Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3

The Good
By that time UMK3 was probably the best fighting game for Sega Genesis, though this port was quite lazy generally, but had still very cool pluses.

At first the graphics - the arcade game had impressive graphics, but the Genesis ports graphics were a lot more pixelated, but the frame rate was perfect at least. The blood still looked good as in the arcade game, but effects were dropped down a bit.

The audio was descent as well, but also missed a lot. Gameplay itself was fun - you started with 23 playable characters, + there was 1 character, who could be secretly played when picking a similar character and pressing a button combination at the same time (the secret character was Human Smoke.)

Playing through the arcade was fun, and discovering the secret treasures of Shao Kahn after you beat him was mostly entertaining, though the Supreme Demonstration was dramatically toned down, about that i will talk in the flaws of the game.

The versus mode and the 2 vs 2 player battles were awesome as hell for that time, it was probably the best thing about the game. Also the 8 player tournament was also welcomed good. The fighting itself was interesting, doing special moves and combos (which was quite hard on a controller where u should press 2 buttons at a time to do a HK, HP etc. Especially hard was to do fatalities then.)

The Bad
The graphics of this port were a lot worse than on the arcade, very much pixelated, and some effects looked very bad and strange sometimes (for example, Dan "Toasty" Forden pops out in black and white colour, some fatalities where changed for memory savings, such as Kitana's kiss of death fatality, where instead of the opponent turning fat, his head turned into a balloon like in Kabal's fatality, and Scorpion's fatality where he pulled a hellish hand out, was simply changed into transforming his opponent into Scorpion's Lair and letting him burn there, it was a nice try for some times though. The sound effects where also toned down badly. The announcer never said the names of the kombatants, in fact, the only thing you heard from the announcer were commentaries (Excellent!, Superb!, Muahahahhaha! etc.) and the Fatality announcement. The sound quality was also very bad, the great sounds of screaming, music and stuff were very bad quality also. But non the less, the screams did not sound that bad that they were painful to hear (if not), and the music still sounded descent.

Also i must note that from the playable characters Sheeva was taken down due to memory savings, though its not that sad.

But one thing which was really bad - the finishing moves. Exactly to explain what was so bad - in the Supreme Demonstration you can see all finishing moves which can be done in this game, and there u discover a sad truth that there are no Animalities, and Classic Sub-Zero, Human Smoke, Noob Saibot and Rain don't even have fatalities here. Quite disappointing.

Also as in traditional Mortal Kombat way - the AI is very difficult to beat for the most part.

The Bottom Line
If you are a Mortal Kombat fan and want a good port of UMK3, this is not for you, but if you own a Sega Genesis and want a fun fighting game on it, i cant recommend a better game than this.