Mortal Kombat

The Good
Mortal Kombat is at its best a very average game. However to some it is an unflappable conversion of a perfect arcade game, to others it is a disgusting corrupting game with deplorable violence that should have been banned from the start.

To me it is a hollow 2D beat-em-up that relies on its sensationalist nature rather than its gameplaying core. It is memorable, but for all the wrong reasons. Everybody knows this game has gore. That is not a new thing. But unfortunately for the gamers of the world the makers of this game were determined that the gore would be the selling point of the game. Couple that with a media hype that was unparalleled in its day makes this more of a one trick pony than a challenging game.

Its plus points are found in its use of digitised actors for characters, this was a new thing and kudos to the Arena & Probe for that. The music was ok too.

The Bad
But that is where the praise ceases I'm afraid. Without the blood & gore (and if you were a SNES owner this was the only version you got) this game was boring. Very boring.

It lacks any kind of flow, switches between very hard and very easy and is a control nightmare. The finishers were a novelty but unfortunately they decided to base the entire game on that one thing.

Thankfully there was better to come.

The Bottom Line
A game for renting only.

The Good
The Game at its heart is mortal kombat. Nothing can change the familiar gameplay of it. So lets start off with the good of this port.

Graphics are very faithful to the arcade. The colors are stunning and look great. The game also has great backgrounds just like the arcade.

The voices are also here in most of their glory. A good amount of the voices were captured. If I remember correctrly it's missing a few from the arcade but for the most part it gots them down pat.

The Music is highly reminiscent of the arcade. This is a GOOD Thing. The arcade had quite a few memorable tunes. The Goro fight music is one of the most memorable mortal kombat fight themes ever.

The gameplay is intact. You know. The moves and the combos. If you can do some kombat in the arcade you can kombat on home.

This game pissed off Joe Liebermen

The Bad
NOW for the bad

BUTCHERED GAME PLAY. When I say butchered let me put it where it counts. The blood is replaced with "sweat" and the fatalities are cut out. Sub Zero's spine rip is now a freeze and a highpunch that breaks the ice. Johnny Cage's Uppercut fatality is now a wussy shadow kick that paralyzes them I guess. Raiden just shocks you and you faint. Kano still does his heart removal move but the move shows a grey thing. What is that? His sweat gland?

They censored Fatality to Finishing Move

Gameplay is not as smooth as the genesis or the arcade. Though the graphics are better the smoothness is a bit off compared to genesis or arcade.

The overall butchering makes it so this game is only mortal kombat in name but not in heart and soul

The Bottom Line
Overall this game is butchered horribly. The gameplay still stands quite a bit but the censorship is so bad that you don't get the full effect. A full 6/10.l I'm being pretty generous too.

The Good
Mortal Kombat for the PC is as near to the original arcade experience as you can get without feeding quarters to your disk-drive. Sure, it feels kinda funky to play with the keyboard, but other than that the graphics are there, the sounds are there and most importantly, the "feel" is there. It would take years for Street Fighter 2 to come out right on the pc, but MK got it right from the start.

Having said that I should now point out that regardless of the overhyping and the needless pimping the game is known for, Mortal Kombat is a damn fine one-on-one fighting game. And perhaps more importantly, it's a damn smart game that deserves all the success it had.

Wazzat? No, you can't have any of what I'm smoking! shoo!

Naw, really. Allow me to explain: Come Street Fighter 2, every arcade game set out to clone Capcom's success story, yet no one added any real innovation or special change. Mortal Kombat, for as trite and cliche as it seems now, was filled with innovative touches that made it stand out firmly over the crop of street fighter wannabes.

For starters you had the setting. Moving away from the japanese concept of "buddy fighting" or such where all fighting games where some sort of lameass tournament where everyone came either to "test" their abilities or save some sister/lover/etc from the clutches of some rich super-strong dictator/champion, etc. Mortal Kombat was not like that. In fact, as you may have noticed, this wasn't "Street Kombat", or "Championship Kombat" or whatever, this was MORTAL Kombat and it was nothing like your kiddie fighting game. Borrowing heavily from the movies "Enter The Dragon" and "Big Trouble in Little China" MK placed players in a dark island where the real prize for the winners was, as the opening screens read: "your continued existance". There was some mumbo-jumbo about an interdimensional war but the real plot here was to get the hell out of the island alive. And the assortment of characters made that an even more serious affair. You had equal quantity of "heroes" as of foes, and the (admitedly) small cast of characters included an assassin ninja, an undead warrior looking for payback, a terrorist, a demigod, a four-armed monster and a deranged shapeshifting wizard. There were no "kawaii" characters to be found and hardly anyone fell in the "best buddies" Ryu & Ken archetypes.

In all, a far more dark and brooding experience than we were used to at the arcades, but to keep it from getting too somber and boring the game made a great use of over the top violence and gore. Sure, we have had our quota of blood in previous games (ie. you could chop opponents in half on Samurai Shodown) but MK took it to the next level by throwing buckets of blood for every hit and adding in "Fatality" animations to finish your opponents in the most gruesomely entertaining ways. It was incredibly cheesy, but also wildly entertaining and a fantastic addition to the game.

Couple that with fast and responsive controls, a unique graphical look courtesy of digitized graphics and a pulse-pounding gameplay that added some new concepts (remember the endurance rounds?) to the same old "best 2 of 3" gameplay and you have one of the most refreshing games ever to hit the arcades, yet MK didn't stop there. As I said earlier, MK was a terribly smart game, and that is evidenced by it's understanding of the arcade underground scene. Many people don't seem to understand how the game gained such a success, and that's because they didn't ever set a foot on an arcade or did so for brief diversions only. As of the early nineties arcades were much more of an underground hotspot with it's very own culture (or counter-culture) similar to the multiplayer online scene nowadays. This scene thrived on word of mouth and challeges (who doesn't remember battling the local SF2 champ?) and Midway understood this and applied it to MK, which was the first game to be heavily laced with secret features. Sure, by now it's seems like a pretty stupid concept but at the time there was no internet you could log on to learn all the tricks for your favorite games, and the special moves for fighting games where gasp! Actually special! And couldn't be found on the manuals for the games or in the cabinet artwork. Thus arcade games had a potential for mistery that remained largely untapped by the developers. This ended with MK, which was the first game to introduce secret characters and those totally cool fatality animations that inspired every gamer to try out every nook and cranny of the game in hopes of finding a secret or even memorizing and exploiting the glitches and bugs to one's advantage. Mortal Kombat trascended the arcade boundaries and became a myth thanks to that, and the knowledge of every move and fatality earned the respect of fellow arcaders and friends, specially with MK's weird and unnatural code-like moves (hold block-up-up-release block-HP...?[Man, I can't believe I remembered that one! :))])

That's what makes MK unique, that's what makes it much more than just a good fighting game.

The Bad
Well, for as much praise as I can give it I have to still say that I prefer SF2 in many aspects. For starters the characters have all the same strength and agility thus removing the variety of strategies you had on other games (ie. Zangief vs Chun-li on SF2 was a very different fight than Ryu vs Chun-li. On the other hand, Sub-zero vs Scorpion and Sub-zero vs Raiden on MK required the same strategy save for some adjustments to each character's special moves).

This also translates to the interface, I'll be hard pressed to find a difference between HP and LP save for the blood, and the use of a block button is just annoying and unintuitive. Pulling back works much better.

Also, if you find over the top violence disgusting and are the sort of fellow that finds this or that offensive and bla. bla. bla. then first of all you suck and need to get yourself a life, (who the hell can't understand the delicate beauty of ripping someone's heart out?? ;D) and second stay away from this game because it's gonna be hell for you.

The Bottom Line
In a word?? Fatality!!! Go play MK, it's a one of the all-time arcade classics and it can still kick your ass on the PC.