Got the us version of this for my gamecube and its a really good game. It plays completly differently from previous mk games. Characters now only have a couple of "special moves" but the game as a whole revolves more round the use of punch kick combo's ala tekken. You don't even have the old uppercut anymore.
You have 3 fighting stances which are activated by pressing the left shoulder button. 2 are unarmed fighting stances and the 3rd is a weapon fighting stance. Unlike mk:4 when you got hit you lost your weapon you keep it for as long as you are in that stance. Some characters like sub-zero can impale the enemy with their weapon and it stays in the enemy slowing sapping away at their energy.
Obviously the games now 3d so you can move around opponents. Some objects on the stage you are fighting on can be destroyed and theres a rumor of certain stage's having "stage fatalities" sort of like certain stages in mk:2 you could do a button stick sequence and perform a death move relating to something that was in the stage.
This rumor was strengthened when someone noted in the "making of mk:da" video thats on the disc one of the guys making a stage mentions it has a background fatality in it.
A lot of the older characters are back along with some new ones, characters like raiden and cyrax have to be unlocked while sub-zero and scorpion are already there to use. Each character has probably about 100 moves and 1 fatality.
To perform fatalities when it says "finish him" you press the left shoulder button and go into your fatality stance, this basically allows you to tap the directions and buttons for the fatality without making you bounce about like a loon like in previous versions of mk.
It plays suprisingly well with the gamecube controller, it uses the d-pad instead of the analogue stick but even with the small size of the dpad on the cubes controller it plays like any other version.
I recorded a couple of vids of characters (complete with fatalities).
Mk intro
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/gerald.mar ... kintro.WMV (5.5mb)
Cyrax fight and fatality
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/gerald.mar ... /cyrax.WMV (3.7mb)
Scorpion fight and fatality
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/gerald.mar ... orpion.WMV (3.5mb)
You may notice little blue glitches in the vid but theyre because of the compression and not the game obviously biggrin: