Mortal Kombat Advance

There were a ton of great games ported to the Game Boy Advance last year. From Klonoa and Castlevania, to Street Fighter and Tony Hawk 2, the Game Boy Advance was the only system other than PlayStation 2 that offered games from almost every major developer. Shortly before Santa brought us our gifts and made everyone smile, Midway shipped one last game that would surely be stuffed in more than a few thousand stockings -- Mortal Kombat Advance.

Mortal Kombat Advance is a port of Mortal Kombat Trilogy and features more playable characters than any other fighting game available for the Game Boy Advance. The list of kombatants include: Cyrax, Kano, Kabal, Jax, Jade, Ermac, Scorpion, Sub-Zero, Classic Sub-Zero, Kitana, Liu Kang, Nightwolf, Kung Lao, Mileena, Rain, Sindel, Noob Saibot, Sektor, Reptile, Smoke, Striker, Sonya Blade and Shang Tsung. That's a lot of fighters! Motaro and Shao Kahn are also playable, but they must be unlocked first.

In the words of Shao Kahn, Mortal Kombat Advance's graphics are "superb." If you wanted proof that the Game Boy Advance was a portable Super NES, here it is. The characters, backgrounds and special moves are very close to the quality of the 16-bit version of Mortal Kombat 3. It's really amazing to see MK running in the palm of your hand. In 1995 (the year when MK3 was released), arcade games could not be ported to any of the existing home consoles without making some sacrifices. The Sony-developed PlayStation changed that, but the long load times held it back from being arcade-perfect. The poor sound of the Nintendo 64 version (released a year later) took away from the overall experience. It must be said though that the Game Boy Advance version sounds just as good as it looks. Believe it or not, the sound quality is better than any other cart-based version of MK.

The only thing holding back Mortal Kombat Advance's graphical perfection is the choppy animation. The digitized characters didn't translate too well on the Game Boy Advance, and the result is something I don't care for: slower gameplay. The Run button helps, but it's not as useful since you can't run up and unleash a combo on your opponent as smoothly as you can in the arcade and console versions of the game. Performing the special moves is a chore. That's something I thought I'd never have to say about a Mortal Kombat game.

For years, Midway has used outside developers to port the various MK games to each console. In some cases, it worked out well. Mortal Kombat 4 and Mortal Kombat Gold were great fighting games. But they made a mistake when they decided to let Virtucraft develop Mortal Kombat Advance for the GBA. Ed Boon, the man who created the Mortal Kombat series, had very little do with this game’s development and it shows. MKA isn't a bad game -- it's a great game that plays badly.

Maybe the Game Boy Advance is to blame. But if that were the case, then MKA should have never been made in the first place. Or maybe the developers needed more time, but isn't that what delays are for? I don't support game delays, but it's not as if I have the power to stop a game developer from doing it. However, this is just a port of a six-year-old game. The base of the coding was written a long time ago. All of the fighters and all of their special moves, combos and fatalities were programmed before the Nintendo 64 landed on store shelves. All that Midway asked Virtucraft to do was port an old game to a new system. In some ways, they did a really good job. The sound is top-notch and the graphics are great. But the gameplay, the one thing that stood out most about the Mortal Kombat series, is flawed. I played with all of my favorites -- both Sub-Zeros, Kabal, Cyrax, Ermac, Sindel and Scorpion. Of those seven characters, six of them did not function properly at all. Kabal's Tornado Run is supposed to paralyze your opponent so that you can run toward him or her and attack with a combo. But every time I tried performing one of Kabal's six-hit combos, my opponent would break free. I had similar problems with Scorpion, Ermac, Sindel, etc. The arcade version was so much simpler, and it used more buttons! The GBA has four buttons, but MKA needed six. So Virtucraft decided to simplify things by making A and B the only attack buttons and use L and R to run and block. But it didn't simplify things, it only made the game more complicated.

Gameplay: 6.5
Mortal Kombat will always hold a special place in my heart. But as much fun as this portable incarnation is, it's very hard to enjoy it after experiencing the seamless gameplay of MK3. If you abandoned the series after MK2, then Mortal Kombat Advance may not bother you as much. MK1 and MK2 seemed kind of slow and mellow after playing the arcade version of MK3, but if you've never played MK3 before, then you might not notice a difference. Regardless, diehard fans are probably going to buy this game, so I'm not going to try and stop you. The diehard fans are the ones who will enjoy MKA the most anyway.

Graphics: 8.9 
Aside from the somewhat choppy animation, Mortal Kombat Advance nearly matches the graphic quality of the 16-bit versions of MK3. The character models are especially impressive.

Sound: 8.5
Now this is what video game music should sound like on the Game Boy Advance! It's not perfect because MK3's soundtrack was not perfect to begin with, but it sounds better than the SNES version of the game and that's all that matters.

Difficulty: 8
As with most games released over the past couple of months, the hardest part of Mortal Kombat Advance is the frustrating controls. Performing combos should be easier since you only have to press two buttons, but it's actually harder!

Concept: 8 
Virtucraft crammed more fighters into Mortal Kombat Advance than most console fighting games released in the past couple of years! I've played with all of them before, but never on a portable system.

Multiplayer: 7.5
The multiplayer action was the essence of MK3, and it's the essence of MKA as well. Although the controls are a bit frustrating, you can't put a price on the multiplayer mode because it allows you to take Mortal Kombat wherever you go and play it with a friend.

Overall: 6.9
Mortal Kombat Advance brought back a lot of great memories. It seems like only yesterday I was waiting in line to play MK3 at a packed theater after seeing the first MK movie. I miss those days. Unfortunately, this game does not allow me to recapture those moments the way that I hoped it would. I'm sure that the GBA's slow processor deserves most of the blame, but after seeing how well NFL Blitz played on the small screen, I thought that MKA would be just as good.