Mortal Kombat II

The PS3 has seen its share of irregular game releases this past quarter. After coming off the launch, consoles tend to do this. A certified drought has been avoided with careful retail releases and releases over the PlayStation Network. Last week saw a close with Midway’s classic, Mortal Kombat II. AMN posted a few impressions of the game and now that we’ve had a chance to play it over the weekend, it is time to pass final judgment.

Let’s cover this base first: the price is fantastic. While Nintendo charges $8 for SNES/Genesis era games and Microsoft would charge whatever they want, Sony has so far been the king of digestible microtransactions with seemingly fair prices. The game is easy to download and enjoy without the nagging feeling you paid too much for a 10+ year old game. So the price is fine and dandy but is this port any good?

Throughout the play test phase, it was hard to be impressed with the title. Mortal Kombat II can’t hold its own in today’s market like some titles from the Golden-Age of gaming. The nostalgia runs high with the digitized sprites of the fighters and the color swaps of costumes to make three fighters out of one (Reptile, Scorpion, and Sub-Zero) but it won’t last long. The special moves are simple to execute. They keep the gameplay fast, moving, and deadly as you try and beat your opponent to a pulp. The key word is try. After fiddling around with the difficulty settings, you find out it makes little difference. You will feel like the AI is cheating by the many cheap shots they are able to pull off. You can pin down the issue to the SIXAXIS controller that is not ideal for fighting games. This hampers how enjoyable the game is overall. The roots of the game might be a quarter-muncher but the difficulty might be too steep for some.

That is where you can get into the online game. For the PS3, Midway included a matchmaking system to join fights and see if you are the best Kombatant in the world. The lag seemed manageable and finding an opponent is easy (if anyone is online playing it). One curious feature is when you find a match, you don’t actually have to fight your opponent. If you don’t press start, you won’t enter the match and you can just watch someone else play against the AI. The online matches are a lot more fun than the arcade single player experience hands down, even with some problems. One odd bug I found while playing the multiplayer to see if voice chat worked (it doesn’t) is that while using a Bluetooth headset, all the sound pipes through that earphone.

Mortal Kombat II appears to be a rush job port of the arcade game. On the plus side, they aren’t asking too much for the file. Even though I’m not impressed with the download at all, I don’t feel bad about spending the $5 on it.