Videogame Review
 
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Mortal Wombat Publisher: Acclaim Developer: Probe Genre: Brittle Turd Reviewed by: MrCHUPON |
"Quite possibly the worst game I have ever, ever played, eclipsing even Bill Laimbeer's Combat Basketball." |  |
Videogame Review | |||||
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In Depth Review: Mortal Wombat [GB]
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*Ahem* Pardon me. Letting the rage out. You might assume that I would direct you to read my arcade review of Mortal Kombat first before you begin to read the review of the Gameboy version. Well surprise -- I'll just come right out and say that, had the arcade version never existed, the Gameboy Mortal Kombat would still be considered a blasphemy to gaming. Everything that it does wrong by itself already makes it a terrible experience even without knowing how unfaithful to the arcade version it is. Let's face it -- the superficial people of the world wouldn't expect a decent conversion of the bloody arcade game on a little black 'n white portable unit, assuming that if it couldn't do the color graphics, it couldn't do the game. Well chalk a rare one up for superficial people -- forget about not being able to do the color, the gameplay is terrible! I mean really, although I didn't expect juggle combos to come flying out of the game, I at least expected somewhat responsive control. Hey, its color rival, Game Gear, had a version that controlled halfway decently. Fist of the North Star on Gameboy (whew, was that a long time ago or what...) had decently responsive control. Seriously folks: you push up, your guy should jump. You push A and your guy should kick. Instead, when you push up you can count the frames it takes for your fighter to get up in the air. Half a second for a crouch animation. Half a second for the jumping frame. Another second or so as you watch him or her float up and peak, and then another second as s/he lands on the ground. You ever see ghosting on a laptop or an old LCD when playing first person shooters? This was ghosting before ghosting was ghosting. Oh and try uppercutting. If you were trying to take snapshots of your character's uppercut animation, you could catch every single frame. Not only is the freaking animation slow, but the reaction time is too -- nearly a half second after you press the damned button, your punch comes out. So theoretically you'd have to really, really anticipate your opponent's movements and press Down and B when the other guy's half a [Gameboy] screen away. It makes the fact that the portable version is limited to two attack buttons very trivial. I can live with punch and kick, I did it with Game Gear. But I can't live with ppppuuuuuuuuuuunnnnnnccccchhhhh and kkkkkiiiiicccckkkkkk. Ridiculous. Speaking of the limitations of the cartridge, let me just get this out of the way real quick. They left Johnny Cage out of the Gameboy version, which really is no biggie. But I do question why they couldn't have left Kano out instead like in the Game Gear version. Perhaps it's just my personal preference, but I'd rather have Cage in there. To break down the moves, you've still got the sweep and roundhouse kicks. Strangely, the roundhouse knocks your opponent down to the edge of the screen. It's like Probe predicted Mortal Kombat II's game mechanics. Weird, but trivial. However, then you get down to the novelty of an MK game: the fatalities. Oh I'm sorry Nintendo, uhh, "finishing moves." So it was lame that they were stripped from the SNES version -- at least Sculptured Software got creative with it and produced some not-terrible ideas. So, what do you call replacing Sub-Zero's head rip not with an ice shatter, but a... uh... I don't even know what to call it, I think it's a dashing punch. No seriously, Sub really just... slides... with his fist extended... and knocks you down. Kano does the same thing except he kicks you. And Liu Kang? His finisher was lame to begin with, even in the arcade (cartwheel kick, then uppercut... ooh scary). But on the Gameboy version, dude doesn't even cartwheel. He crouches. For a second or two. Then he hits you. What... the... FCUK! Fortunately they kept Scorpion and Sonya intact. I'm surprised they did. Maybe the Probe people had some ounce of decency in them. Honestly I'm surprised you're still reading this review, but whatever. If you must know, Probe actually made a... uh... I guess you could kinda sorta call it an admirable attempt at visually reproducing mortal kombat on a 4-shade machine. (Screw it I'm not even going to capitalize "mortal kombat" anymore.) If you played mortal kombat on a black and white TV and imagined it a little bit more pixellated, you've got the picture of what it looks like on Gameboy. Some characters have blacklining around the edges, of course, to distinguish them from their equally grey backgrounds (sad isn't it...) but for the most part you've got a solid representation. But hey, if you've read from the beginning, you know that just because the characters look possibly halfway perhaps slightly halfway almost decent, it doesn't mean that (I'm just going to abbreviate now) gbmk is any fun to look at. With that crappy, slow animation I mentioned above, gbmk is too ugly to play. When you hear me, of all people, say that the graphics matter for a certain game, you know it's a serious issue. And damn, the graphics do really hurt the gameplay. When you start thinking about comparing them to Tiger LCD games, you've hit a new low. This game isn't even good to listen to, man. Forget about it. Turn it low if you must play it (and if you had any regard for your own health you won't), but turn the stupid sound off. It's just as bad as its Game Gear brethren -- it like, takes half the song from the victory tune in the arcade version and then it pastes on some weird chopped up tones afterwards for the courtyard stage... then it makes a decent attempt at recreating the music from Goro's lair for the bridge stage (Which, by the way, you can't knock anyone off of), but it still sounds awful. What trash. Seriously, this has got to be one of the worst games ever. I mean, I do realize it's hard to guage the worst games as opposed to the best -- there's so much garbage out there it's not even funny. So ok, let me put it this way, it's one of the worst games out there that I've ever played. Nevermind a bad conversion, a bad game period. Make the character's smaller. Give me blank backgrounds. Push the processor to its limits and drain battery life faster. Do SOMETHING to make the game play fluidly like it's supposed to. Anything. Even just... not... putting out the Gameboy conversion in the first place. That would have solved it. Quite possibly the worst game I have ever, ever played, eclipsing even Bill Laimbeer's Combat Basketball. This one's a goner. |
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