Mortal Kombat 3

"You don't know how bad videogames can be before you've played this one."

During the early 90s, Mortal Kombat was almost as big as Street Fighter II in popularity. If you hadn't played a Mortal Kombat game, you were nothing. All the blood and violence made the parents of the children who played this game angry and now every game must now have a "recommended for this age" sign on the cover. The 3 first Mortal Kombat games were huge on the Snes and on the Genesis, but were they just as good on Sega Master System?

A lot of characters from Mortal Kombat 2 on the same system has now been removed. In fact the only character who is still in is Sub-Zero, but this time he doesn't wear any mask. Kano and Sonya from the original Mortal Kombat have returned, and the new characters includes Shiva, a female fighter which reminds me of Goro, and Kitana's mother Sindel. In other words this game has one of the worst character selection of all the Mortal Kombat games.

But there's more horrible things in this game then just the characters. When you're waiting for a fight to load you will see six icons which you can change their looks. I've no idea what this make more than it takes time. As soon as the fight begins, the game turns into one of the most unplayable games I've ever seen. The characters looks even worse than what they did in the two previous Mortal Kombat games on this system and the battle backgrounds are nothing at all. It looks like each fight takes places on a small bridge in a pitch black night.

The Mortal Kombat games got as huge as they did because of the blood and the easy special moves. I'm not sure what the thing is I see when the fighters gets a good punch in the face, but it sure doesn't look like blood. And if you manage to perform some special moves in this game, then you're really good with the master system joypad. The game is also really slow and just because you jump right into your opponent when you do a jump kick doesn't mean that you were close enough to hit him.

I'm not really sure why Midway even tried to port this game to Sega Master System. The other two Mortal Kombat ports were nothing that any sane person would waste money on and unlike Mortal Kombat 1 and 2 this game actually wasn't even good on Genesis or SNES. But this game is definitely something to try for someone who wants to see which are the worst games of all time. I know I haven't played anything worse.

Reviewer's Score: 1/10, Originally Posted: 10/16/06