Mortal Kombat II

"Good Port, But not Without Flaws"

After much hunting for the japanese-only Mortal Kombat II port to PSX I found it. So I thought I'd share my thoughts on it for anyone wondering about it that cannot find it and see it for themselves.

Graphics: The graphics seem to be spot on with the arcade, and I know what I'm talking about as I actually own the arcade game as well. Ever bit of color detail and animation appears to be there. Nothing wrong with the graphics. Also there is no censorship at all. All the gore from the arcade is there.

Sound: First the sound effects. They very nice and clear, you have Shao Kahn's voice samples during battle. He says things such as Flawless Victory and Fatality. There are apparently 300 different sound effects as you can see in the sound test menu, so I imagine just about everything is there. The only sound effect I seem to be missing is the satisfying icey shatter from Sub-Zero's deep freeze and shatter fatality.

Music: The music is not XA streamed or redbook audio tracks. It is run on the SPU similar to Final Fantasy VII. For those who don't know what that means, basically it's programmed music like a tracker or midi. The music quality is good but not close to the original arcade. Still, it shouldn't drive you crazy either.

GamePlay: This seems to be indentical to the arcade. Everything works great but there are some things to note. First off, loading times. The loading times actually aren't bad. But they occur at many times. When the game first powers up you see your usual pre-game credits ex: Probe Software developed it so they have a splash screen. Then the arcade story board starts and between every storyboard picture there is a pretty quick loading of the next picture. Not a big deal. Then when the storyboard is complete you get another bit of loading which after you see the lightning and thunder with MK symbol and eventually the logo appears. So to get from the start to there it's like 4 quick little loadings. That's kind of annoying but since the times are short it can be forgiven. Atleast it's not as bad as the Sega CD Mortal Kombat.

On the options menu you'll have 2 particular options of special interest. Shang Tsung Morph and Player Names. By default these are set to loading optimal values. These are Shang Tsung may not morph at all, Player Names set to disabled. When morph is disabled, you do cripple poor Shang Tsung. The next setting is Morph into Opponent which has a slight load time increase and gives Shang Tsung something more interesting to do. You will have a loading time of less than a second when you morph the first time into the opponent. After that you should be free of load times. The final option is Morph into anyone just like the arcade version. As you can imagine, it has to load the character every time Shang morphs. Well it gets WORSE. I assume in order to reduce the loading times, not quite everything is loaded when you morph. What happens is this, if you are Shang and morph into Sub-Zero, then use freeze, it may have to do a quick load. Morph into Lui Kang and do a fireball, another quick load. But what is really annoying is it seems like every time someone does some sort of projectile, EVEN the NON-Tsung player, it has to load it. It's very annoying if you don't tolerate the frequent though quick load times. Unless you are playing against a friend who uses Tsung, you might as well forget about the option unless you want more of a challenge from that one match against the CPU.

Oh yes, and the Player Names option when enabled simply makes the game take another quick equal or less than a second load time to have the voice samples such as "Sub-Zero" "Scorpion" "Baraka". This includes the "Sub-Zero Wins" and such. This however does no apply to "Flawless Victory" or "Fatality".

For the most part the loading times aren't too bad. Most of the time you see a MKII logo in the bottom left of the screen rather than annoying black screen with the boring word LOADING spelled out. There's the typical loading before a fatality is executed, generally it is very quick. There are a few odditys with how they handle the music and loading, but nothing takes away from that game really. The loading is less than what is in current generation fighters so you shouldn't have that big of a problem.

Overall: This is a great port on a very popular system. It is Playstation 2 compatible, which means there is a chance it will be playable on Playstation 3. Aside from some loading times this is probably the next best thing to the actual arcade. From what I've heard the Midway Treasures/Collection versions of Mortal Kombat II suffer from some really annoying emulation problems.

If you have a Playstation lieing around but no Mortal Kombat II cabinets then this is a perfect way to get your MK2 fix without resorting to some form of emulation. If you're lucky enough to find MK2 for PSX, don't pass it up. If you're stuck with the SNES or Genesis MK2, you might try grabbing the Sega 32X MK2. Avoid the Sega Saturn MK2 (the music is horrifyingly bad). In my opinion from best to worse you have Arcade Original > PSX Port > Sega 32X Port > SNES Port > All Other Ports.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 09/05/06