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Review: Mortal Kombat Advance [GBA] |
Whatever reputation the Gameboy Advance had for being a home for awesome fighting games has today been dealt a fatal blow by Midway’s release of Mortal Kombat Advance – one of the worst videogames I’ve ever played.
If you looked up “lazy, rushed, pointless Christmas cash-in” in a very special dictionary – the MK Advance cartridge would be lying there in a Cluedo-esque cut-out. This same dictionary also lists the MKA programmers and quality control testers under “gay”, and the actual gameplay itself under “wretched and unplayable, with no redeeming features whatsoever.”
I’m not too keen on making excessively hateful reviews because I tend to lapse into parody, but this really does deserve it.
It never really had a chance. Despite general fan consensus being demand for a port of Mortal Kombat II, it was announced that the GBA was getting a port of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3. Not so hot. The most character intensive of the series (bar ugh MK: Trilogy) being stuck onto a GBA cartridge could never have been pretty … but this…
Don’t get me wrong, I liked MK1 when it came out, I still fawn sickeningly over MKII, I enjoyed MK3 for a while and even got a few weeks of fun from UMK3 on MAME. Whoever ported it to the Gamboy Advance failed to even make it a decent MK game. What they made instead was evil.
On the surface it’s still recognisably UMK3. The presentation and select screens are true to the arcade version, and the character roster is everyone from Ultimate except four-armed Shokan fighter Sheeva. There are the same towers of destiny difficulty levels, the same between-fight screens, lifebars and general presentation. The game engine is the same IN THEORY. You have a button to block, one to run, punches, kicks, uppercuts and specials. The last bosses are still Motaro and Shao Kahn, rendered even more difficult by the horrible game mechanics, the endings are true to the UMK3 ones.
Now visually, for a GBA game, things aren’t too bad. Menus and between-fight screens look pretty true to the original and the title screen is nice. The sprites are small and grainy, but animate fairly well, and are instantly recognisable. The backgrounds (what few there are – the subway, bell tower, graveyard, 2nd street, bank, Motaro’s lair, desert and waterfront are missing) are decent too, though completely without animation. While many of them were almost still in the arcade version, background elements like the green twisting soul in the Soul Chamber, or the red vortex in the cityscape background are there, but motionless – giving a distinctly cheap look to things.
What sound there is is pretty high quality too; all the namechecks are in there, a feature missing from the SNES and Genesis UMK3 ports, the music isn’t bad quality but each ‘tune’ is just a tiny portion of the original stage theme looping endlessly – and they get annoying really quickly. The musics are mismatched – each couple of stages had their own theme tune, which the GBA port has totally mixed up, making some slightly odd combinations. The award for total audio idiocy goes to whoever decided that every character (even the male ones) utters Sheeva’s “ugh!” sample when they get hit. Sheeva’s not even in the game!
But it’s not the aesthetics that make this so painful – it’s the gameplay; the controls, the engine, hit detection, physics and play mechanics. They’re all absolutely horrible. Not “Mortal Kombat” horrible – as unpopular as the series is, the basics of the game engine still made sense. Kind of. Not so here, MK Advance appears to have been coded in a bizarre alternate dimension where up is down, black is white, in is out and absolutely fucking pitiful is a great handheld console release. I wish I was exaggerating, really, but the more I played, the more examples of really astounding idiocy just kept on revealing themselves, like the coders had deliberately paced them this way.
To being with, there’s the controls. The arcade game had six-buttons (High punch, low punch, high kick, low kick, block and run), the GBA has four. The shoulder buttons are block and run, and the A and B buttons become “punch” and “kick”. It sounds fair enough, but is implemented very illogically. Standing kick does a high kick, towards and kick does a low kick, and back and kick does a roundhouse. Standing punch is high punch, towards and punch is low punch, down and punch is an uppercut, down and kick is a crouch kick, down-back and punch is a low punch and down-back and kick is the sweep. Not particularly intuitive, but really more Nintendo’s fault.
For some reason you can no longer hammer out a series of punches in MKA … now doing P,P,P,P,P will cause the player to do the punch animation … retract their arm, pause, and repeat the same animation. Boo. Most of the moves appear to be either missing or unperformable too, with many characters having a single special. Even when the moves work, their hit properties are totally wrong – Mileena’s F,F+HK drop kick now misses the other player instead of connecting, and Sub-Zero’s freeze often thaws out before you can attack.
Because of memory restrictions, each character has a single fatality and a friendship. They look about as jerky and undramatic as possible – kind of stupid reducing the whole selling point of the game in order to cram in more palette-swapped ninjas. Something else that suffers is the AI. On the easiest mode, the CPU blocks. That’s it. On the harder levels, things get tougher, as the player fights not only their opponent, but the hideous controls and engine as well.
The game physics themselves are equally shameful. Sprites have little weight, hits don’t cause recoil and jump and knockdown arcs are floaty and almost comedic in appearance.
The hit detection is the most outrageously poor I’ve ever seen – ‘proper’ UMK3 combos don’t count; the CPU just interrupts button combos, KI-style, but weird attack sequences will combo, often at random … one time I got a 3-hit combo bonus without even hitting the other guy, another time saw me get a 4-hit combo bonus for a single jump-kick. A blocked jump kick registers as a “2-hit, 0% damage” combo … it’s possible to get stuck “behind” the other sprite and keep hitting them … projectiles disappear and frequently pass harmlessly through the other player … uppercuts sometimes knock the falling character behind the attacker … sweeps repeatedly miss completely … you can’t do cross-ups because you can only jump kick in the direction you’re jumping … Motaro can hit you with his “mule kick” even if you’re standing behind him when he does it … it is, to all intents and purposes, completely unplayable.
And that’s what makes me despise it so … the fact that while the aesthetic side of the game is acceptable for a handheld machine (not up to SSF2XR though) – the gameplay itself is just so nonsensical, random and stupidly frustrating – the fact the coders were totally unable to recreate any semblance of the Mortal Kombat engine, one that’s universally derided for it’s simplicity and lameness – there’s just no point to it’s existence. It reminds me more of those horrible twelve year old fighting games for the ZX Spectrum, where hits and blocks were more a matter of luck than skill. That people made this, were content with the finished version and decided to sell it … it’s unthinkable.
There have been numerous ports of the MK series over the past decade, and while only a fraction ever managed to match the arcade versions in terms of graphics and sound, they still managed to keep the essentials; be it grainy load-time ridden MK1 on the Sega CD, or the one-button control version of MKII on the Commodore Amiga – they all got the basics right, regardless of hardware. MK: Advance fails to do this, miserably.
As a rule, I tend to avoid excessive review scores. Even the greatest games in history have flaws which stop them getting more than the mid-nineties, and extremely low scores are better suited to the metaphor-laden game reviews at SomethingAwful. However I’m going to make an exception for Mortal Kombat Advance, because it is a truly hateful, filthy game – absolutely no fun to play, lazily and incompetently coded, and released as a quick, cynical cash-in. Do not buy this game, do not download it. Strike it’s existence from your memory. This review will delete itself in 10 seconds.
