Path: menudo.uh.edu!usenet From: s.dempsey@genie.geis.com (Steve Dempsey) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.reviews Subject: REVIEW: Mortal Kombat Followup-To: comp.sys.amiga.games Date: 3 Jan 1994 17:06:28 GMT Organization: The Amiga Online Review Column - ed. Daniel Barrett Lines: 251 Sender: amiga-reviews@math.uh.edu (comp.sys.amiga.reviews moderator) Distribution: world Message-ID: <2g9jak$89@menudo.uh.edu> Reply-To: s.dempsey@genie.geis.com (Steve Dempsey) NNTP-Posting-Host: karazm.math.uh.edu Keywords: game, martial arts, beat-em-up, commercial PRODUCT NAME Mortal Kombat BRIEF DESCRIPTION A popular martial arts "beat-em-up" arcade game ported to the Amiga. AUTHOR/COMPANY INFORMATION Name: Program Copyright by Acclaim Ent. Inc. Published by Virgin Interactive Ent. (Europe) Ltd. Address: Virgin Interactive Ent. (Europe) Ltd. 338A Ladbroke Grove London, W10 5AH UK Telephone: (081) 964-8242 FAX: (081) 960-9900 LIST PRICE Purchased at local Amiga dealer for $36.00 (US). SPECIAL HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE REQUIREMENTS HARDWARE Compatible with Amiga 500, 500+, 600, 1200, 1500. See INSTALLATION, below, for tips on getting the program to run on an A4000. Requires 1 or 2 button joystick and 1MB RAM. SOFTWARE None mentioned. COPY PROTECTION Disk-based. Not hard-drive installable. MACHINE USED FOR TESTING Amiga 4000/030 2MB Chip RAM, 4MB Fast RAM 450 MB hard drive AmigaDOS 3.0 BACKGROUND If you occasionally go to the arcade, you probably have already noticed the game Mortal Kombat. Many months ago, Mortal Kombat was ported over to the SNES and Sega Genesis machines. Today, Mortal Kombat is one of the hottest games selling on those two platforms. Fortunately, there was an announcement that Mortal Kombat would be released for the IBM and Amiga computers. (Yes, Amiga!) The greatest fear of arcade ports, however, is that they will not hold true to their original design, often metamorphosing into poor, unplayable pieces of junk. This is NOT true with Mortal Kombat! Much of the game play is preserved making it a very enjoyable piece of software. INSTALLATION AND GETTING STARTED When I first opened the package, I immediately threw the boot disk into DF0: on my 4000/030. Unfortunately, the program did not boot up! The box specifically states that Mortal Kombat is indeed compatible with the A1200 but makes no mention of the A4000. Thus, I first immediately tried all boot-up options (holding the two mouse buttons down at boot time and selecting), but still nothing. Next, I tried various options with the program Degrader, which "degrades" the system to allow older software to work. But I still got nowhere. Now, you can imagine the frustration on my face after feverishly trying to get Mortal Kombat to work but getting nowhere at all. After pitying myself for hours, I logged into one of the BBS's that I call and found this program called the "1.3 Bootup disk". The 1.3 Bootup disk allows Kickstart 1.3 to be allocated into RAM, surviving resets, thus allows non-standard DOS disks to boot up. Nevertheless, I stuck in the 1.3 Bootup disk and let it go. When I was faced with the old familiar "Insert Workbench" display, I threw in the Mortal Kombat bootup disk, and IT WORKED! I have heard that other 4000 users have figured out ways to boot Mortal Kombat using Degrader and the boot menu, but I encourage them to get ahold of the 1.3 Bootup disk, since it is much easier to use. Mortal Kombat comes on just two disks and does in fact support two floppy drives. If you only have one disk drive, however, Mortal Kombat seems to take advantage of any extra RAM above 1MB to minimize disk swapping. Most importantly, there was NO disk swapping at all during the actual game play. This allowed myself actually to "kick-back" while playing the game. Unfortunately, Mortal Kombat is NOT hard drive installable and that's a real bummer. QUALITY I pretty much assume that Mortal Kombat is programmed using 32 colors. Now, if you never saw Mortal Kombat before, Mortal Kombat uses digitized images for its characters, making it a very "realistic" type of game in its class. What you see on the screen is a very good representation of Mortal Kombat's digitized characters for 32 colors. There is a multitude of background screens in which to Kombat. (Which the computer chooses for you.) Unfortunately, most of the screens are static, making it very plain except in one background shot where I saw a witch moving across the screen. Game speed is critical to this type of game, and Mortal Kombat doesn't let you down. The characters' speed and fluidness of movement are essentially preserved in all aspects. For example, doing a roundhouse kick actually looks and "feels" real. In fact, nearly all the martial arts moves take on a realistic approach both visually and acutely. For those who have a two button joystick, you are allowed to use the second button as a "kick" inducer. Unfortunately, I do not have a two button joystick, and thus was unable to test that function. Even with just a one button stick, however, the controls are fairly easy to remember and initiate. Even so, I would definitely recommend a two button stick for overall simplicity. THE GAME Mortal Kombat uses digitized images to represent various characters. These characters are: Johnny Cage, Kano, Raiden, Liu Kang, Scorpion, Sub-Zero, and Sonya Blade. Each character has his/her own strengths and weaknesses. In addition, each character has his/her own "death blow" move. A death blow move will instantly kill the opponent. Note that the documentation does not reveal the death blow moves, so you must figure them out yourself. The object of the game is to win all matches against each opponent and eventually fight the legendary "Goro". Note that there is also a two player mode if you have another joystick. In this case, the two players fight till the end. The option menu will allow yourself to choose various game difficulty levels. I would strongly suggest picking "Easy" in the beginning as it is very tough to win even at the easy level at first. Fighting the other computer opponents is really fun. You apply various offensive martial arts moves to the opponent while at the same time defending from his/her move. After you play a while, you will notice that certain characters can beat other characters without too much damage, and it works the other way around too, so it's a learning experience to play around with various characters. Towards the end of a fight in which one of the character gets "beaten up", you can (if you won) apply the death move. The death move is actually pretty visually gory. In fact, the box of Mortal Kombat states that the game is "not suitable for person under 15 years of age." It can be quite thrilling though, for the older crowd. DOCUMENTATION Mortal Kombat comes with a high quality, glossy, manual dedicated to the Amiga. It is an excellently written manual with nearly all moves (except death blow) illustrated, and information about the "kombatants". I also received three cut-out stencils with various Mortal Kombat logos and such. A very nice addition, if you ask me. LIKES AND DISLIKES I liked the game play and conversion quality of Mortal Kombat. It is a very fast and fun game to play. Support of the two button joystick is also greatly welcomed. Disk swapping on a one drive system with lots of RAM was minimalized, and even non-existent during actual game play making it very stressless. A great problem in Mortal Kombat was getting it to work on my A4000. I am completely disgusted with the programmers who obviously didn't even bother to test the game on an A4000. Come on folks, a LOT of us game users out there have A4000's! Speaking of which, why is it that the game is not hard drive installable? Let us remember that a LOT of game users also have hard drives that we would love to have filled with a good game like Mortal Kombat! I pray that an AGA version of Mortal Kombat will come out soon. I have heard that a CD-32 version is planned. Mortal Kombat could really use 256 colors and take more advantage of faster processors to make the game even better -- especially with the background screens. COMPARISON TO OTHER PLATFORMS I have an SNES at home with Mortal Kombat. How good is the SNES version compared to the Amiga version, you ask? I would have to give the SNES the edge since it has more colors on screen (let's get that AGA version out!), much better joypad support (well, I won't nail it too hard on this one since Mortal Kombat actually went through the effort of getting two button joystick support!), and finally, the SNES has animated background screens which make the game a bit more pleasing. I am happy to say, however, that character movement speed and agility are very much the same. I have not seen the IBM version of Mortal Kombat, but I have heard that it will support 256 colors and be hard drive installable. I can safely assume that it will require more than 1MB of RAM, however. Since the IBM version can be hard drive installable, it gives absolutely no excuse that the Amiga should not also have it. COMPARISON TO OTHER SIMILAR GAMES ON THE AMIGA The only other top-notch "beat-em-up" for the Amiga I can think of (and own) is Body Blows by Team 17. Body Blows requires significantly more disk swaps, even in the middle of actually playing the game, which is very irritating. Mortal Kombat is definitely more fluid and fast than Body Blows. Mortal Kombat is also better in actual game play, making it much more challenging and rewarding. BUGS The only bug I found was that mysteriously the audio would sometimes get a bit distorted but game play would be unaffected. It got to the point, however, that I would be forced to reboot the game since the audio distortion would get very irritating. I do not know why this happens and can estimate it only happens about 1 in 15 times I play the game. CONCLUSIONS Mortal Kombat is an excellent game and definitely the best beat-em-up on the Amiga by far. The conversion quality is top-notch and makes good use of the old graphic chipset. If you are looking for a good arcade game, go out and buy this one. I guarantee you that you will not be disappointed. COPYRIGHT NOTICE Copyright 1993 Steve Dempsey. All rights reserved. This article may be reprinted in any non-commercial publication and/or online magazine. --- Daniel Barrett, Moderator, comp.sys.amiga.reviews Send reviews to: amiga-reviews-submissions@math.uh.edu Request information: amiga-reviews-requests@math.uh.edu Moderator mail: amiga-reviews@math.uh.edu Anonymous ftp site: math.uh.edu, in /pub/Amiga/comp.sys.amiga.reviews