~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.