love the fact that there dozens of martial arts styles to choose from, and that you can switch between styles mid-fight. I hate the fact that they all play exactly the same, with the exact same combos and play style, and are often horribly inaccurate (their version of Tang Soo Do is particularly painful for me). I also find the game engine to be incredibly rigid, and that makes the game much less fun than it could. As for Armageddon specifically.... I was really psyched about the character creation thing, until I found out that you could only have ONE character per profile. The whole point of character creation, IMHO, is to make an exciting new cast for a fighting game: David Bowie versus Guan Yu! Abraham Lincoln versus Jesus! The Red Ranger versus Santa Claus! You get the idea. I also felt like they just didn't put that much effort into it - so much was just recycling together the last two "New" Mortal Kombats (Deadly Alliance and Deception). I didn't have much compulsion to play the game, as I felt like their was nothing new for me. A lot of the weapon styles were exactly the same, and seem to have gotten much less "martial artsy" and more "dungeons and dragonsy" than they were in Deadly Alliance, which lessoned the atmospheric value of the game for me. All in all, I found it fairly disappointing. Maybe if I hadn't already played Deception and Deadly Alliance, and the character creation had allowed me to create a cast instead of one player, I would've liked it better.
