Mortal Kombat Trilogy Review

Mortal Kombat Trilogy is the last gasp of this 2D game, and the only remaining question is: Will Mortal Kombat leave the realm of 2D with an awesome bang, or will it whimper and die? So, like the kombatants themselves, let's get right down to it: Players who enter the tournament on the Nintendo 64 should prepare themselves for feeble misadventure not worthy of the Mortal Kombat name.

If Mortal Kombat Trilogy on the Nintendo 64 has a plus side, it comes from its multiple play modes. In addition to the normal one-on-one fighting, Mortal Kombat Trilogy keeps the two-on-two and eight-player tournament mode (found in Ultimate MK3) and adds a three-on-three battle, which keeps the fight going for quite a long time. The game plays identically to the arcade, although the N64 controller isn't perfectly suited for a game of this nature.

The downslide continues in the form of character selection: The Nintendo 64 combines the characters from all the Mortal Kombat games into one package, but to conserve memory it left out such favorites as Goro, Kintaro, and the unmasked Sub-Zero. (By contrast, these characters are found on the Playstation version of Mortal Kombat Trilogy.)

But the N64 game receives its fatal wound from the graphics and sound. Not only will players encounter a massive amount of slowdown whenever more than a few bones go flying, but also several missing frames of animation are conspicuously absent. The result is graphics that look faded and jagged, as if they were cut out of a magazine, scanned, and then pasted into the game. When played side-by-side, the PlayStation version makes the N64 version look like it's on a SNES. Then there's the sound: The digitized sound effects are utterly atrocious. In fact, it's so muffled that players may as well put their speakers on the other side of a cement wall before starting the game. The music is typical of a non-CD game - that is to say, worthless. It's tinny and very electronic sounding.

Mortal Kombat Trilogy proves that the Nintendo 64 is merely mortal. While it surpasses the Playstation version in regard to load time, it still suffers a three or four second delay when loading a new character in multiplayer fighting. Ultimately, only Mortal Kombat addicts, who don't already own a PlayStation, will find this game worth picking up.

Finally, Capcom has a 3D Street Fighter game worthy of its heritage. But by the same token, Street Fighter EX Plus Alpha is perhaps too closely tied to its heritage. While the gameplay is great, it's standard SF fare, and you can't help but get the feeling that SF EX Plus Alpha is nothing more than a stepping stone to a more impressive Street Fighter game yet to come - as was the case with Street Fighter Alpha.

At its core, Street Fighter EX Plus Alpha doesn't attempt to be anything more than a juggling- and combo-filled game like Super Street Fighter II Turbo - but with the play speed and graphic style of Namco's first Tekken game. Like Tekken, the animations of the characters - rather than their slightly jagged bodies or uninspired backgrounds - are supposed to be the stars of SF EX Plus Alpha's graphics. But unlike Tekken 3, absolutely no attempt is made to give the characters any freedom of 3D movement.

Dizzies have been replaced with super meter-draining guard blocks that stun and leave opponents temporarily defenseless, and super combos now execute at only one level of power and can be interrupted or chained together to form bigger and more damaging combos. Lifted from Tekken is Namco's penchant for "new" characters whose only distinction from "old" characters is appearance - nine of the 23 SF EX Plus Alpha characters mimic existing characters in some way.

There is, however, a new and decided emphasis on offensive attacks. The previously defensive Guile, for example, does a lot more rushing forward with kicks than he did in earlier SF games, and even Ryu and Ken have had their standard "roll back once with a kick button" hurricane kick shifted into an Art of Fighting-style multihit aerial kick. SF EX Plus Alpha is not a game for turtlers and not necessarily even a game for Street purists - this is now less of a game of strategy than it is a game of action, without a doubt. To keep the game flowing, SF EX Plus Alpha has reasonably forgiving controls that ease the chaining together of combos and execution of special attacks. The CPU opponent puts up a decent struggle, but I found that the features that brought me back for more were the expert mode, which lets you unlock four previously nonplayer characters and a few extra game options, and the bonus game, a polygonal version of the SF2 barrel-smashing bonus stage.

In the video and audio departments, Street Fighter EX Plus Alpha is pretty solid. Its old characters closely resemble their 2D predecessors - Zangief is the only negative exception - but lack the more dramatic flourishes that made SF2 and SF Alpha 2 so memorable. Some of the new characters seem to have picked out costumes from the Halloween leftover bins at a Japanese K-Mart, but their unique moves often make their inclusion worthwhile. Special effects are generally handled well, but not spectacularly, and the flat backgrounds are reasonable but not as impressively conceived as those in Capcom's original SF2 or the later release of SF Alpha 2. The game does have its visual moments, though, with a few nice close-ups of multihit throws that bring to life scenes that we could only imagine in earlier SF titles - images that, in my mind, are the only real justification for SF EX Plus Alpha's existence. SF EX Plus Alpha's audio is quite good, full of pleasant, upbeat synthesized techno and rock music, plus a number of clear voice samples that are easily as good as those in any previous SF title.

Taken as a whole, Street Fighter EX Plus Alpha is a fun game with great gameplay, better than average aesthetics, and a large number of characters. As we've seen many (perhaps too many) times before, Capcom has a tendency to use its "good" Street Fighter games as a foundation to build truly great ones. How long will SF EX Plus Alpha be worth playing? Your answer will depend upon how tired you are of traditional SF gameplay.