I finally got to play Mortal Kombat: Deception and WWE: Smackdown vs Raw. And, well, what can I say.

Let's start with WWE: SvR - an awesome game, without a shadow of a doubt. Unless you have spent countless hours with its predecessor Here Comes The Pain, like me. The truth is, nothing much has changed compared to that game. A new timing-based mini game here, a couple of new animations there, that's about it. (You know the saying, never change a winning team!) Don't get me wrong - it's an awesome game, like I said before. It just doesn't deliver the sense of originality as much as HCTP did. And for a wreslting fan like me, that's a bit of a disappointment.

Mortal Kombat: Deception. My first impression: Wow! The last MK that I played was MK:4 on the N64, which was neat altogether (although it missed the flair MK:2 had). Anyway, I skipped MK: Deadly Alliance and spent some fun hours with my friends playing MK: Trilogy for the good old PlayStation 1. So, in other words, Deception is my first Mortal Kombat on a so-called "nex-generation" console. And boy, it delivers... when you're playing Arcade (or, as MK likes to put it, Arkade) or against a friend. Puzzle and Chess Kombat are fun for a couple of rounds, but tend to get boring after a while. They're neat additions nontheless. But the ultimate bummer is Konquest mode, which feels like a rushed action-adventure from back in the days when the Dreamcast was the most powerful console out there. It's fun for... oh,no, I'll take that back. It's not even "fun", it's interesting for the first 20-30 minutes, but it ultimately feels like a chore. The annoying thing is, you'll have to play it unless you want to miss out on some of the hidden characters/stages.

To put it in a nutshell: I'm glad and proud I could add these two titles to my game collection. Unfortunately, they're flawed by a small number of issues - some of which might could've been avoided by just a little more development time.

Hope you share my thoughts!