and serves the Elder Gods in order to prevent Onaga from merging the realms. Sindel – the Queen of Edenia who teams with Jade to free Princess Kitana from Onaga's control. Smoke – Inoperative Lin Kuei cyborg who is revived and reprogrammed to serve Noob Saibot. He is the game's combined sub-boss with Noob Saibot ("Noob-Smoke"). Sub-Zero – Lin Kuei clan leader who learns of his Cryomancer heritage while burying the remains of his protege Frost inside an ancient temple. He additionally teams with Kenshi to stop the machinations of Hotaru and Onaga. Tanya – Edenian traitor who swears allegiance to Onaga in his mission of conquering the realms. The GameCube version had two more playable characters: the sub-boss from the original Mortal Kombat, Goro, and Shao Kahn, the final boss of the past digitized MK titles; both were previously thought to have perished in the prologue of Deadly Alliance. PlayStation Portable version also had the characters from the GameCube version and had four more characters — Blaze, Frost, Jax and Kitana - taken directly from the Deadly Alliance. Several of the returning characters have been redesigned and were given new moves, such as Liu Kang, who reappears as a zombie. Character redesigns were generally well-accepted, namely in the case of Sub-Zero. Once again appearing youthful rather than his depiction as a septuagenarian in Deadly Alliance, Sub-Zero sported a "grandmaster" armor set that was often likened to Shredder from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles franchise. Scorpion was redesigned to resemble a more classical ninja look, while characters like Ermac received a considerable makeover from the standard palette-swap ninja fare, offering up a more sorcerous appearance. Development Mortal Kombat co-creator Ed Boon wanted Deception to be an unpredictable fighting game that gave players new features "they could never imagine". In order to do so, the Midway staff listened to fans on bulletin boards to know what to work on for Deception, such as the playable characters. Wanting to surprise fans and make the game deeper, they added the puzzle and chess minigames (the chess minigame had first been considered for Deadly Alliance, but the developers lacked time to implement it). Boon and John Podlasek supervised the staff, which was divided into teams to work on different areas of the game. One of their concerns was to maintain the traditional feel of the MK series as they wanted the game's violence to