Written by: Mark

 

 

 

Mortal Kombat is the cult favourite one on one beat em up series first unleashed in the early 1990’s. At the time the one on one beat em up genre was quickly establishing itself as the most popular in arcades and home consoles and developers everywhere were releasing titles to jump onto the bandwagon.

 

Without doubt the king of the games at the time was Capcom’s Streetfighter 2 and never really received a serious challenge until Midway released their own contender in the form over Mortal Kombat which featured more realistic characters and levels of gore never seen before.

 

The series became so popular that over the next twenty years numerous versions have been released on countless platforms including the excellent 2011 remake which saw the series improve ten fold and establish it’s popularity once again. Thanks to this we now have received a collection of the first three games in the series for the XBLA service priced at a superb 800ms points.

 

Questions remain however as to whether the games are still as good as they were all those years ago or is the collection proves to be nothing more of a nostalgia trip with little else on offer.

 

 

The first thing to be made aware of with this ‘Kollection’ is that each game is presented in it’s original arcade format. This does mean that graphics and sound are faithfully recreated and to be honest have not aged too well. Having said this there are still some aspects of the presentation which highlights why the games were popular upon first releases. This is mainly down to the more realistic graphical style rather than animated as you would find in MK’s rivals, however the more you play the games in this package the more you notice how rough around the edges things are and how many glitches you encounter as you progress.

 

 

The same can be said with the sound which, especially in the earlier games, sounds like voices have been recorded by actors with their heads in buckets. Musically is a strange one throughout the three games. As a general rule the soundtrack is fairly acceptable however once again is glitch packed and often drops at regular intervals which I honestly cannot remember if was evident in the arcade originals or is just a part of the XBLA versions. Either way it is a real shame and does take away some of the fond memories I had with the three games throughout the past twenty or so years.

 

 

Lets be honest from the start and say that the success of the MK franchise gameplay has more been about the gore and over the top fatalities, animalities, babealities and friendship finishing moves. All of these are present and thankfully can be found in the move list and not hidden meaning that you can perform them at your own free will.

 

All well and good so far however the actual ‘Kombat’ within the three games leaves a lot to be desired. By this I refer to the fact that fights are a little uninteresting to be honest and especially in the first game can be won by simply repeating the same move over and over again. Admittedly things do improve in the second and third games with the second in my personal opinion being the definitive MK experience, however there is still not a lot to be to excited about and just shows how the games would have been trailing their rivals by if they were missing the gore and finishing moves.

 

 

Another thing to be aware of is that due to the games being the original arcade versions the AI of the opponents is incredibly cheap and causes frustration galore as you will find it hard to complete the games even on the easier difficulty settings. I honestly cannot remember any of the three games being this difficult upon original release and I said the same when Street Fighter 2 was first available on the XBLA service. Both of these releases had me questioning whether my abilities had dwindled over the years or if the developers had ramped up the difficulty. Having heard views of several others I suspect the latter as the games have been made such a challenge that they are not as enjoyable as perhaps they should be.