Fighting on the Nintendo DS goes online courtesy of Ultimate Mortal Kombat, a two-game compilation that contains a quality port of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 and a version of Puzzle Kombat, the MK-themed puzzle game that Midway inserted as an extra in Mortal Kombat: Deception. By itself, as a single-player game, it's a bit of a dud. But if you're a fighting aficionado with a DS and wireless access to the Internet, this is a pretty cool package.

Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 was the last 2D game in the MK series and, by far, the fastest of the bunch. It added a run button that the previous games didn't have, amped up the combo system, and added a lot of interesting new characters, all while maintaining the game's digital, photographic look. The finishing moves got more ridiculous, too, with animalities--where your fighter turns into some kind of animal and does something to your opponent--joining the regular fatalities, babalities, and friendships. But even the regular fatalities became crazier. For example, Liu Kang can make an MK2 arcade machine drop out of the sky to crush his victim. It wasn't as serious as the Mortal Kombat games that came before it, and it's certainly not as serious as the darker set of MK games that appeared on the previous generation of consoles. It's goofy, but it's also one of the better 2D fighters from its era. It controls just fine on the DS, and it's still a lot of fun.

There's a catch, though. The Mortal Kombat series has been saddled with some of the worst computer-controlled fighters in the history of the genre. Although the first three fights are easy, afterward the artificial intelligence shifts into "win" gear, where it just reacts to every single little thing you do. It's not a fair fight, and it's not a fun fight. The only realistic way to win is to exploit its reactive nature and trick it, which isn't too hard. On the other hand, it also isn't any fun. If you want to enjoy Ultimate Mortal Kombat, be prepared to play it against someone else.

You can play multiplayer against another person using only one copy of the game, but you'll be limited to a couple of characters, so this isn't really viable for long-term excitement. Locally, you'll need two copies of the game to play it right, or you can connect to the Internet and seek out competition online. The online mode works surprisingly well, and in most cases, our matches against other humans were free from noticeable latency. However, the occasional match was sluggish and choppy, so as with most things involving an Internet connection, your mileage may vary. The game keeps track of your rating, which is a score based on your wins and losses. You can match up against friends using the standard friend-code system, or jump in against random players. All of this stuff also applies to Puzzle Kombat.

Puzzle Kombat is a blocks-and-crash-gems style of puzzle game. It's effectively a rip-off of Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo, but with Mortal Kombat combatants instead of Street Fighter characters. Each character can pull out a different special move by filling up a meter. These moves include the ability to jumble up your opponent's pit, to remove blocks from your own, and so on. It's a functional but unexciting puzzle game that made for a cute bonus back in Mortal Kombat: Deception, where it was one part of a game with many modes. Here, where it gets equal billing with UMK3, it comes across as a little stale.

Graphically, the games look just fine. UMK3 looks like the arcade version but smaller. As a result, the characters are somewhat less detailed than they were in the arcades. For example, you won't really be able to see the look on Stryker's face as he straps dynamite to his foe and then plugs his ears for the blast. Also, there are a handful of pauses and black frames that pop up when you perform fatalities, change background stages by uppercutting your enemy through the ceiling, or do anything else that forces the game to quickly load some new graphics from the cart. The game uses the inactive screen to show you your fighter's special moves, which is useful if you don't already have them memorized. The music is sharp, and the sound effects are good as well.

If you're a DS-owning Mortal Kombat fan, this is a great offering that's certainly worth owning, but only if you're properly equipped to take your DS online. You probably won't want to play alone for more than 15 minutes, so be sure to take that into account before you buy.

Fighter Destiny 2 is a sequel that rests solely on its predecessor's innovative gameplay mechanics and doesn't really offer anything new. For N64 fighting-game fans who may have missed the first game, the second one definitely deserves a look. However, the game's lack of new graphical gameplay and features make it hard even for fans of the first game to see the difference between the two.

The one thing that really sets Fighter Destiny 2 apart from the other N64 fighters is the game's point-scoring system. Instead of simply pummeling opponents with various moves until their life bars have been depleted, the game uses a point-scoring system to determine the winner. Strategies vary in point value; for example, knockdowns are worth more points than ringouts. The scoring system makes playing the game a bit more interesting than most fighting games, since it allows players to employ different strategies for earning points, which varies the gameplay. For instance, some players may try to accumulate points by going for easy one-point ringouts, while others may go for more points all at once by taking their opponents down with a riskier throw.

The game features a standard fighting-game mode that allows you to go through the game, beating opponent after opponent. There is also a Tekken-styled training mode that lets you see and attempt to master each character's moves. The game even has an odd but entertaining board-game mode in which you compete with others. The objective here is to complete the challenges you land on to advance.

Graphically, Fighter Destiny 2 is a decent-looking fighting game. The fighter models seem somewhat detailed and vaguely realistic. The nondescript arenas and fighting platforms are adequate. Fans of the first Fighters Destiny will undoubtedly notice that the graphics haven't changed a bit. In fact, aside from the game's interface and a few of the special effects when fighters are struck, the games look very similar. The sequel's sound hasn't changed much either. The game still has the same various grunts and thuds from the first game that don't sound very real but seem to fit the game rather well.

In the end, Fighter Destiny 2 is incredibly similar to the original - so much so that even fans of the first game will be let down by the sequel's identical graphics, gameplay, and overall lack of innovation. For those of you who are interested in Fighter Destiny 2 and haven't played the original, pick up a used copy of Fighters Destiny first.

Mortal Kombat 4 Review

The Mortal Kombat series is one of the premier gaming series' around today. The series, which until now utilized digitized actors to give the game an extra layer of realism, has been the topic of comic books, movies, action figures, and even Senate hearings. The fourth time around the game has gone polygonal, giving the developers much more leeway when it comes to adding new moves, holds, and characters. Also, weapons have been added into the mix, with each character possessing a different sword, club, or staff to beat his enemies with.

The storyline of MK4 picks up the loose ends left behind by both MK3 and MK Mythologies: Sub-Zero. With Shao Kahn defeated, Shinnok picks up the slack as the main bad guy. However, he is also a selectable character, which left arcade players with no big boss to look forward to. To remedy that, the home version contains MK1's four-armed bad boy, Goro. Goro looks terrific in 3D, moves very fluidly, and has all the great moves he had in MK1, as well as a few additional ones. He isn't selectable from the start, but he'll be available via a code. Returning characters include Scorpion, Sub-Zero, Liu Kang, Johnny Cage, Sonya, and Raiden. Most of the old characters maintain their old moves, and add a new one here and there. The new characters fit very well into the MK universe, a welcome change from most fighting game sequels.

The graphics of the N64 version aren't as good as the arcade version. That's pretty much a given. But they still look very good, make great use of light sourcing, and run at a very high speed. There are a few moments where the frame rate dips, but not enough to cause a problem with the gameplay. The sound is definitely the high-water mark for the N64. The music sounds very nice, and the game has all the speech from the arcade, including the intro and endings. This is quite a surprise, considering the large amount of speech in the game.

The gameplay is very close to the arcade, but the N64 controller gets in the way. The default setup simply isn't very good, but with a few changes and some practice, you'll become proficient fairly quickly. Some of the fatalities in the game are much harder to do on the N64 pad, as they require you to hit multiple buttons at the same time. The combo system has been greatly simplified. Each character can start a combo the same way, and some of the more damaging moves in the previous games (the uppercut, for instance) have been weakened. The introduction of weapons seems silly at first, but once you've played for a while and gotten used to using them, they really do add a new dimension to the game. Each character has two fatalities, and there are two stage fatalities. The fatalities look nice, but too many of them are merely 3D updates to old fatalities, and the new fatalities in MK4 simply aren't that great. It would have been nice to see some more innovation here. A few modes have been added to the game, including a practice mode, which shows all the characters' moves and fatalities. There are also three types of endurance fights, a team battle mode, and a tournament mode.

The N64 has been hurting for a good fighting game since its inception. MK4 finally fills that gap. If you haven't liked any of the previous MK titles, MK4 probably won't win you over. But this is an excellent translation of a good arcade title, and fans of the arcade version won't be disappointed at all.

X-Men: Children of the Atom Review

The PC is at a loss for good fighting games - anyone interested in the genre by now owns a game console such as the Sony PlayStation, feeds quarters into arcade machines regularly, or both. Once in a while, however, a game hits the PC that disturbs the status quo and proves that the PC is indeed a viable platform for fighting games, despite popular opinion. In this particular case, that game is X-Men: Children of the Atom, an admirable and near-exact conversion of Capcom's 1995 arcade hit, which pits 10 Marvel Comics' mutant fighters against one another in a Street Fighter II-on-cappuccino-style battle to the finish. The impressively fluid animation of the arcade title is retained perfectly in the PC version, as is the audio and most of the gameplay. What's more, X-Men retails for a fraction of the cost of most PC games and will work fine on just about any modern machine.

The look of X-Men translates marvelously in the PC conversion - the vibrant color of the arcade is completely intact, as is each and every lovingly hand-drawn frame of animation. However, the game runs at an unpleasantly low resolution and the frantic speed of the arcade is somewhat lost. Each sound effect and speech sample (the X-Men's voices are done by the same folks who speak their parts in the Saturday morning cartoon) is present, while the upbeat synthesized soundtrack rings loud and clear through redbook CD audio. X-Men: Children of the Atom is an aesthetically powerful package.

Surprisingly enough, those who mastered the game's six-button mechanics at the arcade will have a pleasant time using the keyboard alone. However, X-Men cannot be played seriously except with a multibutton gamepad of some sort, through which it controls pristinely. Special moves can be unleashed with surgical precision, and above all else, the game feels just like the arcade. And yet, a terribly important facet is left unattended: the ability to string together multiple punches and kicks into massive custom chain combos is conspicuously missing. And, to add insult to injury, the computer opponent will use those chain combos on you without hesitation even though you cannot use them to retaliate. A simple patch to fix this problem would make a world of difference for arcade purists.

As is, X-Men: Children of the Atom serves up some killer one-on-one martial arts action that's more than enough to tide over those looking for a quick fix of fists and foul play. Fans of the arcade game will be disappointed by the missing chain combos, but others won't mind for even a second, as they'll be enjoying X-Men's slick visuals and cool character designs and wondering all the while as to why the PC doesn't enjoy more games of this category.

Marvel Nemesis: Rise of the Imperfects Review

Marvel Nemesis: Rise of the Imperfects, Electronic Arts' new fighting game, has already appeared on the Xbox, PS2, GameCube, and PSP. Next up for the Nemesis treatment is the Nintendo DS, a portable system with very different capabilities from those other four platforms. The DS's touch screen and voice-recognition features present a lot of interesting gameplay opportunities, which, if used correctly, can more than make up for the portable's lack of graphical horsepower and analog control. Alas, that isn't at all the case here. Instead, Marvel Nemesis on the DS makes very poor use of the unique abilities of the hardware, and the unfortunates who decide to rent or buy this game will be stuck with nothing more than a filthy, horribly buggy version of an already middling game.

On the DS, Marvel Nemesis: Rise of the Imperfects' story goes from heavily garbled to completely incomprehensible. There are a few cartoon panels between each mission, but they never consist of more than two sentences of grammatically incorrect text. The basic facts are that The Imperfects, six superpowered thugs in the employ of evil genius Niles Van Roekel, are out to cause trouble in New York City so the boss can get his hands on a heavily guarded suit of alien armor...or something along those lines. In any case, there's ample excuse for Marvel's superheroes, led by crowd favorites Spider-Man, Iron Man, Elektra, and The Thing, to go up against the nasty ol' Imperfects in a series of one-on-one battles. The battles take place in fully destructible environments that are heavily seeded with objects you can turn into convenient missiles or bludgeons, all at the touch of a button.

It's a chore to wring any kind of entertainment out of Marvel Nemesis: Rise of the Imperfects. This is partly because you must play through the game's arcade mode endlessly to unlock content. You only start with two playable characters: Wolverine and The Human Torch. All other content--including characters, concept art, arenas, and alternate costumes--cost "battle points," which you earn by trashing one CPU-controlled opponent after another as fast as you can. Occasionally the game will offer you a chance to wager battle points on an upcoming fight, but you never know when you'll get this opportunity, and you can only bet a maximum of 500 points on a battle, which is a fairly trivial amount. Unlocking Daredevil, for instance, costs 8,000 battle points. It's also possible to wager points during a multiplayer battle.

Marvel Nemesis' gameplay doesn't compare favorably to any of the other versions of the game, let alone any competing games on the Nintendo DS. The controls have gone from simplistic to cretinous. You can toggle auto-aim using the left shoulder button, but there's no reason to ever take it off, because there's no point to free-running around the level to pick up and throw objects. Furthermore, the game's environmental attacks have gone from somewhat overpowered to completely useless. Furthermore, your lock-on function reacts far too slowly to your opponent's movement. If you're in the middle of an attack and your enemy shifts to your left or right, your character won't adjust accordingly, as it takes a heavy fraction of a second for him or her to awkwardly pivot in place to face the right direction again.

The touch screen's primary use is to activate your character's motion and flight powers, which have no real use in this game, even on the multitiered levels. This is because you can fall any distance without suffering any damage, and your opponent will follow you wherever you go. Sometimes one of the characters will fall off a tall building, causing the game to pause for a few seconds before simply resetting the battle on the roof. Usually, all you need to do to win is maneuver the bad guy in to a corner so you can beat him to a pulp using your regular combo attack. You can also use the touch screen to perform your character's single finishing move by tapping in an elementary combo at the end of a match.

It's quite obvious that Marvel Nemesis: Rise of the Imperfects didn't receive adequate play testing before its release. It's simply riddled with graphical, artificial-intelligence, and hit-detection glitches. Yes, most of the walls and floors are destructible, but they also have a nasty habit of disappearing at odd times so that your character appears to be standing on thin air. The CPU isn't much good at attacking you in any fashion, but every once in a while, CPU opponents will just start attacking a corner of the screen, even if you're standing in the middle of it. At a few points, we were even able to toss an enemy through a solid wall, or out of the screen entirely (the match went another 50 seconds before we won by default).

Marvel Nemesis is not a good-looking game by the standards of the Nintendo DS. Most of the neat lighting tricks from the other versions have been dispensed with, as have a large portion of the character animations. What's left is a blurry hash of strange-looking combat, weak explosions, smoke and particle effects, and bland skeletal environments. Whatever visual ?lan and comic-book styling this game possessed on other platforms is gone. The sound is very mediocre for this type of game, and the effects are perhaps even a little understated. In any case, they're a pretty quotidian collection of beat-'em-up thumps, bashes, and breaking glass.

Marvel Nemesis: Rise of the Imperfects shouldn't have been made for the Nintendo DS. The system doesn't have the capabilities to display the other versions' main strengths, which lie in their graphics and online multiplayer modes. Add this to the fact that this game is clearly an unfinished product (that still costs $35), and you've got a real lemon on your hands. Don't buy, rent, or otherwise play this game. You'll regret it.

Medabots AX is a melee fighting game based on a popular cartoon series. There are two versions available--Metabee and Rokusho--each with its own selection of bots, parts, and collectible medals. Much like in games like Pokémon and Robopon, your goal in Medabots AX is to use your robots in battle to defeat the other Medabot trainers. Unlike Pokémon or Robopon, however, Medabots AX does not have a lengthy quest or a detailed storyline. Therein lies the problem: Medabots AX is just too basic to warrant serious attention, let alone the purchase of two cartridges.

The gameplay is similar to that of Super Smash Bros. on the GameCube. You and your opponent both have two Medabots: a leader and a partner. During combat, all four robots battle against one another until one of the leaders is defeated. If you win, you'll gain experience points and possibly earn a new part to add to your robot. If you lose, you'll still gain experience, but you may lose a part.

The fighting is simple, but it's also terribly repetitive. The battles take place in large environments that are full of inclines, water hazards, and moving platforms. Your robot has arm and head attachments that you can use by pressing the B button and a direction on the control pad. Depending on the parts you've selected, these attachments will be used to perform a long-range, short-range, or grapple attack or a defensive maneuver. You can jump and block, and you can also give your robot partner various instructions with the R button. Due to the fast-paced nature of the game, however, the only practical strategy is to get right into your opponent's face, mash the GBA's buttons, and trigger your "medaforce attack" once the meter is full.

The lack of strategy in Medabots AX definitely knocks it down a peg or two. Each battle plays like the one before, and the strategy involved in the swapping of parts and medals is secondary to your ability to button-mash. The two-player multiplayer mode is more enjoyable, primarily because human opponents don't fall into the same attack patterns as the CPU.

Although there are two versions of the game, the differences between them are minor. Each has the same set of 15 locations and 30 trainers, many of which are drawn right from the television series. In the Metabee version, your initial robot is skilled at long-range attacks and weak at hand-to-hand combat. Conversely, the initial robot in the Rokushu version is tough up close, but feeble at a distance.

As you defeat the other trainers, you'll earn interchangeable parts and medals that you can use to create new Medabots with various strengths and abilities. In all, there are 120 different parts and 12 different medals to collect, but 20 parts and four medals are unique to each version of the game. As such, the only way to create all 30 Medabots and gather all 12 medals is to trade with friends who own the other version of the game. While trading elements suit RPGs like Pokémon, they don't really fit with this style of fighting game. As such, the interchangeable parts aspect is neat, but it doesn't justify making two people play such a repetitive game in order to build all 30 robots.

Fans of the cartoon will enjoy Medabots AX much more than players who are unfamiliar with its subject matter. Popular characters, such as Mr. Referee and the Rubberobo gang, appear frequently, and the visuals and music reflect the colorful, upbeat nature of the show. The robots are large and detailed, and the environments are full of superfluous touches like waterfalls, neon signs, and drifting clouds. The pregame introduction sequence borrows music from the cartoon, and there are a variety of sound clips during battle that further improve the game's presentation.

Nevertheless, the slick cartoon overlays don't negate the fact that Medabots AX is just a so-so fighting game. Even those who watch the series religiously will be hard-pressed to remain interested.

Deadliest Warrior: Legends Review

If, through some fluke of space and time, Genghis Khan and William Wallace had clashed on the battlefield, who would have won? Deadliest Warrior: Legends doesn't provide a definitive answer to this question, but it does suggest that the battle would have been bloody and possibly absurd. Khan might have broken Wallace's leg and chopped off his arm before twisting his neck with his bare hands. Or perhaps the two warriors would have slashed at each other for a few seconds before Wallace's sword miraculously passed right through Khan's body, instantly making Khan go as limp as a rag doll. Legends is a brutal and goofy game that's good for some guffaws. But the short and silly battles and technical problems of this fighter give it about as much longevity as Attila the Hun has after you've cut off a few of his limbs.

Legends lets you choose one of nine historic leaders to take into one-on-one battles with other such personages. Those nine characters are broken down into three categories. Guerrillas like Sun Tzu and Shaka Zulu lack armor but move quickly; champions like Hannibal and Alexander the Great are heavily armored and relatively slow; and berserkers like Hernan Cortes and William Wallace are powerful offensive fighters. Battles occur in three-dimensional space, and you're free to run in any direction. With the three attack buttons, you can perform strikes that target your foe's head, body, or legs. Strikes to the limbs can leave your opponent crippled, making him hobble on his feet or preventing him from wielding heavy, two-handed weapons. And a blow to the head is likely to kill your opponent instantly.

Each warrior can wield quick short-range weapons, slower medium-range weapons, and ranged weapons. There are no health meters in this fighting game; characters collapse when they've suffered a blow the game deems fatal, or when they bleed out from a severed limb. Matches often end within just a few seconds of starting, perhaps with an arrow through a warrior's eye or a sword strike to the head that sends a helmet flying off at a trajectory that makes no sense. You can also attempt to grab your opponent. If you succeed, both combatants must then hit the low, medium, or high attack button, and unless the defender makes the same input as the attacker, he suffers a broken leg, a broken arm, or death, depending on the area the attacker targeted. The finishing moves that play out when a warrior successfully performs a high attack in a grapple (or a medium or low attack to an already disabled area) are sometimes shockingly brutal. Vlad the Impaler's finisher, for instance, demonstrates how he earned his grisly nickname.

Because a single blow can bring the match to an end, there's none of the tension here that can evolve over the course of a battle in a traditional fighting game as combatants feel each other out and whittle each other down. A different kind of tension could have emerged from battles in which any hit could prove fatal, but Legends is too sloppy to generate much excitement. The game's instructional screens have information about different types of damage--slashing, piercing, and crushing--and the varying effectiveness of armor against these types of attacks. But the actual gameplay doesn't support the depth that this suggests. It's hard to see how such details could matter much when, during battles, weapons regularly clip right through people, swords and shields disappear from a warrior's hands when he tries to grab his opponent, and combatants sometimes collapse dead from attacks that didn't even appear to make contact. There's often no clear rhyme or reason to why one fighter falls while his opponent is left standing, and this makes it nigh impossible to become invested in the action.

So a realistic fighting game this is not. Your best bet for getting any enjoyment out of Legends is to approach it not as a simulation, but as the video game equivalent of a schlocky martial arts movie, complete with lousy fight choreography; cheap, bloody special effects; and hilariously bad dubbing. Before each battle, the warriors speak a few words or emit a fierce battle cry, and both the mouth movements and the timing of those movements are so mismatched to the sounds you hear that you may wonder if the game isn't intentionally evoking the stereotypical image of poorly synced dubbing from low-budget kung-fu flicks. It's funny at first, but, like nearly everything else about the game, it looks cheap and hastily slapped together, and the initial amusement wears off quickly.

Whether or not the poor lip-syncing is intended as a joke, Legends certainly has a sense of humor, and it shines most brightly when you turn on what the game calls Zombie mode in multiplayer combat. With this option in effect, fighters don't go down until every last limb has been hacked. A pair of legs, no longer attached to its upper body, might continue to speedily run around the arena, forcing the opposing player to give chase. These battles are a great source of physical comedy, reminiscent of the famous encounter with the Black Knight in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. But the underlying gameplay remains too chaotic and shallow to stay compelling once you've had your fill of laughter at this mode's sheer absurdity.

Legends has an Arcade mode in which you choose a warrior and progress through nine battles, and because fights can be so brief, you may spend nearly as much time on the between-match loading screens as you spend playing. You can also fight one-off battles against CPU opponents, or practice against dummy opponents. After you've completed the Arcade mode with each character, you unlock Challenge mode, where you can fight to survive against waves of opponents, engage in battles in which every hit severs a limb, or try to hack down a number of hanging pig carcasses before a timer runs out. The most interesting mode is the one with the least fighting in it. Generals mode is a simple war game inspired by Risk. You start out with a single territory and a home castle, and on a map, you assign armies to territories you control and direct them to other territories. When you target a neutral or enemy territory, a percentage indicates the likelihood of your victory, and as you claim more territories and entire zones, the number of bonus armies you receive each turn increases. The object is to conquer the enemy leader's castle, and when you attack it, you enter a one-on-one duel with that leader, which you must win to be victorious. Each general has attributes that affect his armies' chances in battle, such as bonuses to attack in mountain territories or bonuses to defense in the desert. But there's little actual nuance or strategy to this minigame. Brute force rules the day; build up a larger army, and an enemy's bonuses aren't likely to do him much good as you steamroll his forces.

Currently, Legends is suffering a crippling blow at the hands of its own busted online multiplayer. There's a common issue causing a significant percentage of ranked matches to freeze up during their initial loading screen. Non-ranked player matches aren't suffering from this problem, but the opportunity to compete with human opponents (which you can also do locally) can't redeem Legends' basic, ugly combat. Last year's Deadliest Warrior: The Game was too unrefined to be entirely successful, but there was something promising about its attempts to simulate realistic, bloody combat. This sequel not only fails to build on that promise; it stabs a knife right through its heart.