Mortal Kombat Arcade Kollection Review (XBLA)
Mortal Kombat is one of the most popular video game franchises of all time. And where or not you prefer this or the Street Fighter series is really all down to personal preference. Well with the amazing Mortal Kombat reboot that was released a little while back. It was decided that 3 of the original arcade games would be released in one handy collection on Xbox Live Arcade. In theory this was a great idea, but there was certainly more than a few little problems.
Well first of all the selection of games. Mortal Kombat Arcade Kollection features 3 of the biggest arcade hits of all time, but as this is called the arcade Kollection why on earth is it missing two games? What is included is Mortal Kombat, Mortal Kombat II and Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3. What happened to the original Mortal Kombat 3 and perhaps more importantly Mortal Kombat 4? You are not telling me that they could not have thrown these in as well. I mean to be fair they did give us the better version of Mortal Kombat 3. So they probably thought what was the point in including the original, but as this is the arcade collection the absence of Mortal Kombat 4 is unforgivable.
The graphics are just how I remember them that awesome digitized style. What is pretty cool is the way that you can change the graphics. You can mess with filters that can make the game look more smoother. You can also change the size of the screen and play with borders if you want or you can stretch it to make it full screen.
As far as the games go lets do them in order. I have a very special place in my heart for the original Mortal Kombat game. To me it was a real game changer. And the game is very well represented here. I think that the AI is not as unforgiving in this first Mortal Kombat game as it would go onto be later in the series. This plays juts like you remember it doing.
Mortal Kombat II is my favourite game in the series and this is a damn fine port. But the game does have a few problems here. First of all the Ai is pretty brutal granted this is an arcade port and the arcade game of Mortal Kombat II was designed to be hard as hell to keep you pumping money in. My biggest issue with Mortal Kombat II is the fatalities and other finishing moves. For some reason the times is messed up and you literally have about 2 seconds to put in the code. As someone who played the hell out of this game in the arcades I can tell you for a fact that there is something wrong with the amount of time it gives you to perform a fatality.
Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 is by far my least favourite of the games in this collection. No other Mortal Kombat game has as brutal AI as Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 does. It gets to the point when it simply becomes no fun to play. Many times you will find yourself having to exploit the AI and cheat to win. Where is the fun in that? Whenever I start a game and if I see that Jade is going to be one of my opponents I just turn the game off and try again.
In all this is a really half baked arcade collection. There are numerous little sound and graphical bugs that may not sound like a big deal, but the point in these kinds of collection is to improve on the arcade originals. This is something that this collection does not do. While it is cool being able to play against your buddies online as a single player game it sadly is not that great.
