Smoke-Tetsu Reviews

Mortal Kombat Trilogy (1996 Video Game)

Worst of the 2D Mortal Kombats

[22 October 2004]

I like this version of Mortal Kombat the least because they did the minimum amount of work to bring back the old characters\scenes that they put into the game. Instead of creating new graphics they took old graphics and tried to make them fit into the MK3 style which did not work so well also instead of filming new footage so that the characters can do the new combo moves they took the old footage and mixed it up so it seems like they are doing combos. Then a lot of the new characters where left unfinished making this in general feel like an unfinished game.

The series wen't downhill after Mortal Kombat II for the arcade and there had been nil a good home version made, most of the home versions just made the game look bad, especially this one this cheapened it. Mortal Kombat II (ARCADE) will always hold the crown as the best 2D Mortal Kombat. Because instead of improving on the formula they took it (MK3-4) in a direction that was not good for it m aking it progressively more cartoony, cheesy, wwf like, unfinished, not as dark. But they now seem to be fixing that with the newest versions and improve the gameplay to boot. NOW it's going in the right direction (since MKD).

Mortal Kombat 4 (1997 Video Game)

Not bad, not good

[22 October 2004]

I have been the biggest Mortal Kombat fan since the beginning and I was hoping that this would do for 3D fighters graphicswise what Mortal Kombat II did for 2D games back in the day meaning. This would look like real actors, in 3D making all others look cartooney. But that's not the case. Ever since Mortal Kombat 3 things had got progressively cartoony, both MK3 and T (which are essentially the same) had got cheesy-wwf-marvel comics like and while it was starting to get better here it underwhelmed me when I saw it at the arcade.

Gameplay wise it is not an improvement instead of trying to fix what they already had they stripped almost everything out. The weapons where kind of neat but they could easily be knocked out of your hands and they didn't significantly add to the gameplay. Then to compound all of this they took the decent looking 3,000 polygon models from the arcade and reduced them to about 600 polygons for the N64\PSX\PC versions and the didn't even have to lower it for the PC but they just wanted to do a quick port make once, run everywhere. They corrected this graphicswise with the dreamcast version later, MK Gold but it was too little, too late.