Ultimate Mortal Kombat

November 19,2007 - This is really shaping up to be quite a year for handheld fighting titles. Bleach: The Blade of Fury was a pretty good game that had some nice touch screen features thrown into it. Now Midway has released Ultimate Mortal Kombat, which is essentially a direct port of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3. While the game doesn't make use of both screens entirely well, the arcade-to-DS translation works out greatly.

Ultimate Mortal Kombat comes packed with Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3. The game is much more playable than the early entries in the series and its responsiveness with the button commands is lightning quick. It's also known as the first game to input the dash command. The game's Choose Your Destiny mode forces you to pick between three bouts of tournament-style fighting, but the level of difficulty with these bouts isn't actually set--that's Midway's style. It's easy to plow through the first few fighters, but eventually you'll have to take out double the opponents. The final two battles in each tournament are just plain cheap due to Midway's fascination of making the AI hard for no apparent reason.

While the single player is solid, the main reason to get UMK is its solid online component. The game keeps track of your wins and losses, and with those numbers, Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection will try to match you with the best possible opponent. (Odds are you'll have a few more losses than wins because the AI is just that cheap.) The great thing about UMK on Wi-Fi is that it keeps track of a buddy list, rather than you having to search for a random friend code all the time. The online bouts that we had didn't experience much slowdown at all and it was really quite enjoyable. Of course, this is Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection--you'll eventually run into a few morons who shut their games off when they're on the verge of losing. The other bad thing is it doesn't keep track of that on your Win-Loss record. Again, it's cheap.

Puzzle Kombat, a puzzle game a little too similar to Puzzle Fighter, also comes packed into the cartridge. The premise here is to create as many chains as possible in order to pummel a respective combo at your opponent, knocking him or her out. The multi-colored bricks can only be purged when you drop a special kind of brick, or if you drop a bomb that takes out any color. The main thing you'll have to look out for is that your opponent (if playing single player) will always have more favorable pieces. So again, it's cheap. Puzzle Kombat is also playable on Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection, and no slowdown has ever occurred during our run-throughs.

As stated, Midway didn't really do much to make use of the many features the DS possesses. The bottom screen is where all the gameplay occurs, but aside from the menus--nothing is "touchable." As for the top screen, in UMK3, the command list, exclusive to each character, is laid out. This is actually a great feature for those who aren't hardcore fighter enthusiasts, or for those who simply don't like figuring out what button does what. It also highlights the Fatality, Fatality II, and Babality for each fighter. For those of you who aren't in the know, fatalities and babalities (and animalities) are explicit finishing moves that can only be done when you've got the match in the bag. In Puzzle Fighter, the top screen has the two characters waiting, pummeling each other, and well... waiting.

The game's graphics are in-tune with the norm from the 32-bit days. Since it's Mortal Kombat, the game that brought about the birth of the ESRB, expect pools of blood and exploding corpses everywhere. The game is rated M for a reason.

The sound is also a Midway trademark. You'll hear fighters' war cries, yelling in pain, and Liu Kang overdoing the Bruce Lee moans of victory. In addition to this you'll have the various "FINISH HIM!" and random pictures of the game developers' shocking faces when you pull off a crazy chain of combos. It's all both funny and nostalgic--a winning formula.

Mortal Kombat is an acquired taste and is looked down upon by most coin-op fighter enthusiasts because of its lack of strategy and its stiffness of control. UMK3 got rid of the stiffness, and the game truly is playable on the DS if you can get by the fact that the D-Pad is so small. If you're looking for a Mortal Kombat game you can play online or on the go, Ultimate Mortal Kombat should well worth a buy because it's such an excellent port and Puzzle Kombat is just an added bonus. But remember, the game is exceedingly cheap, and we're not talking about money.

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