Ultimate Mortal Kombat

In 1995, I had this crazy fantasy of being able to play my favorite arcade games on a handheld machine. Not the crappy, scaled-down disasters for the original Game Boy, but full-fledged ports that played as well the games that cost 50 cents per play.

It would be another 12 years before any such dream would materialize for Mortal Kombat. Not even the Game Boy Advance could pull it off, and though Tekken had great success on PSP, there’s only one handheld that has been able to give MK a flawless victory: Nintendo DS.

Ultimate Mortal Kombat, the MK3 upgrade that added Ermac, human Smoke and others to the mix, has been ported to Nintendo’s dual-screen platform. It doesn’t come with any new characters, stages, or fatalities – it is purely a straight port that’s playable online and locally with just one game card. And really, that’s all it needs. If you’re one of the thousands of gamers that spent their mid-90s weekends lining up behind MK3 and UMK, this won’t be just another port – it’ll be the fighter that never leaves your DS.

 
UMK DS: load time-free and arcade-perfect.

Arcade Perfection Test

How do you know if your fighting game is arcade-perfect? Start by looking for graphical changes. There aren’t any to be found in UMK, which runs beautifully on the DS. I’m probably more impressed by the fact that it looks just like the arcade game than I am by what’s actually running on my DS – a handheld that is capable of producing superior effects. But I didn’t want an “improved” UMK, I wanted it to be exactly as I remembered.

Fatalities and special effects look amazing on the DS. The characters, arenas, blood, and special move content are just the right size – no smaller or bigger than they were in the arcade. PS2’s polygon-heavy technology ousted digitized characters a long time ago, and though the versus screen poses might seem a little cheesy (there was, I hate to admit, a time when I thought they were very cool), the graphics still look great.

After the graphic test has finished, players will either be impressed by and immersed in the gameplay, or completely turned off by the lack of familiarity. Listen up Mortal Kombat fans: UMK is very familiar. Every move needs to be performed with the same speed and precision of the arcade edition. The characters feel exactly the same. If you could plug a joystick into the DS, there would be no difference between this game and the experience you had more than 10 years ago.

Next up is replay value. Knowing how much time has gone by, I wasn’t sure that UMK would be overly engaging. I feared that, like so many games, its time had come and gone. But I was wrong. While other so-called classics may lose their luster, UMK is just as compelling as it was in the 90s. The only thing holding it back is the lack of arcade junkies to challenge. If we’re lucky, that loss will be alleviated with heavy support for the game’s online multiplayer function. Surely the fan base cannot grow back to the million+ level it achieved so long ago. But with arcade-perfect versions of UMK now on the DS as well as Xbox Live Arcade, I’m hoping that this game will live on – and continue to yield new challengers – for many years to come.

The final test, music and sound effects, is the only one that doesn’t score an A+. I love the score. Always have and always will. The sound effects are also classic, despite the times when I wanted to break the speakers just to make Shao Kahn shut up. But the quality of these sound elements isn’t very high. Maybe the technology is to blame – UMK is an upgrade of a game that was made when polygons were scarce, and when arcade sound processors were just barely above the SNES. This is the one area I had hoped would be upgraded, or at least smoothed out to sound more like a modern-day game.

UMK’s single bonus mode is Puzzle Kombat, a mini-game that looks like the world’s most recognized puzzler. It’s not the most exciting puzzler in the world, but there are some cool features worth noting. Instead of connecting three or blocks of the same color, players must use special MK pieces to make the blocks disappear.

Also, whereas most puzzle games give players an equal set of attainable power-ups, Puzzle Kombat separates them by character. Baraka’s power-up cuts out two lines of blocks, Sindel arranges each block by color for easy removal, Ermac levitates a large chunk of blocks right off the screen, and so on.

Puzzle Kombat is played on the bottom screen by default, but that may be changed via the options menu. Whichever screen you use, there’s a good reason to look at the other: fatalities. Block eliminations are met with combat from small, super-deformed versions of 12 MK fighters. When two rounds are won, the winning combatant automatically performs a stage fatality. These differ from the UMK fatalities but have similar themes: electrocution, exploding body parts, a large device that grins the loser into tiny pieces, etc.

Finish Him! It’s Easier Said Than Done

One of the things that will inspire newcomers and infuriate veterans is the difficulty level of UMK. It’s no more challenging than it was in 1996. But my skills, gained from excessively playing MK3 at home and UMK in the arcade, have faded away. There was a time when I could recite nearly every combo and fatality in the game. Now I can’t remember much beyond each character’s basic move set.

With no reason to stretch the gameplay across two screens, the bottom screen is where UMK’s action unfolds. Rather than plaster a UMK logo on the top screen, Midway used that space to display attack move, fatality, babality, and animality information. This is great, but it makes the game no less difficult – fatalities must be entered in three seconds or less.

Fighting enthusiasts that missed the game before will be enamored and happily overwhelmed by the large list of attacks and finishers. Less diligent gamers, however, may give up after a couple of hours. Giving up not only sends the wrong message to developers (do we really want our games to get easier!?), it also hurts yourself. Choosing not to play this game for any reason means you’ll miss one of the best fighters ever made.

Gameplay: 8.0
Ultimate Mortal Kombat may be more than 11 years old, but it is still one of the greatest fighters – and is one of the best multiplayer games available for Nintendo DS. Diehard MK fans won’t be disappointed.

Graphics: 8.0
You could pick out flaws in the PSone and N64 version of MK Trilogy, as well as the SNES, Genesis, and Saturn versions of Ultimate Mortal Kombat. But you won’t find any of those flaws here. The technology may be dated when compared to what the Nintendo DS is capable of, but who cares – this game looks gorgeous.

Sound: 7.0
Low sound quality takes away from the underlying score and effects, which are, dare I say, klassic.

Difficulty: Medium/Hard
Ultimate Mortal Kombat is a tough, hardcore game that doesn’t cater to button-mashing. It doesn’t allow a newbie to come in and feel like a champ. You might want instant gratification, but that’s what fatalities are for. Combat success will only come to those who are extremely dedicated.

Concept: 7.9
There’s nothing here that MK fans haven’t seen before. But this is the first time we’ve seen it come together this beautifully on a handheld.

Multiplayer: 8.7
Online multiplayer and single-card wireless play (for local games) give Ultimate Mortal Kombat everything a great fighting game needs to keep us playing.

Overall: 8.4
A must-own for every fan of Ultimate Mortal Kombat. The arcade-perfect gameplay and the addition of online multiplayer make this port an irresistible package.