If they had a fighting engine worth a crap, they wouldn't need fatalities, chess, or out of combat tomfoolery to sell their games.
Maybe they will create one for this title.
My rose comment was meant to illustrate a few things:
This game should have been a new IP from Midway, with DC characters. That would have done away with the need or want for fatalities.
However, then you are stuck without MK characters.
If you add your MK characters, you are stigmatized into the old gimmicky fighter, one trick pony of using fatalities.
If you gave the DC characters to, say, Namco, they would probably just add them into Soul Calibur.
I wish that Namco made Batman a playable character in Soul Calibur.
Know this, however, the SC engine itself isn't much better than the last 3d MK game. The SC engine is largely unchanged from its Dreamcast version, when the game was largely reliant on 8 way run for depth. It's no counting frames game, like say, Tekken, and superiority in Soul Calibur is much more depenant on quick reflexes and knowledge of the controller, than is Tekken or Virtua Fighter.
Another lame Soul Calibur "depth" addition is parry, which is so impossibe and unpredictabe to time correctly, and its a stark contrast to the buttonmashing and non-balanced tier gameplay found elsewhere.
Don't take this to mean SC is a shallow game. It's simply a button masher by definition, as in a character pressing the buttons with some form of knowledge about what those buttons do, can get lucky and score a victory from time to time.
However, like with any game, the hardcore player will eventually emerge as a much more consistant victor.
The problem lies in the unpredictability inherant to that engine. For instance, a flat out button masher stands a better chance against me, than an advanced player, simply because the advanced player is much easier to predict.
Thus, Tekken remains my favorite engine, and I also feel each individual Tekken game has advantages over its SC counterpart, besides having a deeper fighting engine.
Still, even though Deadly Alliance did have a deeper fighting engine than Soul Calibur 2, it was still a far inferior game, due to several mis-steps in development. Weapons left characters like Shang Tsung largely overpowered, as the game attempted to create characters for advanced players by limiting the move-sets, these character had no real advantages when you learned their moves, they would never be as strong as Tsung, or even close. The poor-mans balancing act.
However the game always looked cool, and was very grewsomely visceral, and therefore, racked up some esteem as a nostalga title amongst the great unwashed.
I expect Batman to sell more copies of this game than MK, though, and so, in the end, fatalities are but a small part of a much bigger and more important picture, which is engine, presentation, depth, and balance.
I don't need your console war.
It feeds the rich while it buries the poor.
You're power hungry, spinnin' stories, and bein' graphics whores.
I don't need your console war.
NO NO, NO NO NO.
