The subject of which system had the best port of Mortal Kombat led to huge debates at school when I was a kid. Of course by default everyone just claimed their system had the best version. Now try for a second to imagine how someone who owned the Game Boy port felt. Nintendo’s black and white handheld was often subjected to lazy scaled down versions of popular titles. The hardware simply couldn’t keep up with gameplay in many genres. Fighting games were a big one. I never actually met anyone who owned the portable version of Mortal Kombat. If your parents picked you up MK for the Game Boy then you probably weren’t happy about it. I decided to give this port a second chance specifically for our review today. Let’s take a look at Mortal Kombat for the Game Boy.
Mortal Kombat focuses around a tournament and its host of fighters. The otherworldly sorcerer Tsang Tsung is the brains behind this operation. It is only by means of Mortal Kombat that his evil forces can enter Earthrealm from the fantastical Outworld. The heroes enter the fight to stop this from happening, but not every one of the playable characters is a good guy. The basic story is still here in this port, but it’s kind of hard to tell if i’m honest. There’s almost no in-game explanation of what’s going on, or why anyone is fighting. The point is they are, and you’ve got to dish out a healthy portion of knuckle sandwiches to win.
The roster is surprisingly intact in this release. The only main character that didn’t make the cut was Johnny Cage. While he’s missed the developers tried to make up for it by offering up the boss character Goro via a cheat code. In my opinion this is a fair trade. It at least gives the Game Boy version one exclusive feature. Unfortunately Reptile is also absent. He was hidden away in the arcade and home console versions anyway. This is why I’m sure most won’t even notice that the green ninja couldn’t be bothered to make an appearance here. The characters, and their backstories are virtually unchanged. It’s not as if Mortal Kombat was a pinnacle of story telling so the effort hardly matters.
This game is your basic one-on-one two dimensional fighting game. You begin by selecting from one of six characters. You are then thrust straight into the arcade mode. It’s disappointing that there are no other options. Then again, I did warn you that this was a lazy port. The developers couldn’t even be bothered to include an option to link the game up for multiplayer matches. Not that you’d want to play this version with a friend, but it just goes to show how little effort was put into this one. Multiplayer has always been one of the big appeals of the franchise, and so already we’re off to a bad start. I did want something more though. Varying difficulty levels, or even a sound test. There’s no reason Mortal Kombat on the Game Boy has to be so barebones.
The big point of controversy between the Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo versions of this release was the violence. Fortunately due to the horrible quality of the Game Boy’s screen it’s a moot point here. I honestly can’t tell if there’s blood, or even sweat dripping off of these guys. The graphical fidelity didn’t allow for much of anything. The fatality finishing moves are surprisingly intact, but good luck trying to make out blood, gore, or really much of anything when it comes to them. Special moves return, and really spice up the gameplay when compared to the simple punches and kicks that each characters have access to. As far as I can tell all of these make their not so triumphant return in this port. Honestly I couldn’t figure out how to perform most of them because of how badly the inputs register in this version of the game.
Unfortunately the Game Boy hardware just wasn’t up to the task of running the gameplay engine in place here. The framerate stays remarkably steady, but at around two or three frames per second. It feels like you’re watching a slideshow with very little interaction. By fighter standards this is simply an unplayable mess. To make matters worse this game suffers from the most input lag I’ve ever seen. The game can take up to a real life second to register inputs sometimes. You press the punch button, and wonder what happened only to see your character throw a fist long after the fact. What’s more is the game has reaction lag as well. This is especially true with uppercuts. It’s next to impossible to tell if these actually land at the time of input. You literally have to wait to see if it worked.
Performing special moves is an absolute chore, and is more cumbersome than in any other fighting game I’ve ever played. The button inputs are largely the same as they were on the home console versions, but they’re scaled down to accommodate only two face buttons. Unfortunately you have to input the directions and face button presses extremely slowly or else the game can’t register them. It feels like you’re playing in slow motion. While playing I found myself prone to actual headaches. It almost feels like you must slow down my mind in order to have any success whatsoever here. Maybe the developers should have forgone this port because it’s a real mess.
Did I mention that the graphics are a mess? Because that’s important. Screenshots don’t tell the whole story. The digitized characters were very impressive by Game Boy standards. Some of the backgrounds are kind of neat looking as well. Unfortunately everything else is absolutely terrible. The frame rate and animations are so bad that it genuinely looks like characters are warping around instead of moving. It’s downright comical. Not only that but many frames linger for awkward amounts of time. The best example of this is when you perform a throw. There’s no actual animation for this. Your character stands still while the opponent gets thrown.
There are also only three stages here. I mean, come on. A more minor complaint is the fact that without a color display it’s tough to distinguish Scorpion from Sub-Zero on the character select screen. The developers skipped typing their names out on the selection screen which is a little hilarious to be honest. Unless you know where their tile is you have to guess and then reset if you got the wrong one. The only thing worse than the graphics is the music. The developers certainly did not play on the strengths of the hardware. Instead they tried to cram the soundtrack into hardware clearly not capable of reproducing it. The end result is an assault on the senses. If you absolutely must play this version do yourself a favor and mute it.
