Mortal Kombat 3

"This series has been milked more than a cow at a farmer’s convention"

OPENING STATEMENT
“Ready.....Fight!”
If you have ever been in an arcade before in your life, there is a very good chance that you have heard that saying before, probably many times. Midway has surely done an excellent job marketing the Mortal Kombat series. Unfortunately, everyone knows that an advertising blitz hardly makes a good game, or even an average one in this case. Admittedly, in the early nineties I was in the Capcom camp at my local arcade. But, as Mortal Kombat 3 shows, I was in the Capcom camp for good reason.

GAMEPLAY--2
Welcome to a tournament fighting game in its most {insert profane word here} format yet! (I have always wanted to do one of those little bracket things in one of my reviews, like they do in the Minneapolis Star Tribune.) Mortal Kombat 3 is a not-so-wonderful combination of a generic tournament fighting game and a visit to the scene of one of the world’s most violent homicides. The gameplay in Mortal Kombat 3 is so bad that even an uplifting film like It’s a Wonderful Life will not be able to save you.

Seriously, just randomly pressing buttons in Mortal Kombat 3 will allow you to win more matches than not. That is how primitive the fighting engine in Mortal Kombat 3 is. When a button masher can win more than half of the time that is a case for bad artificial intelligence or horrible gameplay, and Mortal Kombat 3 is a sure example of the latter.

Each of the four buttons on the Super Nintendo’s controller allows you to use a different attack, just like the King of Fighters button interface. Unfortunately, unlike the King of Fighters series, the way that Mortal Kombat 3 is organized in each match allows you to be a button masher and win. When you have won a match, which at one point you surely will, you can enter complex button combinations to commence a finishing move. This finishing move could be a fatality, a babality, an animality, or something else of the like. These special finishing moves, that can only be used after the announcer says “Finish Him/Her!” are the only elements in Mortal Kombat 3 that require thinking or strategy.

GRAPHICS--8
Unlike the majority of games on the Super Nintendo, Mortal Kombat 3 goes for a fairly realistic look in the graphics department. And, unlike most of the rest of the games that want realistic graphics, Mortal Kombat 3 succeeds. Midway was obviously concentrating on the wrong aspect of game design when they were creating Mortal Kombat 3.

The characters in Mortal Kombat 3 look just like real people, or at least the characters that Midway intended to be human do. Some of the character, such as Cyrax, look like robots, and other things such as that. But, anyway, the human characters look amazing, especially considering that Mortal Kombat 3 is on the Super Nintendo. I will compare the design of the characters to the design of the characters in the Street Fighter series. In the Street Fighter series, it is obvious that the characters are human, but the characters are drawn in a very cartoonish or anime-styled way. In Mortal Kombat 3 the characters are also obviously human, but they are not in a cartoonish way. They are as realistic as can be on the Super Nintendo.

The environments and backgrounds in Mortal Kombat 3 are unfortunately fairly unimpressive when compared to the characters. While the environments are far from horrible, the characters show them up substantially. Most of the environments are decorated to the hilt with weaponry, and other ways of producing blood and gore. They have most every way of pain, or drawing blood, in a background excluding a blood drive. Speaking of the blood and gore that Mortal Kombat 3 is filled with, when it splashes on the screen, I feel that it looks very unprofessional.

MUSIC--5
SOUND--10
The music is nothing special, but the sound effects sure are. The music is just your generic, basic fighting games music, with a few violent twists thrown in. That is correct, Midway has found a way to make instrumental music sound violent. While I congratulate them on this new discovery, that hardly makes the music in Mortal Kombat 3 good. A couple of the tunes are good, but they vary so little from stage to stage you may need bionic ears to pick up the changes.

The sound effects are perhaps perfect. The creepy announcer, whom I can hear in my head weeks after I have last played a version of Mortal Kombat, says “Fight!” and the other catch-phrases of Mortal Kombat 3 with such spot-on accuracy and evilness that it sent shivers down my spine. The punching and kicking sound effects are also quite good, and they actually sound like your character is hitting someone, instead of them sounding like a developer hurling a book at a punching bag.

CONTROL--6
While the controller configuration in Mortal Kombat 3 works just fine, the way that the characters respond to your commands does not. All of the characters seem to be a step slower than you need them to be in Mortal Kombat 3 when you are controlling them. Of course, the computer controlled characters have no problems at all, which can result in some messy battles, in more ways than one. Midway’s excellent superficial categories have not continued on to the control category.

FUN--1
All of you have heard a kid repeat the line from Austin Powers in which, when filling out a survey he is asked what sex he is. Austin Powers responds with the now famous “Yes please.” Somehow, that line almost wanted to make me say, for the fun category, “Fun?” “Not on your life.”

Midway has shoved everything that would make Mortal Kombat 3 a good game aside to create a marketing blitz that Nintendo and Pokemon fans ever would kill for. Mortal Kombat’s marketing blitz is more of a silent, word of mouth blitz, that still penetrates every aspect of gaming, and it is a whole lot cheaper.

But the monotonous gameplay just makes Mortal Kombat 3 no fun whatsoever. The tournament ladder is interesting, but there really is not much of an incentive to keep from dying, which, at most times, happens inadvertently. I just find button mashers mindless, and I believe that a game is truly sad if I can win while I am half asleep.

CHALLENGE--MEDIUM TO HIGH
Well, if the repetitive gameplay was not enough to hook you, perhaps your computer controlled opponent’s constant willingness to be as cheap as possible will. On top of that, most of the time when your opposition wins, they will further humiliate you by throwing upon you a fatality, or something else that would either not be for the squeamish, or that you would die if it happened to you in a picture for your high school yearbook. Granted, you have heard me say throughout this review that button mashing will surely allow you to succeed in Mortal Kombat 3. It will. Sometimes I think that button mashing, as well as being cheap against the cheap artificial intelligence, is the only real way to beat the computer.

REPLAY VALUE--LOW TO MEDIUM
I think it is possible that Mortal Kombat 3 has scored a new low for the tournament fighting genre in the replay value category. Granted the storyline is entertaining, engrossing, exhilarating, extravagant, and downright enigmatic, but that hardly makes you want to play Mortal Kombat 3 more than once. The cheapness and unintelligence that Mortal Kombat 3 portrays just makes you want to be associated with this poor product even less. The only time that I can ever picture anyone actually wanting to play Mortal Kombat 3 is if they have some of those little bratty cousins over that everyone hates, and they want to scare them.

PROS
*Amazingly realistic graphics for almost any console.
*Sound effects are among the best ever created.
*Mortal Kombat gave the world a new take on spelling words that start with the letter ‘C’ with a ‘K.’

CONS
*Nothing new added since the first incarnation.
*Gameplay is boring, repetitive, stale, and primitive.
*Mortal Kombat 3 exists, adding torture to everyone from Joseph Lieberman to myself.

CLOSING STATEMENT
The only way I can fathom anyone liking Mortal Kombat 3 is for the blood and gore, and if you like games because of blood and gore you are a sick, sick person. I will make sure to visit you in the asylum where you belong. Sadly, it is true that many people I am acquainted with play games like Mortal Kombat Gold and Resident Evil 3: Nemesis just to see blood and gore hurtle across the screen. It is my opinion that this is pathetic, and that they should just rent a movie. Some movies with violence actually have redeeming qualities, for instance The Rock.

OVERALL--3

Reviewer's Score: 3/10, Originally Posted: 12/27/00, Updated 07/18/01