Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3

"Whatever..."

As with most of the other home conversions, there is nothing here that has changed much other than the addition and subtraction of different characters. Where you would have had a couple of favorites, some new characters have been added into the mix in order to give you a rather decent variation on the game overall and attempt to give some life to the franchise. However, what you’ll find here is that even with the addition of the new characters, a couple of new story lines and ending sequences, there are a few things that are missing, as they are in other versions {except the Saturn and Arcade version} that you may want to go on a rampage about! The ridiculously silly Animalities have been taken out of the game so that space could be freed up for other characters to come in. Although this isn’t much of a bother to me, it is rather disappointing to others, and the additions that were thrown in, almost as an afterthought in some cases, is almost too much to bare.

The game play is your typical Mortal Kombat style gaming in which you and an opponent fight a rather bloody battle to what may be a rather gruesome end. There are no endurance rounds; there were no Test-Your-Might rounds, anything...just straight through fighting. That can, and does, get on your nerves after doing it with this type of game for so long. Something else that has been added to the game is the addition of the combination system that allows you to nail off a three to six hit combination with the right button presses, all corresponding to the different high and low attack buttons. While this is something new, there isn’t much variation here in the way that you can do the combinations other than throwing in a jump attack at either the end or the beginning! Now if you’re playing up against a skilled player, you’ll get your ass handed to you simply because once you start a combination, you can’t stop it until you are finished with the button presses, or it hits at some point. This brings a little more challenge to the game, but really doesn’t do much but force you to learn a new facet of Mortal Kombat and one that the game could do without in the long run! With the few new fighters that are available to you {Jade, Rain, Ermac, Noob Saibot, Scorpion}, you may find it rather disappointing that some of the fatalities were changed and that some of the different finishers were removed altogether.

Controlling Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 is virtually the only part of the game that is different from the other versions of the title on other systems. While the game doesn’t control all that bad, you’ll find that the use of the six-button controller is a definite must throughout most of your battles, and there may be times that the responsiveness that you need just cannot be found! The combinations on the Genesis controller, much like the other versions {save for the Arcade} is nearly impossible to pull off consistently. Add into this that some of the moves have been taken out altogether in order to give a much more fluid pace, and you may find that all of your training needs to be retaken again. Most of the moves that you found in Mortal Kombat 3 are back and are just as difficult to pull off. Some of the characters are missing moves altogether which changes the way that you may have to control the game. Actually, when you play through the game, you may find that the game play is so chopped up now, that it takes a true Mortal Kombat master to throw off all of the specials, fatalities, and combinations that could be found in the game!

Visually, the game comes up to speed in one simple place, and that is with the addition of the new characters and some of the new backgrounds that you have to fight in. One of the best, in my own humble opinion is the Desert, in which you fight Jade as her home territory. While there isn’t too much that can be said about the overall look of the game, there is something to be said about a half buried Cyrax in the distance and the combinations come off clean! What you will find though is that there is differences with the way that the game is represented and produced with some of the frames of animation being discarded altogether and different finishing moves being taken out so that other characters could be brought in. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I find it rather disturbing to know that some characters were taken out of the game, so that a couple of useless characters {Rain, Noob Saibot} could be brought in. Fatalities that you find through UMK 3 have also been changed slightly due to hardware constraints so don’t look for Scorpions Hell Raise anytime soon!

Audio wise, nothing has really been changed since Mortal Kombat 3, but the addition of the new stages and their themes have been added and although they sound decent, there really isn’t much here that will make anyone notice. There are also glitches throughout the game that you’ll find popping up at just about every moment in which the sound effects seem to come through even after the match has stopped. Sometimes these same sound effects will stop altogether when you reach the next match, and I don’t know how much of the constant screaming I can take before I want to literally rip someone’s head off! All in all, there is something to be said for the audio accuracy of the Mortal Kombat games, and the only one that I can think of that actually pulls this all off correctly, is the Arcade version of the game.

As a conversion of a tired franchise, the Genesis just doesn’t seem to pull off the game the way that you would hope in any of the aspects that are most needed. With halfway decent visuals that are truly showing the age of the series, the lack of conceptual innovation and the addition of useless characters, anyone who is not a hard-core Mortal Kombat fan will have a hard time actually accepting this game into their library! If you can get past the crappy control, and the boring game play that has now plagued this reviewer through several different sequels and several different platforms, then you may find that game has a couple of merits, but too few to actually warrant anything higher than an average rating.

Reviewer's Score: 4/10, Originally Posted: 01/09/02, Updated 01/09/02