Mortal Kombat - final thoughts

I posted my review on Mortal Kombat amid several other articles, but there were still a handful of items I wanted to follow-up on. I'd say after a re-read of my review, the score and overall sentiments are still ones I stand by, but there are some additional insights I'd like to add quickly:

- Online play is just not as smooth as I would have hoped. And this is across the board.

• The first two nights I played online once the PSN was restored the combat was really laggy. It got better on subsequent nights, but was still worse than say, Super Street Fighter 4 or Marvel vs. Capcom 3 in my opinion
• I still haven't been able to do a King of the Hill match. I've read about it, and I've tried to connect every single night since the PSN restored, and it just searches for a match but never comes up with anything. 2 nights ago I let it run for about 30 minutes in the background while I played 360, toggling back and forth between TV inputs every few minutes.
• It takes way too long to find a match. I can't help but think there's just some sort of server problem - but it takes about 1-3 minutes to find a match every time it succeeds - and a lot of times it just never succeeds at all. I'd say better than half my tries do not wind up in an online match. And I've tried a lot of different settings, but generally just try a simple ranked match with no qualifiers.
  
• Again, not sure if this is a Mortal Kombat server issue, PSN or some combination of both, but I would say I've spent about 3 hrs trying to get into matches vs about 20 minutes of actual playtime. Disappointing to say the least.

Got to the last match in the Challenge Tower. There's 300 levels of it, and you have to do this to unlock things like various levels of difficulty in test your might/sight/strike. I did do a lot of skipping (once I bought everything in the Krypt, I really didn't have anything else to spend my koins on, so I shot up the ladder as quickly as I could. Some of the challenges were actually pretty cool - some were pretty lame and some were just really hard. Here's some quick thoughts on it:

• Many of the challenges were built in such a way you take advantage of certain character abilities. They can also serve as a training device to learn how and when to use certain moves from certain characters
• Some of the challenges were just silly - like when you throw/heave your limbs at your opponent, and they regenerate a few seconds later
• You get to use Goro for a level. That was cool and unexpected.
• Some of the challenges, like beating an army of 3 Goros in a row? yeesh
• The final challenge? Too much for me. You're fighting the final 3 bosses at a high level of difficulty, all in a row and without life regeneration between rounds. I can beat the first two, but that's it. Not getting that trophy

There is a lot of unlockable stuff here:

• There's 2 'hidden' characters you unlock in story mode
• There's 4 'secret battles' that are fun - if sometimes hard - to make happen
• The Krypt has a ton of content in it, though about 1/3 of it will only interest you for a handful of minutes
• Babalities. Had not discovered these when I wrote my review. I have since.
• Scorpion is still my favorite character. And he has the throwback MK 1 costume, throwback fatality as well. Good stuff

One last point I had been curious about was the online redemption code. I was not sure if my son would get to play or not - it looks like his account does get authorized as well. I say looks like because I recall trying to get online before I put the code in, and it said something about me not being authorized to do so. I put the code in, and that night PSN went down, so I never got to test with my son's account until last night.

It does let him connect to the lobby and see the online options. So, it looks like he is allowed to, but it's hard to say 100% since the online matchups still never happened - we spent about 25 minutes trying 4 or 5 times to connect to an online match in various modes, and he was never able to find a match. We switched over to my account to see if I could find one, and I did on the 2nd try. Not sure what the deal is, but that's just sort of how the online has been so far for us.

The reason I'm not too quick to blame the PSN itself is we hopped off and played Black Ops and Mod Nation Racers online right afterward and had no issues at all with either of those games.