Mortal Kombat fans love women. Mortal Kombat fans love blood. So here's a woman made of blood.

Born of a Mortal Kombat II Kitana programming glitch, Skarlet is the latest mortal kombatant to spring from rumor into life, joining Ermac the Scorpion programming glitch and Blaze, the burning figure from the background of the second game's pit stage brought to life as the boss of Mortal Kombat: Armageddon.

Skarlet's definitely not merely a palette swap here. She's quick and brutal with the odd habit of covering both her and her opponent's head-to-toe with vital fluids by the end of a match, just like mom.

Skarlet adds value to the first batch of downloadable content for the latest Mortal Kombat.

In today's Speak Up on Kotaku, commenter Dracosummoner talks about a game that sold him with its demo and then let him down in full release. Has that ever happened to you?

Have you ever played a demo that you absolutely loved, one that instantly convinced you to go out and play the real game ... which turned out to be a disappointment in comparison?

My poster-child example would definitely have to be Wreckless: The Yakuza Missions. The demo mission was simple in formula — destroy a bunch of Yakuza members' cars by plowing into them with your own car or forcing them into walls — but it was simply a joy to play.

Before I got into the Halo series, this demo was what originally convinced me to want an Xbox at all, since Playstation 2 and GameCube ports hadn't been announced at the time. The actual game, however, suffered from strange, out-of-place objectives, such as having to push someone else's car along a very narrow underground bridge with no side rails, as well as an overall lack of polish in the level and mission design. Now I kind of wish I could have just played that demo over and over.

They call it their flawed masterpiece.

Released last year, 4A Games' Metro 2033 gave gamers a chance to experience a different sort of apocalypse, one untainted by Western views and culture. Metro 2033 was an apocalypse shaped by old world fears, and Russian ethos.

Based on the novel of the same name by Russian author Dmitry Glukhovsky and developed by a team in the Ukraine, Metro 2033 was a very different sort of game. In the first-person shooter you adventured and fought to survive in the warring factions that blossom in Moscow's metro system. The survival-horror tinged title made things more interesting by making your ammo also serve as your currency.

But, as THQ, the game's publisher, told a room full of journalists earlier this month, the game was not without its problems. The publisher described it as a cult hit with bugs. The sequel to the game, Metro: Last Light, hopes to correct all of the issues with the previous title.

The team worked on fixing the artificial intelligence of the game this time around, worked on weapon balancing, and strove to make the combat feel more exciting and tactical, we were told.

The segment of gameplay we were shown, they warned us, was stitched together from different parts of the still pre-alpha game.

The demonstration opened on a grand cathedral in ruin. A camera pans across the crumbling remains toward a strange noise, the sound of some sort of rat-like creature eating a corpse.

"Much has changed since the dark ones were scorched from the earth," a narrator says. "The air is not pure enough to breath, but sometimes we glimpse the sun or a bit of blue sky. But sadly we ourselves have not changed. War rages throughout the Metro."

In Last Light, the station-cities of the Metro are fighting for control of a "doomsday device" locked away in the military vaults of D6.

The camera moves on from the cathedral, slowly drifting across a Moscow in ruin, past a downtown area packed with abandoned cars, creatures skittering among the rusted hulks of automobiles. Finally the pan stops on two men opening a manhole, climbing down into a metro station. The screen goes black as the manhole closes above them.

Now it appears the game is being controlled by a gamer. The man he controls, Artyom, switches on night vision goggles. He's standing in a tunnel entrance, facing a thick layer of cobwebs. He reaches over and unscrews a light bulb, hiding as a large metal door at the other end of the tunnel slowly swings open.

Two men speaking another language, perhaps Russian, walk out to look around. They separate and Artyom creeps up behind one of them and decapitates him. He swivels and shoots the other guard with a strange, hand-built gun, a Geiger counter strapped to its side.

The player moves into the door, creeping along the edge of light case by a nearby cook fire. He shoots the pot over the fire, using its liquid to douse the flames. He shoots a nearby bulb, casting the area he's in, in darkness.

He works his way through the area, killing another guard as he makes his way to a command center decorated with the word "Reich." The player gets into a gun battle, taking out enemies with a found chaingun. The Reich, it turns out, are a group of neo Nazis.

The player and another character, both on the same side, make their way into a large hall filled with men, women and children, all doing the Nazi salute to an orater at the end of the hall. When they're spotted the other character fires his gun into the air, sending people scrambling in every direction, and then the two of you run through to a rail car in another section of the Metro.

The two of you crawl into the rail car, a small armored affair, and start rolling down the tracks. A gun battle erupts in the tunnels as your buddy handles the car and your fire at pursuing rail cars. Finally, you catch up to an armored train and jump on board, taking out enemies as you hunt for a prisoner. That wraps up our look at the game in action.

Metro: Last Light looks sufficiently gritty and somber, though what we saw of it lacked any sort of sense of horror or suspense.

The team say they're working to bring mulitplayer to the game this time around, something they tried to do with the original Metro 2033, but weren't able to finalize.

They also said they're tinkering with the concept of using ammo for currency. They want to preserve the notion of scavenging for resources, they say, but don't want to make ammo so hard to come by and so valuable you aren't able to get into the occasional firefight.

They are working on their core systems to figure out what works best, they say, it's still a work in progress.

Look for more details about the PC, Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 as it approaches its 2012 release.

Today's Talk Amongst Yourselves will be the best Talk Amongst Yourselves of all time. After all, anything that includes the subtitle Majora's Mask is the best of its kind.

Celebrate the excellence of today's TAY by commenting here about video games.

Side-quest: Go to #TAYpics and post suggestions of which public-domain painting we should use for Talk Amongst Yourselves in June. Vertically-aligned paintings won't be considered. Please include the name of the painting and its artist. We'll pick a winner and start using it tomorrow.

The Nintendo DS Lite, rumored to be discontinued, is getting a price drop, down to $99.99 effective June 5, according to a Nintendo press release that went out this morning. That's a $30 drop for history's first non-ugly DS, a model that's been supplanted by the DSi, the DSi XL and the $250 brand-new 3DS.

The iPhone seems packed to the rafters these days with loud, violent shooters and games about money. So let's take things a little slower, and relax with a puzzling platformer about some cute spirits instead.

Spirits is an iPhone and iPad game by Spaces of Play that, at the risk of crudely comparing the game, is like Lemmings meets Limbo. Only if Lemmings was slower. And Limbo was cheery instead of constantly morose.

You're tasked with guiding a number of sweet little spirits through levels by changing their form. If you need to climb over an obstacle, you can turn one of them from a wandering spirit into a little bridge. Or, if you need to get shot up a narrow pass to reach a new level, you can turn one of them into a gust of wind.

The real trick, though, comes in that for each level you're given a certain number of spirits. And you're given a minimum number you have to send through. So you can't just build bridges and the like wherever you please and just clear a stage via brute force. You have to be economical, and plan things through.

The game was first released a few months ago, but it was only earlier this month that an update was released tweaking its controls and making it easier to play. I never played it when it was supposedly harder, but I'm loving this version, as it's taxing without ever feeling stressful.

The beautiful artwork and soundtrack probably helps with that, too.

Spirits is $2.99.

Spirits [Apple App Store]

What is Heroes of Ruin? It is Square Enix's stab at social gaming on the Nintendo 3DS.

The game features a band of four heroes taking on monsters and other creatures that pop up in games involving bands of heroes.

Heroes of Ruin uses 3DS StreetPass functionality for an in-game "Traders' Network" that lets players buy and sell in-game items. It uses SpotPass to give players rare items or various challenges via WiFi hotspots.

There is also a Heroes of Ruin community website that gives players daily challenges and in-game quests.

You can play solo or with others through drop-in/drop-out multiplayer.

Heros of Ruin is getting its first airing at this year's E3 gaming expo in Los Angeles, and it will be available in early 2012. Check out the game's teaser. It's not so exciting!

The people who make Call of Duty keep promising that they won't charge you extra to play their hit game against other people. They shoot down any fears that they're going to turn CoD multiplayer into a pay-per-month subscription service, a la World of Warcraft or HBO.

But starting this fall, series publisher Activision will offer a service you can pay for each month: the premium grade version of something called Call of Duty: Elite (don't panic... there's a free version coming too).

Starting as a beta this summer and then launching on November 8, 2011—the same day as the next Call of Duty, Modern Warfare 3—Call of Duty: Elite will be a PC and mobile service that lets players track their stats, compete for real and virtual prizes, and form both social and gaming groups with players from across multiple CoD games.

Elite will be available in two tiers of service, one for paying and one for non-paying Call of Duty multiplayer fanatics. While all of the perks of membership are yet to be announced, that paying group may never have to pay for a Call of Duty map pack separately again.

At a glance, Elite resembles Bungie.net, the richly-detailed stat tracking service for that other mighty first-person-shooter series, Halo. But the top people behind the Elite project, including the heads of Beachhead Studios, an outfit dedicated exclusively to building and supporting Elite, promise that their service will prove to be the best of its kind, transcending expectations of websites for multiplayer video games.

The Elite service is, at its most basic, a very fancy website. It will primarily be accessed through users' web browsers, though Activision is planning to offer some sort of Elite app for iOS and Android devices.

Elite will include stat-tracking, lots of social-networking options and a bevy of competitions, some of which will be organized like the season of a professional sport. The service's Career stat-tracking and social grouping features will be free for everyone, according to top people who briefed Kotaku on the service at a recent demonstration in New York City.

It's not clear which other Elite elements will be exclusive to the paid version, let alone what a premium membership will cost. The paid version is at least confirmed to include more than just access to Elite. During an unveiling of the service, Jamie Berger, vice president of digital business at Activision, told reporters that a premium Elite membership will give subscribers a constant flow of Call of Duty content, including map packs, which have previously been available a la carte. Berger stressed that anyone who strictly buys a CoD game and doesn't pay for Elite can expect campaign, co-op and multiplayer "for no extra charge." He didn't elaborate on why someone would opt for the premium Elite offering of CoD map packs and other downloadable content, though one could imagine that those premium Elite members might get access to such added content early or at a bulk discount.

Two of us at Kotaku were recently given an advance demonstration of Elite, using a version of the beta build that will launch this summer and tie into Call of Duty: Black Ops. The screenshots that follow, all supplied by Activision, show off the features of Elite that were presented in our demo. (Click each to enlarge.) The Elite officials wouldn't tell us which of the features we saw would be offered only to paying customers—just that "many" of those we saw would be free—so as you check out the following screenshots and our accompanying descriptions, you're welcome to guess what you'll have to pay for and what will be available for all.

Elite is divided into four sections, the first of which is Career. It operates as one might imagine, sucking in a Call of Duty player's multiplayer stats from a PC or console and displaying them on multiple pages of the Elite site. This screenshot shows an Elite user's performance in Call of Duty: Black Ops which will be supported in the beta. It appears that Activision and Beachhead are only guaranteeing support for Modern Warfare 3 and beyond once the service launches in the fall.

The Career page and all of Elite will be platform-specific, so a player who has Call of Duty games on, say PC and PlayStation 3 will only have their stats from one platform in their Elite interface (unless, presumably, they decide to get two Elite accounts). All social-networking and competitive options will also involve only CoD players on that same platform.

One surprise feature on the Career page is the level calculator. It will allow players to input the number of hours of CoD they play each day in order to have the calculator tell them how many days it will take them to Prestige, aka reach the multiplayer mode's top rank before cycling to the lowest rank and starting the climb again.

The Career mode will give players access to an intense amount of statistics for the matches they've played. The shot here shows the player's performance in a Domination game on Black Ops' Berlin Wall map. The map shows green and red dots where the player killed another player or was killed. The timeline below it shows when those kills occurred and can be scrubbed through in a manner that crudely but effectively recreates the flow of life-and-death action in that session. These kinds of stats can be expected to be available on Elite just a minute or two after a match concludes in the games themselves.

The Career tab includes a Leaderboard Tracker, which will allow an Elite user to compare their standing in a variety of Call of Duty modes to those of other players they've befriended or are tracking through the service. Speaking of befriending people...

The Connect part of Elite makes CoD just a little bit more like Facebook or even Twitter. Players can befriend each other and see how they stack up on leaderboards (see previous screenshot). They can send messages to people they befriend and track the performance of players they're not friends with. Elite users can also join up to 64 groups, each defined by a hashtag. A user can start a group or join one and then strive to be the best CoD player in that group, be it #MW3, #Kotaku or even #StephenTotiloIsMyFavoritePersonNamedStephen.

Players will also be able to interact with each other through the Theater, which will allow users to host videos of their favorite CoD moments and comment on them. One of Elite's more clever features is its ability to read the meta-data of the Call of Duty videos uploaded to it and automatically tag each video with the names of the players in the captured match. Every player will easily know which videos they were in, intentionally or otherwise. Thanks to that bit of Elite tech, an unsuspecting Call of Duty player might discover that they were the victim—or the accidental star—in some popular Black Ops killstreak video.

The most promising and potentially impactful part of Elite is the Compete section. It has the potential to turn a fervent fan's weekly (or daily) after-work, after-school Call of Duty multiplayer sessions into what will essentially be participation in a season of CoD played as game show or sport.

A Program Guide in the Events page will list upcoming challenges. Some challenges will involve uploading videos or screenshots that meet certain contest criteria. So-called Lone Wolf Operations will challenge players to perform certain one-off feats in multiplayer—say, a set number of kills in a game mode that day—and could, the Activision people who showed us Elite said, win a player anything from an in-game badge to a real Jeep. The grander Events will pit players against each other in weeks-long tournaments that are set up for CoD gamers at different levels of skill. It's not clear yet whether the tournaments will only involve comparisons of players' stats against one another during the tournament or if players will ever be expected to actually play specific CoD matches against one another. (A Beachhead developer did say that the Elite team will be able to sniff out attempts to cheat in the tournaments by those who might attempt to pad their stats by playing against of friends who pose at shooting targets for them.) Winning tournaments and other contests will earn players Trophies, new status symbols that will surely motivate players the way Xbox Achievements and in-game badges already do.

The least-flashy part of Elite is the Improve section which is designed to serve as an instruction manual for Call of Duty multiplayer. It is a prettier version of an FAQ, providing data about how weapons and attachments work...

...how maps are laid out...

...and other details to study so that you can improve your Kill-To-Death ratio in Modern Warfare 3 and beyond.

Based on what we've been shown of Elite so far, the service looks like it will give CoD addicts a trove of data and networking options that they will surely enjoy. It doesn't offer anything to the single-player-only CoD gamer. It also doesn't yet have any meta-game in its own right, no way, for example, to "play" Ellite on your iPhone in a manner that would let you beat other Elite gamers or affect your standing in a proper Call of Duty game. The top developers on the service told us that game-like extensions and other unseen features may well be a part of future evolutions of Elite. For the beta, though, players should expect the features listed here, retro-fitted to suit Black Ops. An expanded suite of features will be offered when Elite launches alongside Modern Warfare 3. [Update: Elite will continue to also connect to Black Ops after the service launches in November, according to a spokesperson for the service.]

Elite will go into beta this summer. Those interested in joining should check out CallofDuty.com/Elite.

The Call of Duty series has been a blockbuster for Activision, one that has, on the strength of its online multiplayer, kept gamers busy for months after each release. The series has earned the publisher of the game piles of money. For a while it has seemed that some sort of premium service was inevitable. If people pay $15 a month to play World of Warcraft, why wouldn't they pay to play CoD? Yet Activision appears to have decided that it can't suddenly start charging for CoD multiplayer, so Elite results as the company's best option to find an alternate way to make money on multiplayer.

It remains to be seen how enticing it will be to pay for Elite. But there's a second benefit that Activision might gain for Elite. For the last few years, competing first-person shooter creators have been trying to knock CoD off its pedestal as, by far, the biggest multi-million-cop seller in its class. They have found it hard to do so for many reasons, including the fact that there is simply a lot of social pressure for gamers to buy each new Call of Duty.

The shooter gamer wants to play with their friends. The more passionately one person in a group of friends feels about playing Call of Duty, the more likely that all of the friends in that group will get the next game in the series. If Elite bonds those groups more tightly together—through communal stat-tracking, through social-networking, through competitions—then those groups of friends will find it even more enticing to keep the Call of Duty playing going, and those games that want to compete, will have a harder time than ever butting in.

(Want to know more about Modern Warfare 3? Check out our full coverage, including a trove of single-player details, the game's first trailer and impressions of a level we saw in action.)

The Force | LAS VEGAS, NV: Filmmaker George Lucas appeared at CinemaCon earlier this spring. (Photo: Ethan Miller | Getty)

Hands On With StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm 's Campaign, Now With More RPG and Space Yetis StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm is a mutated beast of last year's real-time strategy game infused with traces of point and click adventure. For StarCraft II's first expansion, the second chapter in Blizzard's trilogy, the game is getting a dose of role-playing game elements.

She's Bayonetta, Brought to Life As far as short nicknames go, hers must be on of the shortest. Going by the frisky sounding "H", this cosplayer focuses her attention primarily on one thing: games made in Osaka.

L.A. Noire DLC Offers Players New Cases to Play. New Ways to Pay. A handful of downloadable content is coming to detective game L.A. Noire. The DLC includes standalone cases, in-game items and challenges.

Not One Space Pirate, a Whole Squad of Them They're pirates in space. But they've got more than guns and swords. They've got cell phones and groovy collars. Arrgh!

Remembering Capcom's Great Nintendo Promise / Betrayal Capcom and Nintendo have always had a rather close relationship. In 2002, though, the pair became blood brothers. Or so people thought.

Maybe! Apparently the stealth game was accidentally revealed on the PlayStation.blog, but then taken down. There were apparently discussions of this on the PlayStation Community Forums, but they too were taken down.

According to a post on GameTrailers.com, the game is going to be a PS3 title and will be out in late 2012.

Sony told Eurogamer that it would not comment on "rumor and speculation".

Expect more info at E3 about Syphon Filter 4—if true. Dun dun dun.

Rumour: Syphon Filter 4 Revealed on PlayStation.Com [Giant Bomb via Eurogamer]