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Review: Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 (XBLA) |
Mortal Kombat’s great, isn’t it? The controversy, the films, the characters, the games, the comics, the whole deal. The guys at Midway have truly been living the American dream for the past fifteen years – can you imagine becoming incredibly wealthy, successful and famous on the back of selling such thinly-disguised crap? Hell I’d do the same, given the opportunity, grandma-selling start-up costs or no.
Even the endless stream of ports that now rival Capcom’s own Street Fighter factory line have a certain lure to them, and I’d be lying if I didn’t own a couple (which incidentally makes me a double liar, as in my MK Gold review I vowed to never purchase another Midway title in my life.) And now consoles can do HD media, can we please get some complete series releases – MK1-Armageddon on a single disk would be swell, the same goes for SF2:WW-3S. Thanks.
The latest in this unending stream is a downloadable release for the Xbox360’s Live Arcade service. For those who’ve never used Live Arcade, imagine a web portal for downloading a collection of demos and games to be played on or offline; a kind of cross between Kaillera and Valve’s STEAM content delivery service, with a little MSN thrown in for good measure. Live Arcade plays host to a collection of new and classic games, Street Fighter 2: Hyper Fighting is on there, as is Smash TV, Gauntlet and even DOOM, all available for a reasonable amount of Microsoft Points – the Xbox Live currency scheduled to replace the US dollar by mid 2008.
This release of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 is no doubt the reason that UMK3 hasn’t been included in any of the Midway Arcade Treasures compilations for the past couple of years. In fact surprisingly UMK3 hasn’t been sold at all since its initial home release run on the Saturn, Mega Drive and Super Nintendo in 1996, although it does come as part of the ‘Collector’s Edition’ of Mortal Kombat Armageddon, which hopefully no-one owns.
If you’re not familiar with UMK3, I envy you. If you are then there’s absolutely no reason whatsoever to mention how it was a hastily-released update to the hastily-released regular MK3, adding a handful of new characters including the return of Scorpion, in what can only be seen as a grovelling apology for even DARING to suggest that Cyrax would be a good replacement for him. The game also sees additional secrets, moves and character balance attempts, the ability to open the button-sequence auto-combos from a jump-in punch, as well as new stages (and a new ((rubbish)) ‘pit’), plus a new fourth difficulty tower, the return of endurance matches and even more infuriatingly hateful AI routines.
It’s the ability to play online versus allegedly human opponents that gives this title its real worth, the aforementioned AI making the single-player game an excruciating experience, one that belies Midway’s coin-hungry, fun-dismissive game design philosophy. Against other people it’s breezy, fast-paced and perhaps even fun, for a short while at least.
With a functional, if not exceptional front end that offers the opportunity to create and join either ‘Player’ (for fun) matches or ‘Ranked’ (serious) competition of either the one-on-one ‘Versus’ type or the four-player tournament ‘Challenger’ matches, getting a game in UMK3 is extremely easy. In fact having sat in despair for half-hour stretches in the deserted Hyper Street Fighter 2 Xbox Live lobby I’d go as far as saying it’s annoyingly, unjustly, sickeningly easy to get a match. Perhaps it’s the high-profile afforded to it by the very nature of the heavily self-promoting Live Arcade, perhaps it’s the series’ continuing high profile. Maybe it’s a raft of nostalgic late twenty-somethings bemusedly putting aside their newest physics-engine-d role-playing epic for a quick giggle at one of those silly little fighting things … whatever the reason, if the rankings are anything to go by there are tens of thousands of people currently playing.
And 19,999 of them use Smoke. Smoke is the Akuma of UMK3. He’s the Jin Kazama, the Oswald, the Chun-Li of UMK3. He’s the ‘right, I’ll show YOU!’ character and somewhere out there in the wilds of the internet there must be a document giving the exact instructions on how to use him. Instructions that read:
1) Teleport punch
2) Spear
3) HP, HP, LK, HK, LP
4) Repeat for as long as your fingers can bear the shame
Worse still, a lot of these Smoke players have seen these instructions and nothing else. For every deadly dangerous Smoke player there are hundreds, thousands of stultifying dolts doing the trademark ‘can’t do a teleport punch’ low kick shuffle, eminently defeatable but sometimes overwhelming in numbers.
It’s also surprising how common early 90’s-style whining and moaning is, which takes me back to my theory of young adults reliving their mis-spent teenage arcade years, even extending to swearing and crying about people being ‘cheap.’ Yes, blocking is cheap. Jumping is cheap. Combos are cheap and throws are cheap. Turtling is cheap, as is overly aggressive play. Perhaps someone needs to take these people aside and explain to them that MK is cheap. And that it (sadly) isn’t 1993 any more and these things happen and people can’t be bothered playing fair and honourably any more, especially in such a silly little game. I’ve been insulted from both sides of the Atlantic, and I’ve ever been given negative feedback for playing ‘aggressively.’ In a fighting game!
I fully acknowledge that online gaming as a whole is riddled with examples of such stupid behaviour, it’s just this basic failure of comprehension of a genre that I have watched from its joyous birth, through its golden age, into its decline and near-death makes it all the more baffling to me. How dare people use the basic tools the game provides, in the way intended by grandpa Boon and granny Tobias themselves?! Surely that’s like playing HALO and complaining people are firing the guns!
Such sore losers dropping from games is also an issue, although unlike the earlier Capcom LIVE fighting games, if your opponent drops, you get the win. It would have better still if it was ten wins, or mild genital electro-shock treatment, but we can’t always get our own way.
From a technical standpoint the game is an interesting mix of old and new. It runs in widescreen with the picture in 4:3 in the middle and borders at the sides, although it is possible to stretch it sideways. The sound is pointless 5.1 audio, of which no use is made whatsoever. Connection lag in online play varies depending on the players – two users with the full four green bars will often get a lag-free match regardless of physical location, and the game’s simplicity means that even laggy three and two-bar games are playable. As an emulated version of the arcade game there are issues – unlocking the game’s three hidden characters requires two controllers to do, and accessing them again once unlocked is rather unintuitive. The controls can’t be re-mapped (the 360 joypad is hateful for fighting games at best) and the game is prone to crashing. There are also obvious bugs – because the game restarts between VS matches, fights always take place in the Netherrealm stage – barring the odd appearance of the blue portal stage for secret characters, the rest of the stages never show, no matter how many fights you have.
Getting the chance to play the game competitively for extended periods has really made me think about MK, and the reasons for its design choices – it’s become crystal clear to me now how it truly is a fighting game made for people who don’t or can’t play fighting games. Who don’t have the time or inclination to learn split-second timing and hundreds of counter moves, but want to pretend they are and have fun doing so all the same. People who wanted to join in the fun all those SF2 kids were having but couldn’t because of their giant fingers, or hooves or whatever they had.
Still it’s hard to complain too much, it did only cost 800 MSP (£6) and I didn’t even need to leave my festering lair to get it. It’s also been interesting to see how an old MK stacks up to the new 3D incarnations, and the final verdict is that the new versions are shit. Sure UMK3’s no legendary fighting masterpiece, but it still gets more of the basics right than any post-MK4 game has. The controls are reasonably responsive, and combat is fast, furious and fun to watch instead of being dull, sluggish and ugly. UMK3 is apparently the best game in series from a competitive point of view, and I can agree with that. MKII may have the aesthetic edge, but you’ve seen everything it has to offer in half an hour, at least with Ultimate it’s two or maybe even three.
With UMK3 and HF, and rumours of SNK adding one of their old fighters to the pile, the best possible outcome for players will be a continuing stream (even a dribble would do it) of Live Arcade classic fighting games. They’re popular (HF broke the records for fastest selling XBLA title) they’re cheap and they bring fighting to the masses in a way that PC emulated netplay will never do. And if that means suffering infinite Robot Smoke spear combos to get there, then so be it.
EXTRA: should you want to play me, and my Kurtis Stryker of semi-death, hunt around for XBL gamertag Beil and maybe we can arrange some sort of kicking.
