Absymortal Tragic Trilogy
Written: Sep 13 '02
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Almost every Mortal Kombat character since the dawn of the series
Cons: Impossible difficulty glitches, poor sound conversion, sloppy compilation, worn-out engine
The Bottom Line: Mortal Kombat Trilogy's flood of problems has driven the series into such a horrendously bad standard it's no wonder why the series has become such a mockery it itself.
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| NMD85's Full Review: Mortal Kombat Trilogy for Saturn |
In case you're wondering if there's a difference between the Sega Saturn version and Sony Playstation versions, there are some slight differences here and there but all in all they are both ports. Introducing the year late Sega Saturn port of an overkilled game engine, Mortal Kombat Trilogy. In short, MK Trilogy is a compilation of Mortal Kombat's history since Mortal Kombat to Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3. Running on the latest engine, the Mortal Kombat 3 engine (designed by Williams Entertainment), MK Trilogy combines all of the arenas, some classic characters, and plenty of rediculous blood and gore from the game's history. After playing Trilogy, I can't help thinking of the brilliant idea of combining all three Mortal Kombat games into one gargantuan title. On the darker side, I can't believe Midway rushed the production into an oblivion of worn-to-the-bone gameplay, and overblown engine. I simply don't know wether to interpret the game as MK Trilogy in the Mortal Kombat 3 series or through the entire series since everything is slaved to run on the careless and sloppy MK3 engine. At least if Ed Boon and John Tobias wanted to show off their legacy of classics, they could of at least put more thought and created a brand new engine or at least allowed you to select the engine you wanted to play on. Disgraceful and utterly boring this game is now.
Getting back to the Saturn port, what differences does this game represent over the original 1996 release of the Playstation version? Notably, the developers got extremely lazy and careless when porting over to the inferior Saturn version. It took them almost a year to rerelease the game for the Saturn, and at that, it's even worse than the original was. The game suffers from extended loading times, more pixelated graphics and animations, horrible sound problems, and a difficulty gltich that has not even been balanced. Since the original port of MK Trilogy slimmed down the loading significantly since Mortal Kombat 3 on Playstation, the game loads everything much quicker into the database resulting in hardly any freezing during performance of the finishing moves. The Saturn version suffers longer load times, and for reasons unknown. The visuals have gotten much shoddier since the Playstation version; now the characters have a more pixelated look taking more away from the original designs. The Saturn port also suffers from missing sound and the typical cut-off problems of the typical MK nature. The Playstation version included all the voice-overs from the arcade, and sadly the Saturn version is missing them. The cut-off problems were boiled down to a minimum on the Playstation version, but are now evendent all over again on this version.
One of the most discouraging problems to be found in the original Playstation version was incredibly poor balanced difficult settings. The programmers have indeed done this in the past, but now this game proves that it has been taken out of proportion. The problem is so horrendous that no matter what difficulty the game is on, you will most guaranteed always beat the first three battles with no problem and then experience the utmost impossible enemy AI in any fighting game. Putting it to the test, I've not only been playing a become quite experienced at Mortal Kombat games since I started playing them in 1993, I also tried beating this game's difficulty bug on a Gameshark. I must of stayed in battle for around five minutes trying to even breath on the opponent. There's no question, you could be the a tremendous player and still find it unable to conquer the insane AI. Of course, this is what brought my score down heavily for the original PS version, and since those unmotivated developers didn't make any effort to fix the problem for the Saturn version, it goes down even more. Of course, for those who won't be playing the single-player need not worry, nevertheless, it takes a huge chunk out of the game's playability.
A rather impressive and welcomed feature was returning the original Mortal Kombat sprites into this game. By pressing "Start" on the controller, you could unveil the "classic" renditions of some characters. For instance, you could play as MKI Kano, MKI Rayden, MK2 Jax, MK2 Kung Lao just to name a few. What a great idea blown back by such horrendous organization. Sloppily, the developers just went and took all the old sprites and dowsed them in MK3's engine so that they now have chain combos. Some of their combos are rediculous at that, even some can be pulled of by repeated pressing low kick, or some take a tremendous amount of combinations. While this idea would of been interesting if the game weren't on the MK3 engine, the developers didn't even include all of the classic character models. Not to mention, the models are suffering from serious loses of animation which makes them look and play shoody. Another returning model is the Johnny Cage model, in short he looks terrible. Not only does it look awful, but the design is missing serious losses of animation making it look cheap and slapped together. Such a ingenious idea, used so crudely because of lazy developers.
Ultimately, Mortal Kombat Trilogy could have been such a memorable successor to the original games. Due to the narrow-minded planners, the game turned out to be an absymal collection of everything running on the tired MK3 engine. Possibly if the game were allowing you to select from the MK1/2 style or the 3 style the game may have gotten more respect. Mortal Kombat Trilogy proves since MK3, the games beyond that have really not gotten past more than personal greed by the inexperienced developers and for that, the Mortal Kombat series have lost many followers and it's own dignity. The creators Boon and Tobias should be ashamed for humiliating the series to such a extent of failure and utmost poor execution. Now seriously, get this garbage out of my site and bring back the Mortal Kombat we all once respected, that also means hiring developers who can do more than port the same engine over and over again until it's dead.
Recommended:
No
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Epinions.com ID:
NMD85
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Member: Nick M. DiMaio
Location: Connecticut
Reviews written: 183
Trusted by: 17 members
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