flash-hammer's Full Review: Mortal Kombat: Gold for Dreamcast
I can still remember the first time I played Mortal Kombat 4. It was in an arcade somewhere in London, and I can remember thinking it was pretty cool, and writing off it's flaws based on the fact I didn't spend enough time playing it to learn how it worked properly. Funny thing is, I actually forgot the game existed until I got my Dreamcast, and even then it was a year or so before I found Mortal Kombat Gold, the upgraded version of the 4th game, lying in a preowned bin at a low cost. Memories of Mortal Kombats past came flooding back to me, and I plonked down my cash before retreating home to play it.
MK4 was the first Mortal Kombat to appear using 3D models, and therefore the first not to use the series trademark digitised actors to render it's fighters. While this was a case of Midway, the game's makers, trying to keep up with the times, it marked an end of an era for the series. MK always had a certain goofy charm afforded to it, and the digitised actors were one of the reasons for this. The fact that MK4 wasn't at the cutting edge of 3D, and the fact it came out around the same time as a boom in 3D-rendered fighting games meant that it quite frankly got shown up as 'just another fighter'. You see, the MK engine was never all that great, so the guys behind it, Ed Boon and John Tobias, came up with various ways of spicing up their fighter, which was originally intended as a tie-in to the Jean Claude Van Damme movie Bloodsport. The game ran into some controversy for it's Over the top blood-spilling when moves connected, as well as the fact that each character had a selection of 'Fatality' moves, where you were given a certain amount of time at the end of the fight to enter a button combination to finish your enemy off with a gory deathblow. Many of them were tongue-in-cheek, or just too silly to be taken seriously, but that didn't stop people complaining, and the series getting so much free publicity and hype it was unbelievable. It's testament to the series promotional aspects that not one game in series has been forced to elaborate very far beyond the dragon-in-a-circle logo on the front cover.
Mortal Kombat Gold(MKG) is a fighting game, like most of the entries into the series. Pick a character, fight an enemy in best out of 3 rounds combat, aiming to deplete their health bar using various attacks, before they do the same to you. This game takes place in pseudo-3D, where it's mostly 2D fighting, but there is a side-step option to justify it's 3D setting.
This entry, which was lead into by the poorly recieved spin-off game, Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub Zero, sees the Earth come under a new threat in the form the fallen Elder God Shinnok and his Sorceror partner Quan Chi. Naturally it's down to Raiden to gather up Liu Kang, Johnny Cage, Sonya and the rest of the boys, Scorpion and Sub Zero to get drawn in somehow and one big fracas to kick off.
Now, contrary to what many may tell you, some fighting games do have plots, and the MK series was actually well known for having one of the best. Then MK4 appeared like a big, fecal-brown blot on the record of the series. Not only did it fail to do anything interesting with it's established characters, who seemed to be re-playing previous storylines(Scorpion resolved his issues with Sub Zero back in the second game), and it's new characters just plain sucked. Jarek, who was the old character Kano's buddy, is the singer from Alien Ant Farm dressed as an elf. Tanya is basically yellow-swimsuited Kitana and Reiko is a mask-less ninja with bad facepaint. However, the biggest insult is reserved for the game's boss. Prior MK titles saw two bosses, the shape-shifting, Big Trouble in Little China-inspired Shang Tsung and the colossal warlord Shao Kahn. While the former changed his appearance and became playable in latter games, Kahn, and the original form of Tsung, were over-powered and unplayable beasts of bosses. This game gives you Shinnok, a stupid jester guy with a dumb hat who uses the other characters moves, and can be selected from the start.
In case you are wondering what the Gold upgrade warranted, it's the inclusion of some classic MK fighters that didn't show up in the arcade, N64 or PlayStation versions of the game. Baraka, Mileena, Cyrax and Kung Lao debut in 3D, and in total there are 20 selectable fighters to begin with, with a further 3 to unlock. The problem with the game's characters, and stages as well, is that the story is all over the place. You fight in locales from the Outworld and Earth realm, ones established in prior games, yet it's never explained where you are meant to be. It's almost as if they just wanted to make a 3D MK, and half-baked a story to try and justify it.
In terms of new gameplay additions, aside from the side-step move, which doesn't really add much to proceedings, the game is essentially Mortal Kombat 3, with the weapons, which I'll get back to in a second, attached. It uses the same canned-combo system, the same standard moves and carries over the same lame collision detection, no wait, actually that last one has been made worse this time around. In addition, the added dimension also gave Midway a new way to bugger up the game, by making the camera get stuck behind objects during Fatalitys. Meaning you can't see half of them. Bravo guys, seriously.
The weapons then. Every character in the game has a unique weapon that they can draw if the player enters the correct button combo. These weapons do extra damage, but end up bringing up more flaws than they do pros. For example, it seems to take the character about 10 seconds to draw the weapon, meaning your opponent will 9 times out of 10 knock it out of your hands. While this does bring up one cool aspect of the game, the ability to pick up your opponent's weapon off the floor, it also means that you rarely get to use the damn things. In addition to this, the characters have few unique attacks with them, and they prohibit Fatalitys, so you can't help but feel like they were an afterthought lobbed in to make the game stand out from it's competition. Even worse are the 'stage weapons', which are objects like rocks that lie around and can be picked up and thrown. It's just a shame that they look so out of place you will end up wanting to throw them off-camera instead of at your opponent.
The game controls the same as all MK games prior to it, with High and Low Punch and Kick buttons, as well as a Run and the infuriating Block button. The latter two are both ridiculous, especially in a mostly 2D-playing fighter, and it's little wonder the series is now held in as low regard after years of sticking by this control system.
In general actually, MKG is a generic at best game to play, with it's pretty poor hit-detection, as well as the same control flaws carried over from the prior game. What makes things worse, is that Fatality moves rarely respond. Ever. I don't know if this is a fault of the DC controller, of the game's programming or some combination of the two, but it's very, very frustrating. The game just isn't all the fun really. The rights turn into mash-fests, and there really isn't anything to get excited about, even on multiplayer. All the game makes you do is enjoy most of the other, better, Dreamcast fighters more. I mean, it isn't terrible, or even unplayable, it's just not fun and has enough flaws to make you want to turn it off far more than it does play on.
In the game's defence, it does incorporate one cool feature, the short FMV videos that are used for your character's ending in Arcade mode. These short videos are more akin to what you would expect from a Tecmo or Namco fighter, but they are really quite cool, and in many cases more entertaining than the game you played to see them.
Despite this, they do bring me to another flaw the game can call it's own, the graphics. While these are improved over the Arcade game, the fact this game came out around the same time as the far superior looking Virtua Fighter 3tb makes you wonder what Midway thought they could get away with. In defence, the stages look a lot better than any stages I've seen in a fighter on a pre-Dreamcast console, but they still rank down there as some of the poorest graphical backgrounds on the console itself. The fighters themselves don't hold up much better, looking and moving in a very robotic, 32-Bit-esque manner, with the new characters added for the Gold version looking, Kung Lao and Cyrax exempt, completely horrendous. In fairness, Kitana is well rendered, and even seems to have been modelled on Jennifer Lopez, but everyone else seems stuck somewhere between N64 and Dreamcast level graphics.
Sound in the game is a bit of a highlight though. The game carries on the series tradition of sweeping, moody and atmospheric music and the voices...hey those sound kind of familiar. Now I think about it, so does a lot of the music. Oh, I get it, they just re-used sound effects from previous games. Yeah, great going guys.
At the end of the day, I may be coming down a little harsh on Mortal Kombat Gold, but the fact is that the Dreamcast is home to some of the greatest fighting games ever, and I'm just annoyed as a Mortal Kombat fan that Midway didn't see to it that they put a game that could proudly fit alongside such statuesque entrants into the genre as Fatal Fury: Mark of the Wolves, Dead or Alive 2 and Streetfighter 3. Instead the series was represented by a half-baked upgrade to a pretty shoddy game from the last generation of consoles. While MK completists may be interested, there really isn't much to recommend Mortal Kombat Gold upon. It's at best generic, and at worst quite shoddy game that really is one of the series low points.
Exclusive to the Dreamcast, Mortal Kombat Gold is the latest rendition of Midways arcade classic fighter. Running at 60 frames per second with high-re...More at eBay
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