Mortal Kombat

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.

The Good
Mortal Kombat is one of the all time classics, so nostalgia is heavily in this games favor. You can't help but enjoy the game simply cause it takes you back to the past.

The sprite animations are very impressive even today. The character movement is great and better then some other fighting titles. The backgrounds not only look cool but some of them have special environmental fatalities (fatalities are post fight beatings that you inflict on your opponent that usually involve dismemberment).

The soundtrack is another one of the better parts of the game. Even though its not quite as good as it once was, you tell why so many people have remixed it. The voice over guy sounds very cool and to hear your name after beating your opponent makes you feel like you accomplished something.

And unlike later Mortal Kombat games, this edition features a 2 player mode instead of a constant tournament. Now you and a friend can challenge each other without having to do the tournament, leading to some nice pick up and play action.

The Bad
Mortal Kombat on the SNES is heavily edited, most likely due to Nintendo's family demographic and how controversial the game was in its debut. Blood has been completely removed from the game, replaced instead by "sweat" (which looks more like dust-- and given how old the game is that would be a pretty accurate statement). The individual fatalities have also been removed from the game, although the bridge/pit level fatality is intact (minus blood and severed heads). While this complaint is merely a cosmetic change, Mortal Kombat has other problems.

Mortal Kombat's gameplay isn't quiet what it once was. Special moves aren't very easy to pull off without looking up how to perform them. There's no jump back button so its easy for people to start whaling on you with the punch button. And like other games of the day, Mortal Kombat treads a fine line between good fighting game and button masher. This version of Mortal Kombat also feels like a straight from the arcade port by not including a pause button, a feature that makes the game very inconvenient since you either have to die when you need to go to the bathroom or you have to hold it in (this can become a real problem when you are in the middle of a tough tournament).

The Bottom Line
While the SNES version of Mortal Kombat is missing blood and fatalities, its still a very solid fighter and well worth having. The game will keep you busy for hours on hours when played with friends and even if you don't have any friends its still pretty cool. After all, very few gaming experiences can compare to beating an opponent without losing a drop of health.

The Good
Firstly, pump up the volume on the stereo! You can also stick this disc into a music player and get the soundtrack and The Immortal's MK theme song remixes. Nice FMV character profiles, tight controls, all the moves and cheats are here. Also, lots of narration from the narrator, which was absent from the Genesis version.

The Bad
While I know the Sega CD isn't the ideal platform for FMV goodness, the commercial still didn't need to look as bad at it did. I mean, Sonic CD and Silpheed have excellent FMV, and NBA Jam's is decent, but that commercial is just mostly hues of brown. Nay, nay, nay. Then there's the horrible slowness to it all. Hey, Probe! Ever hear of disc streaming? Digital Pictures used that technique in all of the crappy FMV games so that no access time was present. Hell, Probe could've even stuck some of the data into the Genesis' RAM. What really gets me is the access time when a fatality is execute, or when Shang Tsung transforms. That's nuts! It's awful, and it takes away from the game. Of course, Probe did the development of this title in 64 colors instead of the high-res mode of 256 colors, and didn't use anything the Sega CD offered in the area of special effects. It's true I didn't expect the sound effects to be in dynamic QSound or anything, but at least Sculptured on the SNES kept the arcade's sounds in. Then there's the ending, which is not the actual ending. You see, the Sega CD is similar to a PC more so than we would've ever known. Probe did an excellent job of MK on the PC. It was arcade perfect except for the low-res VGA graphics, which is the high-res of the Sega CD! They also kept everything in from arcade machine. Acclaim and Probe were is such a hurry to cash in on MK at the time, though. As far as the friend factor goes, we laughed at this version, and I'm sorry I wasted around $60 bucks for it. Lastly, the characters are their Genesis size, when I know that large, colorful characters can be done on the Sega CD (Samurai Shodown, Eternal Champions, Fatal Fury Special).

The Bottom Line
If you a big budget, over a year late shovelware title for the Sega CD, by all means obtain this disc. Seriously, in this day and age, go get the version on the Midway collections, or get that little TV joystick version at a Target or something. This version is slow, slow, slow. And laughable.