Now I’ve seen some very poor fighters this year; Streetfighter The Movie Arcade, Bloodstorm and Guilty Gear X (just kidding there fellas) to name but three … but MKT falls far below all of them, because not only is the content appalling, but the actual concept is morally reprehensible too. Where do I start?

Well what is MKT? When it was first announced it was rumoured to be a compilation of the first three games. Fair enough I supposed. Time passed, and the news changed; now it was going to be a single game, featuring all the characters of all MK games (all uh four games that is.) That buzzing sound you’re probably hearing about now is the warning alert in your head as you wonder just what sort of game will come from a team whose last fighter got 8 separate characters out of two sprites.

It was never going to be pretty … but .. but this. Dear god….

The intro really sets the tone for things — a static image with text scrolling in front of it … woo! The game itself features all the MK3/UMK3 characters, the MKII characters who weren’t in 3 onwards … and just to really wreck things, a few MK1 characters too, as well as all the backgrounds (secret ones included) and musics too. Of course, given the huge technological gulfs between games, the older characters will need a fair bit of retouching and reanimating so they match the newer ones right? Um … no. And the old backgrounds will need to be altered so the new sprites match them, yes? No. Only in a MUGEN-eers’ most depraved, crack-induced nightmares should something this bad actually exist.

And things get worse. Not only are the characters from various MK games just dumped in the backgrounds of others, but they all look far, far worse than their arcade counterparts. I know the PSX has memory issues, but the loss here is shocking. The sprites are tiny, blocky and must have about 32 colours each. Animation is missing all over the place, and glitches are commonplace.

The PSX version (my one at least) is also buggy as hell, sometimes when you win there’s a 20 second pause before the screen fades (it ALWAYS happens when Kahn wins), it’s crashed on me, and it’s possible to end up standing half ‘outside’ some of the backgrounds. There’s also other shit, like the way there’s an audible crack when certain sound samples stop playing.

It’s stuff like that that make me so anti-MKT … the fact that so little effort was put into it, and yet it’s sold at full-price as a brand new game. It’s horrible.

As far as ‘brand new’ actually goes … well … there’s a few new characters. Rain is new, and Noob is playable. Ermac, Classic Sub-Zero and human Smoke are available from the start. And yes, they’re all palette swapped ninjas! - which brings the total to SEVEN. Then there’s Johnny Cage. Cage is the only “new” character in the sense that there’s the only one who isn’t a recycled sprite. He looks lame, but he’s still new. (I sound like the whacked-out dad in “Eraserhead”)

Yes, in the whole game there’s ONE character that isn’t a cut and paste job. Terrible.

Another new feature to Trilogy is the ability to choose any of the four boss characters; Kahn, Goro, Kintaro and Motaro. Are they worth a look? What do you think? The fact that none of them can attack while jumping pretty much kills the remotest possibility of them being worthwhile characters. They don’t have fatalities, nor can fatalities be performed on them. Their moves are what you’d expect, and they can’t do combos, so basically, all Kintaro can do is standing punch all day long, and hope his 200% damage advantage helps him out. Fucking crap.

The fun never ends, as the MKT gameplay has changed slightly. Some alterations seemingly done on purpose, others just happen through sheer laziness. For a start the CPU AI is cheaper than ever. Now I hated the UMK3 AI with a passion — and yet they’ve managed to make it worse. Even on the easiest level, the 6th fight seems almost impossible. The CPU locks you down so tight it’s barely worth moving. And even if you do get past it, there’s the horrible endurance (2 x cheating teleporting auto-comboing fools), the yawn-fest that is fighting Motaro and then Kahn. Shao Kahn now has a throw and a Jax-style grab and punch - he has been made “more difficult” … his AI is not improved, he just has more cheap patterns, glitches and super-priority attacks than ever before. It took me about an hour to beat him, a hateful, nightmarish hour that I can never reclaim. Fuck you Midway!

The new characters all have auto combos (yay!) and some of them are activated by such complex commands as “LK, LK, LK, LK” I have no idea why they needed to make them easier than they already are, but they have.

Other delights include the dreadful collision detection (crouch under Johnny Cage’s Shadow Kick, and try to uppercut him before he recovers - YOU MISS EVERY TIME!), the way the CPU teleports from jumping into an auto-combo in ways the human player cannot do and the wonders of the pathetic “new” fatalities - Scorpions’ “Hand From Hell” and Classic Sub-Zero’s “Ice Spike” and “Head Rip Black-Out” just go right off the retard-o-meter.

The two new gameplay features to MKT are the Aggressor bar and Brutalities. The Aggressor bar is like a super meter, except when it fills up, you leave a transparent trail behind you and that’s it. Actually - the manual says you become stronger when it’s full — and doing a 4-hit combo revealed that yes, the damage increased from 23% to 27%. I like the way the back of the box says the Aggressor mode increases your “strength and power” — even though they both mean the same thing. :|

The other “great” new feature is a new finishing move. The “Brutality” (ph33r!) is just an extremely long auto combo that automates after the eleventh (!) hit and culminates in the poor opponent exploding. There’s no way in hell I’m taking the time to learn even ONE of those stupid button-sequences — I just used the one-button-fatality cheat — and as much as I want to hate them, they’re sort of cool. A bit. There goes my reputation again. But I really love Guilty Gear X!

But behind the terrible coding, the lazy, sloppy, money-grabbing concept, the lack of new features, the billions of palette swapped characters, the cheap AI, the crappy mechanics, the low-res, low-colour graphics and clicky, choppy sound that loads in big chunks at the most inopportune times — it’s not that bad is it? Well, yes actually. I’m harsher on this game because of what it is, and because of the affection I have for the older games in the series. This truly is the Mortal Kombat series’ lowest point — and if you’re one of those people who thought Capcom vs. SNK was the most lazy, despicable recycled fighting game of all time — you ain’t seen nothing yet. And that isn’t a challenge to buy MKT. Run the hell away!

• Publisher/Developer: Midway
• Score: 40%