“The Mortal Kombat Warriors Possess Expert Special Moves.”
“Enter Shao Khan’s™ [sic] deadly tournament… If you dare!”
North American front cover.
The past few months spent doing ludicrously long essays on fascinatingly flawed games have been fun and fruitful. True labors of love, the whole lot of ’em. But you know what? Not every bad game is gonna be able to get that same level of highly detailed treatment. When it comes down to it, not every title has the story of its development revealed for us to relay — its troubled production laid bare for us to pontificate on. Sometimes, all we can do is give our best guesses as to the “what went wrong,” and let the final product do most of the talking for itself. While there may well be behind-the-scenes stories still waiting to be told, we can’t tell ‘em until former developers step forward to divulge them. That’s the trouble with covering this bad games beat: Not every article can be a hot scoop or intriguing insight. On occasion, the best we can provide to you is a standard review, and our takes on why a given game doesn’t work as it was likely intended.
Bearing all that in mind, we present to you Mortal Kombat Trilogy‘s ill-advised conversion to Tiger’s equally ill-fated Game.com. It’s a baffling bit of handheld handiwork — a version of the game so pared-down and compromised as to leave you wondering why the attempt was even made in the first place? The answer likely comes down to a matter of money, as it usually does: Tiger probably paid a pretty penny for the license, and determined to deliver something despite the mounting issues development would’ve faced. Still, there are a few particularly baffling questions left as-of-yet unanswered: How was it allowed to misspell Shao Kahn’s name? Why are several kombatants missing their most recognizable special moves? And how – how in the Hell, I ask – did the developers determine who made it onto the game’s finalized character roster? We’re talking about a game where Ermac and Rain made the cut, but not Sub-Zero or Scorpion?!
Brace yourself, dear readers. For the time has come to travel once again to Outworld, and survive the kombat gauntlet in store for us. Where we’ve previously covered the original Mortal Kombat‘s incarnation on Game Boy, and determined that the team at Probe Software had perhaps mistakenly prioritized presentation over gameplay; Mortal Kombat Trilogy on Game.com represents a more measured balance of the aspects, and yet still similarly fails to capture the magic of the fatal fighting franchise. We’ll do our damnedest to break down the hows and whys: By first exploring the console-exclusive basis for the handheld conversion, battling against the beleaguered black-and-white rendition, and ultimately rendering our verdict on the contending cartridge. Will we deliver a bone-crunching ‘Brutality’ onto it, or argue in favor of a more favorable ‘Friendship?’ Only time will tell… But it’s probably gonna be the former, isn’t it? I mean, we’re talking about a fighting game on the Tiger Game.com, here. There’s only one way to find out, I suppose: I challenge you to read about Mortal Kombat Trilogy!
