“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!
“Remember: The Future Depends Upon How Well You Fight!”
“When you are happy with your choice, press the ‘A’ button to lock in your choice.”
Mortal Kombat Trilogy print ad.
A brief bit of Mortal Kombat genealogy to start with: April 15th, 1995 marked the arcade launch of Mortal Kombat 3. While this then-latest entry was generally well-received, and represented a step forward in the series mechanically (introducing a ‘Run’ button, multi-layered stages, and pre-match ‘Kombat Kodes’ enabling fight modifiers and secret content; among other new features / improvements), it had been met with one common complaint: Several fan-favorite characters had gone missing in action since the previous installment; including the likes of Scorpion, Rayden, Kitana, and Johnny Cage. This was due largely to ongoing legal disputes with much of the original cast of martial artists and motion capture actors, who had filed lawsuits against Midway on the back of unpaid royalties — their shared belief [rightfully] being that they were owed further compensation for their likenesses being used in the console conversions of Mortal Kombat I & II. Arguably the key employee in the ensuing staff exodus would be Daniel Pesina, who was not only recognizable as / synonymous with Johnny Cage, but who had additionally performed the roles of the game’s masked ninjas; including (but not limited to) Sub-Zero, Scorpion, and Reptile. These departures left Midway in the unenviable position of having to recast actors for some of their most iconic characters, while opting to omit several entirely for at least the time being (explaining those missing in action); all while Daniel was busy lending his endorsement to failed MK competitor BloodStorm, participating in a now infamous ad campaign while dressed as Johnny. Man, now there’s another article we’ve gotta get around to at some point. Oh, and Tattoo Assassins too, while we’re at it; since the brothers Pesina also had a hand in that one! Put a couple pins in those two.
Getting back to Mortal Kombat 3: Ultimately, the remedy for the complaints received was to issue a new revision of the game, boasting an expanded roster of returning kombatants and a handful of other gameplay refinements. And so, November 6th, 1995 saw the release of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 to arcades — releasing just seven months after the original cabinet. While it was again met with largely positive reception and eager players, the relatively rapid turnaround wound up prompting a question from critics: Why hadn’t Midway just held off on releasing Mortal Kombat 3 until it had reached the level of fine-tuning and available content that UMK3 brought with it? Well, answering that brings us back to another tough decision Midway had to make during the original MK3‘s development: They knew that arcade exclusivity on the series’ third installment was gonna be particularly short-lived, on the back of arrangements made with retailers for the console conversions. So, the plan was drawn up to launch MK3 as a somewhat “incomplete” cabinet, hand it off to the console conversion teams shortly thereafter, and to satiate undoubtedly frustrated arcade operators by quickly providing UMK3 to them as a free upgrade kit. It was an attempt on the part of Midway to try and make all their business partners happy as best they could, at the risk of undoubtedly drawing some initial public criticism and complaints. Striking a balance that made both arcade owners and the consumer market happy was a tricky thing, and I certainly don’t envy the position they were put in. But at the end of the day, what matters is that folk dug on Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3, and Midway were perceived as doing right by the fans.
There’s only one party I can imagine feeling somewhat miffed by this turn of events: The suits at Williams Entertainment — Midway’s own parent company, and publisher of Mortal Kombat‘s console conversions. Despite getting to release two distinct iterations of MK3 for the Genesis and Super Nintendo (as well as a Sega Saturn version of UMK3), and making surely substantial profits off the backs of both them; they were likely still a bit bothered about having to briefly compete against themselves with the arcade launch of UMK3, during the period where all they had on offer were their 16-bit conversions of the inferior non-Ultimate version. Never mind the fact that in spite of this, those console conversions of original MK3 still sold like gangbusters — to the tune of a million units on the SNES alone: Midway’s and Williams’ interests in arcades and home consoles were divided across different divisions which were effectively made to compete against one another, and which could directly affect each other’s sales in the case of a franchise like Mortal Kombat. As such, it’s easy to imagine the console division feeling slighted by the UMK3 situation, and demanding some form of amends. Of course, this is all speculation on my part: Another just-as-likely theory could be that Midway and Williams were just looking to make as much money as was humanly possible — that the console sales actually exceeded expectations, and the plan was promptly conspired to develop an “exclusive” entry for upcoming 32-bit hardware offerings.
Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 for Arcade (Midway Games, 1995)
Of course, to hear series co-creator Ed Boon tell the story of Mortal Kombat Trilogy’s inspiration, it was as simple as recognizing the potential of that new generation of consoles. In a series of tweets, Ed described the impetus to develop a “new” title as the following: “When we going [sic] to release Ultimate MK3 on consoles, it seemed odd to release it on the Playstation without doing something ‘special’ for it. Since the PS1 had so much space (CD drive) we decided to include the MK1 and MK2 assets and call it MK Trilogy. […] Actually we were busy working on the arcade games and our San Diego team was doing the ports and MK Trilogy.” The San Diego team mentioned in this quotation would be in reference to their Williams Development division — the previous producers of DOOM on PlayStation (and later DOOM 64), and credited for Mortal Kombat Trilogy on Nintendo 64 specifically. It would be Salt Lake City’s Avalanche Software who ultimately helmed production on the definitive PlayStation version of the game — the more content-rich of the two editions, and the foundation for later PC and Sega Saturn ports. Regardless of your console platform of choice, you’d be getting more or less the same final product: A further updated edition of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3, with the series’ most comprehensive character roster to date (until Mortal Kombat: Armageddon in 2006, with its colossal count of sixty-two kombatants).
“Her ability to read the thoughts of her twin sister will enable Khan [sic] to stay
one step ahead.”
Promotional page from 1997’s Tiger Fun Book product catalogue.
Mortal Kombat Trilogy aimed to include every previously playable kombatant across the first three games, as well as a handful of previously unplayable bosses while it was at it. This meant taking the existing Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 roster, re-incorporating characters last seen as their Mortal Kombat 2 iterations, and a cheeky bit of fanservice in the way of a couple throwbacks to the original Mortal Kombat [in the form of some alternate characters]. As if all that weren’t enough; new ninjas known as Rain, Noob Saibot, and Chameleon (replaced by ‘Khameleon’ on N64, who serves as a variation on the game’s “princess” / female assassin template) were also introduced as playable characters — just in case six palette-swapped shinobi weren’t already enough for you. Joking aside, the roster represents a pretty major achievement for the time: A comprehensive compilation of three game’s worth of fighters [and then some], allowing for match-ups fans could only dream of previously. It’s also arguably something of a turning point for player expectations of fighting games — a dangerous concession made / precedent set for those who would demand that every last one of a franchise’s legacy characters should appear in all its sequels. And although Midway and the Mortal Kombat team had already been blasted once for their “failing” to bring back klassic kombatants – setting the stage for this entry (and ultimately for Armageddon) – it would still remain a point of contention in future titles to follow.
To its credit, Mortal Kombat Trilogy on consoles is at least a little bit more than just another content update for Mortal Kombat 3. In addition to balance changes and other bits of tweaking no doubt done in the background, the game prominently features a new ‘Aggressor’ mechanic, wherein filling an on-screen meter (by means of landing attacks on your opponent) will result in a brief buff period of faster movement and more damaging attacks. This is also the installment in which ‘Brutalities’ were codified as a series staple (after having previously been introduced in the Genesis / Super Nintendo conversions of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3): A new type of finisher activated by strings of eleven inputs, resulting in your opponent exploding into gibs. Of final note is a ‘3 on 3 Kombat’ mode present exclusively in the game’s Nintendo 64 version — an iteration on the ‘2 on 2 Kombat’ mode introduced in UMK3, wherein a character getting beaten sees them promptly swapped out for a fighter waiting in the wings to continue the round. In the case of upping the kombatant count from four to six, it was a feat only the N64’s cartridge was deemed capable of — something of a struggle for the CD-based platforms, which couldn’t afford to hold that many characters in memory and would’ve had to necessitate potentially lengthy mid-fight loading.
Mortal Kombat Trilogy for PS1 (Midway Games, 1996)
The end result of this console-exclusive release? In the words again of Ed Boon on Twitter: “It sold HUGE !!” To attempt to quantify that, VGChartz claims nearly three million copies sold of the PlayStation version, with an additional one million Nintendo 64 cartridges reportedly having been moved. Take those numbers as you will given VGChartz’ lack of source attribution, but I’m inclined to believe them as being believable ballpark figures. A handful of reviewers may have criticized Mortal Kombat Trilogy for being “more of the same,” or made note of some discovered exploits which upset the game’s balance; with additional complaints levied against the N64 version in particular, owing to its reduced roster size (thirty vs the PlayStation’s thirty-seven) and poorer presentation. With reference to the N64 version, by measure of IGN’s Peer Schneider: “On the N64 the player animation is choppy and the flat, rather unexciting backgrounds look like they suffer from a low color palette. […] Let’s face it, the N64 is better at creating smooth animations using polygons than at prepainted bitmap animation, whether in three or in two dimensions.” All that being said, this small smattering of middling-to-low reviews did little to affect sales, as Next Generation magazine would report later in 1997: “Even titles such as the ill-received […] Mortal Kombat Trilogy managed impressive sales numbers as gift-buying parents and new system owners rushed to get the maximum N64 experience.”
1997, as you may recall, would also be the year Tiger launched their second-ever cartridge-based portable (the R-Zone holds the dubious distinction of being their first): The Game.com. In attempting to evolve past their single-game LCD handheld games, they produced the Game.com with intent to compete against Nintendo’s Game Boy — a fight they had no hope of winning, but seemingly no shortage of money to throw at it either. And the “unique” selling point they believed would best help them in this contendership? Their access to a wide library of popular licenses from which to produce games around; including some of Capcom, Sega, and Williams’ most lucrative IPs. Of course, the Game.com would not represent the first time these licensing deals were established: Previous LCD games were designed around many a pre-existing property, including the likes of Mortal Kombat I and III in cooperation with Williams. These would be exactly as primitive as you likely imagine, and do little to capture the depth of the games they were based on. With the Game.com though, the potential was there to produce more substantive games — cartridges which could perhaps provide better approximations of gameplay, wider ranges of characters, and sounds beyond the single-channel tones and chirps their cheaper range were limited to. And what better game to demonstrate these new capabilities than a conversion of Mortal Kombat Trilogy?
It bears repeating here [as mentioned in our previous Game.com articles] that Tiger handled all matters of Game.com game development themselves, tasking an internal studio within the company with producing almost all of the cartridges in its library. This meant that Williams and Midway’s involvement with Mortal Kombat Trilogy on Game.com likely began and ended with their licensing arrangements, and perhaps being asked to provide certain game assets for the purposes of reference material. But when it comes down to it; it would be Tiger’s team who would have to re-draw all the graphics, write all-new code, and ultimately assemble the game from the ground up. A daunting prospect for a group of developers whose previous experience likely laid in far more simple LCD fare (assuming they didn’t just onboard new employees with previous cartridge development experience). At the very least, conversion work gave them established source material to pull from and reproduce — a model that they could aim to approximate, even given their admittedly far weaker hardware. And with the public’s understanding of how handheld devices compared to full-fat arcade cabinets and home consoles, their expectations for what a portable device was capable of achieving should’ve been far more reasonable. Folk didn’t expect a Game.com take on Mortal Kombat Trilogy to be a perfect, uncompromised port: All they wanted was something that captured the spirit of the source material.
For what it’s worth, promotional materials advertising the game seemed to indicate that Mortal Kombat Trilogy might well manage the feat: Between screenshots in games magazines and Tiger’s own product catalogues – as well as a brief clip featured in one of their TV commercial spots – the game on display looked the part well enough. Showing off the likes of Sub-Zero, Jade, and Human Smoke (complete with pixelated puffs surrounding him); their scaled-down greyscale approximations matched [if not exceeded] the quality of the last two Mortal Kombat outings on Game Boy — its conversions of Mortal Kombat 2 and 3. And with the benefits of higher screen resolution (200×160 pixels on Game.com versus 160×144 on Game Boy) and more than double the clock speed on Nintendo’s aging handheld (10 MHz vs 4.19 MHz), there was a genuine potential here for Mortal Kombat Trilogy to assume the throne as the best portable edition of the franchise to date. Of course, there is one golden rule that must be heeded when it comes to the Game.com: What you see in advertising – sometimes even on the game’s own box – isn’t always what you get.
Mortal Kombat Trilogy [on consoles] is positively rife with “Infinites” — the ability in a fighting game to lock opponents into inescapable combos not accounted for by the developers. In this way, characters who are capable of pulling them off can effectively cheese their way through any given match-up, so long as the player at hand is able to master the timing and execution required to keep their opponent locked out of escaping from it. Generally speaking, these are infuriating to fall victim to, and characters capable of performing them tend to get banned from tournament play. But seeing as almost every character in Mortal Kombat Trilogy has at least one or two infinite routines up their sleeve – and as many of them are actually quite easy to execute – the game has never been considered as a particularly viable candidate for competition in the first place.
“There Are 11 Characters for You to Choose From — Or Are There More??”
“Touch here to begin the battle.”
North American back cover.
Mortal Kombat: The name of a tournament with a ten millenia history, upon which the fate of the realms is wagered. It has become tradition that every fifty years, warriors from Outworld and the Earthrealm compete against one another in the tournament, with the condition that ten consecutive victories would allow the winning realm the right of conquest over the losers. While Earth’s most skilled warrior monk Liu Kang was able to end the centuries-long winning streak of Outworld’s champion Goro – before the Shokan beast could secure a decisive tenth victory for his realm – a conspiracy concocted by Outworld’s emperor Shao Kahn and his sorcerer subordinate Shang Tsung still threatens the sanctity of our realm: Earth’s surviving warriors are challenged to an immediate rematch tournament, to be held for the first time within Outworld itself — where Shao Kahn himself would be able to compete and surely secure a victory, disrupt the dimension-balancing Furies, and allow him to merge with Earthrealm without needing to achieve the requisite ten tournament wins. Luckily, Liu Kang and company overcome the odds and prevail once again, foiling Kahn’s dark designs.
But the evil emperor still has one card left to play in his plan to conquer Earthrealm: The dark magic revival of his deceased wife, Queen Sindel. With her resurrection due to see her emerge from within Earthrealm, this allows Shao Kahn to reach across dimensions in order to reclaim her — forcing a partial merger between Outworld and Earthrealm, and allowing him to stage an immediate invasion. The result of this action is the instantaneous deaths of billions of Earth’s residents, where its sworn protector (and God of Thunder) Rayden is only able to muster up enough power to protect the souls of a handful of chosen warriors. With Earthrealm now a half-demolished hellscape under patrol by Outworld’s “extermination squads,” and Shao Kahn’s evil vision seemingly come to full fruition; it falls on Earth’s last remaining warriors to track down and defeat the Kahn once more, and revert the realms back to as they were before. This is the story told across the first three installments in the Mortal Kombat series, and which Mortal Kombat Trilogy would ostensibly seek to condense into a singular game.
… Except – in spite of the implications of its own title – Mortal Kombat Trilogy is actually meant to just encapsulate the events of Mortal Kombat 3 once again, now with the added benefit of Mortal Kombat I & II’s remaining unimplemented characters returning to the fray. This brings the roster on PlayStation (as well as on PC / Sega Saturn) up to a walloping count of thirty-seven playable kombatants, with a still-formidable thirty available on Nintendo 64’s smaller-capacity cartridges (compared to CDs). So, when the time came for Tiger’s internal studio to recreate a version of the game fit for the Game.com, they were faced with an immediate and major dilemma: Their system’s own cartridge format would give them just sixteen megabits of capacity to work within — roughly two measly megabytes. Needless to say, this represents a downright microscopic amount of space when stacked up against the Nintendo 64 version’s twelve-megabyte allotment, let alone a CD’s potential to store 700 MBs. Even when accounting for some of the obvious reductions in scope and storage – the inability to produce color graphics, the need to scale down sprites to fit the screen, and having to forgo the likes of CD audio – they’d still be looking at thirty-plus characters (and thirty-plus stages to pair) which they were expected to attempt to recreate for the handheld.
Simply put, a 1:1 reproduction of Mortal Kombat Trilogy’s contents would’ve been an impossible feat for the Game.com to manage (nay, any handheld offering in the late 90s) in the best of scenarios. And to be very clear, Tiger’s dedicated Game.com development team never had the benefit of working under a “best case scenario.” The expectation placed on them was to turn around at least a dozen games per year, meaning they were always being made to balance multiple titles in simultaneous development at any given moment between 1997 and 1999. Remember that it was Tiger’s own internal studio helming production across all their titles: When it came to game conversions, the original developers and publishers seemed to have no obligation beyond allowing for the use of their trademarked characters and graphical assets, leaving Tiger to have to figure out all the rest on their own. When faced with this prospect, and knowing that there were only more games waiting for them to develop after Mortal Kombat Trilogy was done and dusted, you can understand why Tiger’s team ultimately decided to go the route of cutting content — boiling the compilation down to its “most exciting characters and backgrounds” (as per ad copy), and hoping to at least convey the core of the gameplay as best they could with the means available to them. And so, thirty-seven fighters were whittled down to just thirteen, with ten ‘Kombat Zones’ (stage backgrounds) making the cut.
Now, in Tiger declaring their supposed intention in picking and choosing the “most exciting characters,” you can probably make a safe assumption as to what that’s code for: A priority given to the character designs which are most easy to recycle sprites for across multiple different kombatants, as seen in previous attempts at handheld conversions. As such, you would reasonably expect to see the full range of male “ninja” characters (derived from Sub-Zero and Scorpion’s designs), as well as females sharing the “princess” sprite base (based on Kitana and Mileena). Able to easily fill out at least ten character slots from those alone, you can further predict a handful of cyborg fighters (stemming from Cyrax / Sektor), before the team would have to start incorporating some of the series’ more unique characters; including the likes of Liu Kang, Sonya Blade, Johnny Cage, and other stand-outs who don’t share any of their sprites with other kombatants. In this way, it should theoretically be possible to balance variety with quantity to an extent — to deliver at least a handful of the expected fan favorites, as well as pad out the final tally with the benefit of characters who share base sprites. And for the most part, this is – in fact – the design philosophy Tiger subscribed to… Except, some of the particular choices they wound up making are downright baffling. Let us count the ways.
First things first: The Game.com’s four featured ninjas consist of Ermac, Noob Saibot, Rain, and Reptile; where Ermac and Noob must be unlocked by way of cheat codes. You’ll notice that list does not include the likes of Sub-Zero and Scorpion — arguably the two most iconic characters in the entire franchise. Where it should theoretically have been possible to render two more recolors of the shared ninja sprites (choosing to include Sub-Zero in his ‘Classic’ appearance, rather than his updated Mortal Kombat 3 style), or to have simply swapped the duo in for two of the decidedly lesser ninja characters; you’re left having to assume there was some other factor that prevented their appearances on the Game.com. Perhaps their special moves proved too difficult to program — where Sub-Zero’s freezing projectile and ice clone may have been particularly challenging to implement, and Scorpion’s “Get over here!” spear ran into issues with being able to drag fighters across the screen? Or maybe it was some matter of trademark issue or last-minute legal injunction in dealing with Midway: Where pre-release promotional screenshots for the game clearly feature Sub-Zero (as well as a pre-cyberization Smoke), he and his bitter rival’s removal may have been a matter of contention with their licensors — a demand that more money be paid in order to feature them in the game? If some variation or version of the latter theory holds true, then perhaps further choices for character inclusion are explained by it as well.
The remaining characters comprise Kitana and Mileena along with Jade, cyborgs Cyrax and Sektor, Nightwolf, Rayden; as well as two boss characters, Motaro and Shao Kahn (misspelled as ‘Khan’ in-game and in multiple pages of the manual). Names conspicuous by their absence here are the series’ main protagonists Liu Kang, Sonya Blade, and Johnny Cage; key villains in Kano and Shang Tsung, as well as quickly-established fan favorites in Baraka, Jax, Kabal, Kung Lao, Sindel and Sheeva. (Nobody cares about Stryker, ACAB, etc.) Now, obviously, there shouldn’t be an expectation for every last character to survive the transition to handheld here — even in the case of a game originally marketed on its thorough roster. There’s just too many unique sprites to deal with between these cases, and not enough cartridge capacity to house them all. So when it must’ve come time to start cutting down the names, there are a few choices that probably came more easily than others: You can pretty safely ax characters who are arguably “inessential” to the game’s broader plot — who first appeared in Mortal Kombat II, and were left with little else to do in the third installment other than show their faces. That rids us of, like, five names right off the bat? At this point, I’d go on to cut out some of the more cumbersome characters to have to theoretically redraw: Sorry to Sheeva (a personal favorite of mine), Kintaro, and Goro. It’s here where I’d have also cut Motaro from the roster, personally, but I guess Tiger’s team decided they needed at least one proper monster-type? Personally, I reckon I’d have gone for Goro in that scenario, considering his legacy status.
So, who would I argue as essential in making the cut? I think you’ve gotta include every member of the original Mortal Kombat roster in a given version of Trilogy: Liu Kang, Sonya, Johnny, Rayden, Kano, Sub-Zero and Scorpion. Mortal Kombat II could be represented by the twin princesses in Kitana and Mileena, while opening a door for more prominent recolors in the likes of Jade and Reptile. Shao Kahn is also a definite must-have, especially given his returning role in MK3‘s plot. And while Shang Tsung has historically been problematic in implementing due to his transformation ability (given the loading / memory issues on CD-based platforms); that shouldn’t have been too much of an issue on the Game.com, given the cartridge format’s ability to instantly load and swap sprite banks. Where it comes to repping for Mortal Kombat 3, then, Sindel should serve as a particularly vital inclusion — her resurrection serving as no less than the catalyst / plot device that sets that whole game in motion in the first place. Add in the cyborgs at this point – consisting of Cyrax, Sektor, and Smoke if one so chooses – and that brings us to a modest seventeen characters (just four more than the actual release’s thirteen). If that number should need bolstering, there’s always the additional three ninjas you could toss in, to bring it up to a more respectable twenty.
But I believe that even without doubling down on the ninjas, that imagined roster of seventeen represents something like a bare minimum for what Mortal Kombat Trilogy on handhelds should’ve been made to include: A sizable chunk containing representatives from all three installments in the titular trilogy, with a reasonable amount of sprite recycling in place in order to maximize their storage budget. While previous portable versions of Mortal Kombats were expected to make some more drastic cuts when it came to included fighters – excluding their share of series mainstays, and prioritizing clone characters – Tiger’s Game.com iteration had so much more it had to prove. In addition to being a conversion of a game whose gimmick centers entirely around its comprehensive roster (on the back of an entry maligned for its lack of recognizable characters, at that), it also represented a vital opportunity for Tiger to prove they could do what the likes of Game Boy and Game Gear couldn’t — to set themselves apart from the competition, and present their own handheld hardware as the premiere platform for console-parity portable experiences. In dropping the ball as badly as they did in this instance – based solely on just the capacity to carry over characters – they instead demonstrate the inherent limitations of their system, and of the dedicated team responsible for developing its cartridges.
Of course, the criticisms of Tiger’s take on Mortal Kombat Trilogy don’t begin and end there. The core gameplay, in actual execution, is also compromised in a variety of ways. That being said, and before we get too deep into our litany of complaints: I do have to say that Mortal Kombat Trilogy on Game.com isn’t entirely without merit. Sure, it’s not exactly fit for anything even resembling serious competitive play (if such an arrangement could even be made possible), and its technical aspects are riddled with more holes than swiss cheese; but it moves at a relatively decent speed given the system, and functions as well as you could reasonably expect with its lesser amount of buttons and limited technical specifications. You could certainly do a whole lot worse than how Mortal Kombat Trilogy wound up, even as there’s the obvious room for improvement. I’d certainly rate it above Mortal Kombat‘s original Game Boy outing, as well as a handful of the handheld conversions to follow — the likes of Mortal Kombat 4 on Game Boy Color, and Mortal Kombat Advance on the Game Boy Advance. But hey, those are titles for another pair of potential articles, and it’s my opinion that Tiger’s Mortal Kombat Trilogy represents a more novel subject matter for me to dive into first.
It’s past time we started talking about the experience of actually playing the dang game. From a menu presented in the same style as the console versions; you can select between your standard single player mode, two-player competitive play (by means of the Game.com’s ‘Compete.com’ cable), and an options menu. The ‘2 on 2 Kombat’ mode goes missing in action here, though I’m not sure who in particular would’ve really missed it all too much. And to get it out of the way upfront: There’s absolutely no way (currently) for me to try out the multiplayer for myself, but I can reasonably assume it functions fine enough? The Game.com’s dubious “online” abilities were never leveraged for multiplayer across any of its games — the system being entirely incapable of connecting systems together across the Internet. If a Game.com title was ever advertised as having a multiplayer mode, it’s strictly by way of the Compete.com accessory, and would’ve necessitated two copies of the game (one per handheld) in order to function. Now, I’ve never heard much in the way of latency complaints or compromised game speed where it comes to the Game.com’s link cable, so I’m gonna assume that kombat plays and feels much the same as the single player mode — albeit with the potential to torture a friend with some of the game’s dirtier tricks. But you’ll probably have to learn those for yourself in single player first anyway, so that’s the mode we’re gonna primarily focus on here.
We’ve already gone over the range of characters available from the selection screen, and the fact that Ermac and Noob Saibot require entering a pair of codes here (‘B-C-B-B-D’ and ‘D-D-C-D-B,’ respectively) in order to unlock. GameFAQs and other cheat repositories have erroneously indicated for decades now that Scorpion serves as another additional hidden character – apparently by the vaguely-explained means of “holding Up, Left, and Right for 5 seconds” – but this is conclusively complete bullshit. If he was actually in the game, you’d think he would be available as a default character in place of either Reptile or Rain, wouldn’t you? As an additional gripe I’ve gotta get out of the way here: You’re not actually able to select your character by means of the Game.com’s touch screen, which seems like a no-brainer to me. With just thirteen characters to show for, there’s no doubt their portraits could’ve been arranged in such a way as to line up with the screen’s 12×10 capacitive grid, and allowed for selection by tapping or double-tapping. Ultimately, this is reflective of a larger issue with the system library, where most games in general tended to leave touch control entirely by the wayside. I’m not asking Tiger’s team to incorporate a whole stylus-driven control scheme for the actual fighting gameplay, here: Just leverage it across all the menu navigation, to make it feel more like these games were actually built with the Game.com in mind.
After “choosing your destiny” from one of the four towers (representing how many fights you’ll need to survive before squaring off against Shao Kahn), you’re thrust promptly into kombat, and can begin to get a sense for the game’s look and feel. All told, it’s not too shabby: Characters move across the screen at a decent clip, and update at a semi-steady thirty frames per second. Curiously, special attacks and their associated effects attempt to update at a comparative sixty, which can result in something like a disconnect in the pacing. I say “attempt” as the presence of additional sprites on the screen has the nasty habit of halving the game’s whole framerate, if not dropping it into single digit territory. Still, it rates higher than any previous handheld outings for Mortal Kombat, between the comparatively sluggish Game Boy and Game Gear releases. Of course, Game Gear still holds the advantage in character sprite detail; boasting its color graphics and scaled-down arcade sprites, compared to the Game.com’s characters being completely redrawn in four-shade monochrome (much the same as on Game Boy). But even bearing that in mind, Mortal Kombat Trilogy looks its part quite well, and is still immediately recognizable for what it’s meant to emulate. I’d also argue that getting to draw up new sprites from scratch gives Tiger the advantage in linking attack and movement animations together, where having to cut in-between frames from the existing digitized animations results in far less fluid state transitions.
Combine those character sprites with some decently-rendered backgrounds on Game.com – where the likes of Mortal Kombat 3 on Game Boy and Game Gear had given up almost entirely on drawing them by this point – and what we’re left with is probably the best-looking portable MK of the 90s era! Not a particularly high bar to clear, but credit where credit is due nonetheless. Where it seriously lacks though is in the sound department, with its complete lack of background music and small library of sound effects. This is pretty par for the course for most Game.com games, but hits a title like Mortal Kombat Trilogy especially hard, where I’d argue that MK as a series has always been partially defined by its strong sound design — its punchy impacts, iconic battlecries, and composer Dan Forden’s dark, understated background music. Instead, all you get is a singular bit-crunched sound effect to accompany every hit in the game, and boy howdy does that noise get old quick. Of course, there’s also the legendary announcer calls (compliment of Midway pinball legend Steve Ritchie), which compel kombatants to “FIGHT” and “FINISH HIM!” Tiger would’ve been remiss not to leverage their system’s audio sampling capabilities to include at least a small handful of these vocal cues, so you do at least get the expected range of round announcements and finisher calls. Unfortunately, there’s no longer Forden’s face popping up mid-fight to chime “Toasty!”, so the whole effort is a complete failure in my petty personal opinion.
Returning now to the subject of actual gameplay: With just four buttons on the Game.com lettered A through D, you already know that there are gonna be some omissions made considering the six-button control scheme that had become standard with Mortal Kombat 3. Here, high and low punches are merged into a singular ‘Punches’ button (A), ‘High Kick’ and ‘Low Kick’ get individual keys (B and D respectively), and ‘Block’ is bound to holding down C. This means that the dedicated ‘Run’ button is no more — instead activated by double-tapping left or right on the D-pad. Truth be told? The idea of a dedicated run button was always kind of goofy to me anyway, to where double-tapping a direction just makes way more intuitive sense. Similarly, I’m more partial to the “backwards to block” style of fighting game mechanic, and would’ve been just as happy to see its button unbound as well — freeing up space for the second punch button. Though I suppose when all is said and done, that might be seen as straying too far away from what gives Mortal Kombat its mechanical identity, and probably have upset Midway themselves in the process. In any case, the consolidated punches go over fine, and I was never left struggling to get the right basic moves out / remembering which buttons correspond to which inputs.
For their part, the standard moves are all fairly responsive, truly demonstrating the long way we’ve come since Mortal Kombat’s original Game Boy outing. Practically every animation is relegated to just one or two frames, resulting in the sort of snappy jabs and swipes you’re looking for out of your basic attacks. Blocking and crouching are similarly responsive, where they can actually function as effective means of negating attacks — again, a far cry from the Game Boy’s awkward “hold ‘Start’ to block” and second-long input delays rendering defensive play impractical. Which brings us to the matter of jumping, and one of the first major faults I feel fit to take with the combat on Game.com. Leaping into the air in Mortal Kombat Trilogy brings me back to the early 80s era of prototypical platformers, where your rising and falling speed are identical constants — a bound divorced from conventional gravity, where you slowly rise to a predetermined height before descending precisely as slowly. In the context of a fighting game, it leaves you feeling particularly floaty and vulnerable, in a way that is far from conducive to either an effective dodging or approach tactic. In a word? It’s dangerous, and should generally be avoided at all costs — especially if you happen to be playing as Shao Kahn or Motaro. More on those poor saps in just a bit.
Mortal Kombat would of course be incomplete without its characters’ unique special attacks. Each of the thirteen characters have two of them to their name (where the accompanying manual will reveal the inputs for one apiece), meaning that many of their more recognizable moves from their original appearances don’t make the cut; such as Cyrax’s ‘Energy Net,’ Noob’s ‘Teleport Throw,’ and Reptile’s ability to turn invisible. What Tiger seemed to have aimed to do here was give every character possible one projectile-type attack and one close-quarters special, as an attempt at some sort of roster parity? I have to assume they were technically limited in how many animations they could actually include per character, and had to attempt to balance them all accordingly. Unfortunately for the small handful of characters who don’t get a projectile, they are thus rendered completely useless, as it turns out that ranged attacks are far and away the most effective in the entire game! Yes folks, it’s here where Mortal Kombat Trilogy finally falls apart completely, as the game’s AI opponents are universally incapable of dealing with incoming projectiles. Where even the Game Boy Mortal Kombat titles implement the ability for computer opponents to recognize when a player is spamming a move and to deal with it accordingly, our Game.com iteration seems to feature no such code — not an effective implementation of it, at the very least. In effect, you can set the game to its hardest difficulty level, pick a character such as Rain, and repeatedly spam either his ‘Gravity Ball’ (quarter-circle forward and A) or ‘Lightning Strike’ (back, forward, forward + A) until your opponent inevitably hits the floor dead. And once you figure this trick out, you’ll likely have little motivation to play the game in any other way — to risk any other tactic other than the one guaranteed to win.
The projectiles also pair quite nicely with opponents attempting to jump over them, where they will promptly be denied and knocked out of the air every time. For whatever reason, it appears that hitboxes on jumping characters still manage to extend all the way down to the floor — at least within the striking distance of projectiles, for our purposes. This makes your standard ground-based projectiles effective anti-airs to boot, further adding to their already overpowered implementation. At this point, the only thing you should have to worry about is fighting the game’s bosses, who traditionally boast additional health and are more resilient to special attacks — to where Motaro in Mortal Kombat 3 is infamously capable of reflecting all incoming projectiles back at players. Unfortunately (?), nobody at Tiger got that particular memo, and both Motaro and Shao Kahn are in fact very susceptible to projectiles here on Game.com. Motaro, for his part, will likely spend half your match against him (as a boss) attempting to jump toward you, allowing you to knock him backward and kill him with just five shots of any ranged attack. Shao Kahn behaves almost identically, and takes the same number of hits before being similarly defeated. Chalk this up – I would theorize – to the developers not implementing any sort of statistical differences in their boss appearances from their player-selectable counterparts. As such, they can both be quickly felled, and Shao Kahn’s destruction will thereby bring you to the single-most disappointing end screen of any Mortal Kombat game to date: An abrupt cut to the game’s logo, a swirl transition to the word “VICTORY,” and an anti-climactic return to the title screen. A thoroughly low-effort reward for a (more likely than not) low-effort playthrough spent spamming projectiles.
Funnily enough, choosing to play as either Motaro or Shao Kahn yourself will result in one of the most tedious gameplay experiences imaginable: Not only do they lack crucial projectile specials, but they don’t even get to have any finishing moves either. I suppose the latter is true for their playable console appearances as well, but the fact they can’t engage at range on Game.com makes them hands-down the most useless characters on the entire roster! The only saving grace for Motaro is that some computer-controlled characters don’t seem to be able to properly track him on the screen, resulting in them spending the bulk of matches awkwardly shuffling around waiting for you to crush them to death. An amusing trick, I suppose. But hey, I mentioned “finishing moves” just a second ago, didn’t I? It’s high time we covered what is arguably the franchise’s most iconic and infamous feature: The ability to gruesomely end your defeated opponents with a range of character-specific ‘Fatalities,’ as well as a handful of goofier alternatives which would be gradually introduced over the course of the series (beginning with Mortal Kombat 2). Fret not over Mortal Kombat Trilogy‘s “T for Teens” ESRB rating here on Game.com, for these finishing maneuvers do remain intact… well for the most part, anyway.
Every character has access to their own ‘Fatality,’ ‘Brutality,’ ‘Babality’ and ‘Friendship’ — all except for the aforementioned Motaro and Shao Kahn, as well as an odd case where Noob Saibot is missing his Fatality? In any event, this means that all the characters lose out on their secondary Fatalities, as well as the ability to perform Animalities. In exchange for missing out on those, the inputs for all these moves have been made universal across characters, where “Forward x3, Down + A” will reliably trigger a Fatality as any kombatant (as opposed to the unique inputs for each required in the original games). Now, the quality of these animations here on Game.com are admittedly mixed, to say the least: Some are appropriate translations of their arcade and console counterparts, such as Reptile devouring his opponent in three bites with his lizard mouth. Brutalities will always reliably explode your foes into gibs, which is satisfying enough. And of course, Babalities are what they are — fully-functional across all the characters, if not boring in their result. Other animations though can end up losing something in the translation, such as Rayden’s ‘Fatal Shock’ just appearing as an incoherent sprite-flashing effect with no resulting corpse or viscera to show for it. Others still are just outright broken, where half of the Friendship animations seem to be missing frames or otherwise play so quickly as to be missed within a blink? Again, Rayden gets the short end of the stick with his ‘Kid Thunder!!’ finisher, where the titular kiddo disappears after just a single frame on-screen. Oh, and there are no longer additional ‘Stage Fatalities’ to execute, pairing with the fact that the stages are no longer multi-layered either.
Of all the losses suffered in the conversion to Game.com though, I think the most damning and crucial comes down to the lack of secrets and mysteries. Sure, folk would’ve had to have figured out the inputs for additional special attacks / finishing moves on their own at a certain point in time, as well as the cheat codes for unlocking Ermac and Noob Saibot (they’re not revealed anywhere within the game itself, and would’ve intended for you to use the Tiger Web Link cartridge in order to connect to the Game.com website and view them). And then there’s an extra options menu you can unlock by means of another cheat code (Up, C, D, B on the options screen), which enables you to toggle a handful of secret settings including “One Button Fatality” for further simplified execution of finishers. But that’s where the secrets begin and end: There are no mystery opponents to taunt and confront you through the tournament, no minigames to discover, or so much as a ‘Supreme Demonstration’ to be viewed demoing all the game’s finishing moves for your enjoyment. Where even the much-detested Game Boy conversion of the original Mortal Kombat managed to squeeze in a playable version of Goro as an unadvertised bonus, Mortal Kombat Trilogy on Game.com feels like it gives you nothing to latch onto or discover for yourself. This is perhaps the element Tiger understood least in attempting to approximate the franchise on their half-cooked handheld, and it’s a genuine shame.
Some last-minute gripes I’ll get into here: Matches between palette-swap characters is a particularly challenging prospect on Game.com, given just how similarly they’re colored and rendered. Previous handheld Mortal Kombat entries in greyscale solved this by darkening your opponent’s palette by a shade, so that they more clearly stand out from your own kombatant. Instead on Game.com, you’re meant to distinguish characters solely by their heads being shaded differently; which is almost impossible to discern on the system’s tiny, ghosting-prone screen. In addition to projectile attacks sometimes slowing down the game, there are also myriad issues that arise if your opponent fires one off at the same time — where there’s the additional potential for one or both attacks to not even appear on-screen at all, due to processing / rendering conflicts. In addition to being ridden by typos, the manual also incorrectly denotes the inputs for several characters’ special attacks; using ‘HP’ for “High Punch” despite the lack of distinguishable high / low punches, and claiming that the block button has to be pressed in conjunction with given attack buttons across several moves (they work just fine if you don’t).
And that’s just about all there is to say about Mortal Kombat Trilogy on Game.com! What could’ve had the potential to be the best handheld outing for the franchise in its era winds up coming closer than you might expect in some categories, while simultaneously managing to fail completely in others. It makes for an interesting study in contrast then, as it manages to look the part and perform better than several of its contemporaries, but collapses like a house of cards when the gameplay is examined beyond its surface level. When looking at these Game.com cartridges in detail, you begin to get a sense for what Tiger prioritized when it came to their development: Making sure they looked the part for screenshots and commercials, while often allowing gameplay to fall by the wayside in the pursuit of that. In that sense, Mortal Kombat Trilogy makes for a particularly revealing assignment for conversion; where the franchise source material’s gory spectacle often overshadows the underlying systems and fighting mechanics, and where Tiger’s hyper-focus on the former shows just how little mind and regard they paid to the latter. It’s not to say that they fell completely flat in executing on technical fundamentals – making sure the game runs decently and that inputs respond promptly – but rather that they weren’t afforded the time / budget to more fully realize the franchise’s more unique functions and attractions. For all its own faults, Mortal Kombat Trilogy on consoles was a genuine labor of love, and manages to reflect that through its gameplay. Mortal Kombat Trilogy on Game.com, then, reflects its rushed development in much the same way. Chalk it up as another casualty of the assembly-line process Tiger’s studio were made to work on, and the expectation to get games quickly out the door.
Text within the game and the instruction manual (as well as in promotional materials) switches back and forth between spelling Kahn as “Khan.” Where you’d assume that it actually should be spelled with the “H” before the “A” (as it is when used to refer to real-life historical chieftains), Mortal Kombat has always codified Shao’s title as “Kahn” since his very first appearance. The fact that Tiger could not consistently get this spelling right really goes to show how much care and effort they invested in this particular conversion. The manual also goes on to misspell the word “Shaman” as “Shamen” in Nightwolf’s character bio — where, coincidentally, his bio is the only one to actually include Shao Kahn’s name with its intended spelling! You can’t make this shit up, folks.
“You May Turn Blood ON or OFF.”
“Sektor survives the Outworld invasion —
he has no soul to take.”
Promotional page from 1998’s Tiger Game.com Holiday Catalog.
It’s been four years since I wrote our original console review / retrospective for the Tiger Game.com, and in that time I’ve still yet to find a single game magazine that actually bothered to review its releases while it was still a contemporary platform. As such, I have no historical reviews or scores to share for Tiger’s take on Mortal Kombat Trilogy. We can pretty safely assume most critics would’ve savaged it if they had covered it, as no one ever took the Game.com to be a serious contender to Nintendo’s claim on the handheld throne — even as Mortal Kombat Trilogy demonstrated some fairly close competition against Game Boy’s small catalogue of middling fighting games. That’s just how the cookie crumbles, I suppose. As for sales of the cartridge, there’s no concrete data to show for those on Game.com either. Educated guess? Let’s wager on something like the lower end of five figures — more likely the mid-range of four digits. But believe it or not, Tiger wasn’t done milking Mortal Kombat Trilogy just yet — no siree, not by a longshot. In fact, there’s a very real possibility that their “alternative” versions of Mortal Kombat Trilogy on offer may well have outsold their own Game.com release, all told and cumulatively accounted for.
Tiger produced three distinct LCD versions of Mortal Kombat Trilogy: One in their traditional standalone handheld format, a cartridge-based version of that for R-Zone systems, and one more spun off from their Giga Pets line of Tamagotchi-esque devices — appropriately rechristened as ‘Giga Fighters,’ and featuring a model based around the Mortal Kombat cast. The first two I listed are exactly what you’d expect them to be: Basic-most attempts at capturing the one-on-one fighting gameplay by means of blinking LCD cels, wherein all the playable characters (Cyrax, Ermac, Kitana, Mileena, Sektor, Sonya, and Sub-Zero) are rendered as slight variations on one another — depending on what side of the screen they appear on / are locked within. Somehow, the screen is left with enough space to render versions of Shao Kahn and Kintaro as well, where the Kahn also inherits Shang Tsung’s ability to morph into other characters? This is all based on reporting by the Mortal Kombat Secrets website, which is the only source I’ve found to include legible screen captures of these games in action. I can tell you for sure that the R-Zone version – given its swappable cartridge format – would’ve been playable between the original model of eye-searing headband / visor peripheral, as well as on the slightly more tolerable ‘X.P.G.’ handheld system. I swear that I will get my hands on these awful things one of these days, and testify as to exactly how migraine-inducing they are.
That leaves us with the Giga Fighters line, and Mortal Kombat Trilogy’s appearance among its offerings. As I understand it, the other three models of Giga Fighter devices came in flavors of Batman & Robin, M.I.B.: Men in Black, and an original Tiger property titled Tech Warriors. On your Mortal Kombat Trilogy model, you can raise and train your choice of three characters from a roster of six; including Kitana, Rayden, Scorpion, Shao Kahn, Sonya, Sub-Zero. You’d be required to turn on your device on a daily basis in order to keep track of meters including hunger and cleanliness, satiate their needs as necessary, and train them to improve their fighting stats over time. In other words, typical Tamagotchi-style creature management, with the curious spin of caring for grown adults preparing to fight each other to the death. The ultimate goal would be to eventually take your fighters online by means of a PC-connecting peripheral, where they could go on to compete in matches against other Giga Fighters owners over the worldwide web. For those without Internet access, you could also link two physical devices to one another, and compete against friends (or more likely, against yourself) in that way. Now, the bit that isn’t clear to me is whether or not you could make your Mortal Kombat characters compete against fighters from the other Giga Fighters models; such as setting up a crossover match between Scorpion and Batman, more than a decade before Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe came to be? If so, Tiger certainly deserves some credit for predicting the direction the series would ultimately end up going. Still waiting on that Mortal Kombat vs Men in Black crossover game, NetherRealm Studios!
In reaching for some sort of “conclusion” to tie all these loose ends and tangents together: Tiger were absolutely shameless in how they leveraged their acquired game licenses, and I honestly can’t help but love ‘em for it. Who else but Tiger at the height of their 90s hubris would’ve thought to turn Mortal Kombat into a Tamagotchi?! Certainly not Midway themselves, I can tell you that much. Even as Mortal Kombat 3 marked something of a turning point for the series in terms of tone – where fans of the franchise will tell you Mortal Kombat started getting “goofier” and more cartoonish at around that point – there’s nothing they could’ve done that would’ve topped having to raise Rayden as a digital pet and remind him that he has to eat and take showers. And at the same time as Tiger were selling consumers on that totally oddball experience, they were also marketing a more legitimate conversion of the console game, on a handheld system that practically no one was buying. This is the sort of kitsch nonsense we’re missing in the modern gaming landscape; where publishers are far more protective of their IPs, and there are far less in the way of competing consoles and handheld devices attempting to vie for market share. Sure, it means more in the way of “quality control” and less in the way of disposable plastic gimmicks, but it also means that the industry has gotten a lot more boring for it. Phone games and Switch ports just don’t hit in the same way that Tiger’s endless assortment of half-baked trinkets did back in the day. And though we’re most assuredly better off for it, I think it’s still valid to look back on that era with some odd fondness. Mortal Kombat Trilogy on Game.com might not have been a great game, but it’s not without its janky charm.
