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- ~Mortal Kombat 2
-
- Reviewed By Martin Keen
-
-
- Computer game reviewers are supposed to be impartial and unbiased.
- If they are showing any signs of emotion which might adversely effect
- their judgement of a game then they shouldn't sit down to write a
- review. So at this very moment I hear my football team Southampton
- have just lost 3-0 away to Chelsea conceeding two goals in the last
- two minutes. It wouldn't take an expert psychologist to work out I'm
- not very happy.
-
- So... Mortal Kombat 2 is a complete pile of tripe which is enormously
- overrated (just like Rudd Gullit - who scored the second goal) and
- was written by Probe who are probably based in London somewhere near
- Chelsea. And we all know what a hell hole Chelsea is; full of theives
- robbing football teams of results in the last minutes.
-
- Ahem! OK I'm feeling a bit more adjective now. Now what was it I was
- writing about again? Oh yeah, Mortal Kombat 2.
-
- Mortal Kombat 2 is in fact a truly classy piece of software. The whole
- thing reaks of professionalism and so it should after whipping up
- quite a storm in the arcades and on those weedy console things. You'd
- expect a 486 PC to totally outshine a Super Nintendo and Mortal
- Kombat abliges (unlike Street Fighter 2). If you've got a fast 486 or
- a Pentium you'll be able to play this game in SVGA with full detail,
- which graphically is almost indistinguishable from the arcade version.
- As you're no doubt well aware all the characters in this beat-em-up
- are digitised (apart from Goro whose having four arms caused problems
- finding an actor to play his role) and they look fantastic. The
- backdrops too are quite magnificent full of animation and character.
-
- So on the presentation front its as close to the arcade version as
- could possibly be hoped but what about the gameplay? MK2 is a thriving
- cesspit of special moves. Each character have their own combinations
- of joystick movements which will cause one of any number of special
- moves to be activated. You'll find them by accident at first but
- gradually you'll find out most of them, then its time to move on to
- the next character and start again.
-
- Finishing moves are a riot. There is still the feared fatalities to
- play about with but also introduced are babe-alities and friendships.
- Babe-alities result in turning your opponent into a crying baby while
- friendship moves are a gesture of love - for instance Edward
- Sissorhands lookalike Baraka uses his knife arms to wipe up a quick
- oragami model.
-
- To execute most of the moves in MK2 requires a fair amount of skill so
- you can forget about using the keyboard. A four button joystick or
- joypad is absolutely essential. This may cause a problem when trying
- to play in two player mode because connecting two joysticks to the PC
- isn't always easy and may well require the use of an adapter. But its
- well worth the hassle, beating a real life human opponent is
- infinetly more satisfying than stuffing the CPU.
-
- If you're looking for a beat-em-up on your PC then this is undoubtably
- the one to go for, and its complexity and size should keep you
- discovering new moves for months to come.
-