Mortal Kombat 1-3 - Memories and Impressions?

damiennolan

I recently picked up and import copy of Mortal Kombat Armageddon Premium which includes an arcade perfect coversion of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3.

I fired it up and i got me thinking about the influence the first few MK games (as far as UMK3) had on me during the early-mid 90's. The blood & gore, fatalities, digitised characters etc.
For me 2D Mortal Kombat was untouchable and I lost more coins and hours to those games!!

Just wondering if anyone else would like to share their memories of those games. Seeing/performing your first fatality etc.

Please dont turn this topic into a Mortal Kombat versus Street Fighter debate though!!

MK Only!!

Sagat06

The cutting edge graphics, using real characters!! The sheer brutality of the finishing moves... and the side splitting laughter when you beat one of your mates and did a babality on them. They just dont make them like that anymore!!

Moussdog

I remember sitting in Peter Readys house, the only megadrive owner on our road, legs folded in anticipation of this promisingly brutal game. My hands were sweating as I switched views between the Megadrive start up screen and the dragon logo on the cartridge. He chose sub-zero. He battled his way through his first match without the slightest hint of blood......."alright alright maybe it's only the fatalities that displayed the gore we were looking for".....as if Peter knew how to do fatalities. My heart sunk. Looks of desperation around the room and murmurs of panic were silenced by the quiet boy in the back. Like that one eyed Chinese guy in Gremlins he spoke softly and wisely "There is a code which doth turn on the blood". Yeah unfortunately dullard didn't actually know the code. It was at this moment Peter decided to reveal that he had only rented the game and it was due back tomorrow and of course there was no internet. We eventually got the codes for blood and the fatalities and I've always remembered fondly my Mortal Kombat playing days. Finish Him...Damn right I will.

Retr0gamer

Mortal Kombat 1 was a truely pathetic game. The digitised graphics were badly animated and plain old crap and the gameplay really sucked with jilted movement and characters only differing by their special moves which created a lot of useless characters. After you got over the awful blood effects there wasn't much to keep you away from the infinitely better Street Fighter 2. The console conversions were dreadful. The MD one had the blood but the gameplay was amazingly worse than the horrible arcade. The SNES version had the arcades gameplay but the blood, and thus only worthy thing about it, omitted.

Mortal Kombat 2 was very different from the rest of the games in the series in that it didn't suck. Graphics were the same awful badly animated digitised characters. However the developer must have paid a lot of attention to SF2 because the gameplay was an awful lot better. The juggle combo system was excellent and the characters were very well balanced although the special moves were the only thing that differentiated them again leading to a few dirty characters. The fatalities were much better and very tongue in cheek. The only thing to spoil it was the dirty cheating AI bosses.

I was really looking forward to the home conversions. Sadly I was a Mega Drive owner and got the pathetic conversion by Probe software that took out all the combos that made the game worth playing. The SNES conversion was very good.

By the time MK3 came out it looked crap compared to Tekken and Virtua Fighter and the gameplay was rubbish. Gone was the skillful juggle combo system and replaced by the dreadful remember the button combination combos that were really boring. The blood wasn't shocking anymore and th fatalities were awful. Terrible, terrible game.