Having recently restored my Tiger Game.com back to working order, I’ve been keen to make some videos on its small library of games as an excuse to dip back into some of the wonders that Tiger tried to pull off with the little system that could.
Mortal Kombat Trilogy should have been the greatest of 2D Mortal Kombat games when it originally came out in 1996, but after the excellent Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 the series took a bit of a dive. The general reaction to Mortal Kombat Trilogy was that it was now seeming a bit old compared to the likes of Virtua Fighter, and Tekken and other 3D fighting games.
Still, for fans of the Mortal Kombat series the prospect of all fighters and arenas from the first three games combined into one new game seemed awesome.
Mortal Kombat Trilogy was the first game to target just the 32/64 bit era of consoles with releases on the Nintendo 64, Sega Saturn, PC and PlayStation. Unlike previous games in the series, it did not release on the Super Nintendo and Sega Mega Drive even though those consoles were still getting a few new games here and there.
It didn’t even get a handheld version on the Game Boy or Game Gear as previous entries had…which brings us to the subject of today’s video. There was indeed a handheld version of Mortal Kombat Trilogy and that was for the Tiger Game.Com. There was even a version of the game from Tiger for the R-Zone which you could say was a handheld…but it mostly a weird attempt to cash in on the Nintendo Virtual Boy if you can believe that?!
The Game.Com version of Mortal Kombat Trilogy features just thirteen fighters with eleven available from the start and two hidden characters. This is compared to thirty-seven on the PlayStation, Saturn and PC versions and thirty-one on the Nintendo 64.
What’s crazy is that some of the most iconic characters from the series are missing such as Johnny Cage, Sonya Blade, Shang Tsung, Scorpion and Sub-Zero! The list continues with Liu Kang, Jax, Sheeva, Goro, Baraka and many more.
If all these iconic characters are missing, who is present? Raiden, Reptile, Kitana, Jade, Shao Kahn and a few others, but including Nightwolf and not Sub-Zero? What were they thinking? The crazy thing is they did include Reptile, but not Sub-Zero or Scorpion who are famously all palette swaps of each other. I can imagine that on the black and white Game.Com a palette swap character may not make sense as they would appear essentially identical unless their moves differed. This said, these characters did feature in the likewise black and white Game Boy games.
In some ways, the Mortal Kombat Trilogy game that Tiger produced for the Game.Com is quite an achievement. The characters look the same as on the console and arcade games, and the backgrounds are details. Here lies in the problem though. The Game.Com has a really poor refresh rate. This means that when you jump around the screen your character kinda disappears and blends in with the backgrounds. This is a problem that was also noticeable on some Game Boy games, notably Donkey Kong Land where Rare made the game with similar detailed graphics to the Super Nintendo game and a black and white handheld simply can’t distinguish detailed characters against detailed backdrops in fast motion.
This said, the Game.Com was much worse than the Game Boy in this respect and along with the Batman and Robin game on the Game.Com Mortal Kombat is probably the worst offender.
Gameplay wise the game plays and feels like a Mortal Kombat game. The biggest downside is that the Game.Com only has four action buttons where as by this stage we were used to six on the Super Nintendo, PlayStation and Saturn. Still, this was more than you’d get on the Game Boy or Game Gear so we at least got high and low kicks and punches. Pulling off special attacks is possible, and I felt I was having fun playing it. It was just a little hard to see at times.
The game doesn’t quite have the same feel as console or arcade versions of the Mortal Kombat games as I often found that both me and my opponents were crashing into each other and both losing energy which I honestly don’t even remember being possible on other versions. On the Game.Com this happens constantly.
When you start the game you pick a character and then as is usually the case in Mortal Kombat games, the game then asks you to choose which difficulty level you want to challenge. The higher the difficulty the more opponents you have to face to reach the tournament final. Weirdly, and I was certain that I was pressing the wrong thing at times whenever I was defeated the game made me restart the tournament again which I thought was a crazy choice for them to put into the game. It effectively means you only get one continue to attempt to beat the game.
The sound in the game is perhaps the weakest point as there is no music and that takes a lot of the atmosphere away from the game. You do fortunately get some sound clips which say the iconic ‘Fight, Finish Him, and Fatality’ lines, but I couldn’t find that the ‘Toasty’ line is in the game.
Conclusion
To judge this game against modern games or even console games at the time is in a way unfair as it doesn’t do well when compared to the home versions of Mortal Kombat Trilogy and could be judged as a one-star experience. When judging the game just as a Game.Com game it is one of the better games on the system. It’s not great, but it does give you a recognisable Mortal Kombat experience on the Game.Com and will certainly keep you entertained for short bursts of time.
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