Serious MK fans will enjoy Gold thanks to the fact it keeps everything that made the series famous intact, blood include
Out of all the under-appreciated and under-rated Dreamcast games, Mortal Kombat Gold tops the list. MKG is simply MK4 but with extra characters, but what's wrong with that? Wreckless amounts of fans in the series hail this as one of the worst games, although I seriously have to argue against this. Sure, MKG is a disappointment, but hardly a unforgivable one. If you give MKG time, there will be alot of enjoyment to be discovered.
For starters the graphics, they look nice on Dreamcast to say the least, the visuals are in fact the same quality as that of the arcade, in fact, better and look decent on the Dreamcast. Characters are well detailed and have a much higher amount of polygons than on the N64 or Psone. The arenas themselves look excellent. In comparison to other beat em' ups, I wouldn't say it looks the best, but that is because it is being compared to the best. MKG still looks like a Dreamcast game, because it looks far greater than anything on Playstation or Nintendo 64.
The gameplay is another thing people can't seriously say is good, but again, I disagree. The controls are simple, but again, this was the same case with MK4. Why should it be complicated anyway though? Surely gamers understand that it should be easy to play to be enjoyable. Perhaps combos are easy, but I doubt that is problem for gamers. MKG also has the weapons system featured in MK4, including new ones. The weapons control oddly but make a nice change from combat. Fatalities also make a much expected appearance and are all good. The only problem I have with the fatalities is that the ones features on the new characters are weak but still gory anyway.
There are a few problems with MKG. Although this comes in the form of odd bugs involving the much poor sound and music of MKG. My biggest gripe is that they weren't recreated in any way for Dreamcast and were indeed poor, so poor that they were comical. The bugs themselves though are killer, with voices and music not being loaded or the game having odd problems during 2-on-2 combat. Load times probably are the reason for this.
The game isn't tremendously long either, but the game has replay value, so you'll be playing the game frequently afterwards. The length of the game is also helped by the cheesy (and quite funny) endings for each character). So like I said, MKG is a disappointment, but hardly the worst MK game. Serious MK fans will enjoy Mortal Kombat Gold thanks to having keeping everything that made the series famous and with quality visuals as expected from the Dreamcast.