Difficulty:

Easy

Time Spent:

10 Hours or Less

The Bottom Line:

"Instant classic"

Graphics: Being this is a pretty early Genesis game, they're not anything to fangasm over, although they're not too bad. The coolest part of anything visual I'd have to say would be the fatalities.

Sound/Music: Rating which is best, I'd say music. Some of the tunes have a Japanese/Chinese tone to it, while others are just simply there. They are very nicely composed for an early Genesis game, though. The sounds mostly range from some slight voice-acting and other simple sounds like jumping, hitting, selecting, so on and so forth.

Difficulty: Even at the highest difficulty, this game honestly is pretty easy, mostly because the enemy can't rip any combos on you and things are slowed down due to a not-very-speedy system.

Gameplay: This was a popular arcade game that was ported to a varity of systems, obviously the Genesis included. It was a pretty controvercial game because the fact that it had explicit scenes of blood and gore (yeah compare that to blowing off zombie heads with shotguns in RE4). The Genesis at this time was a system which had something Nintendo didn't, for awhile that is, and that was that most of the games on this system were aimed at the older croud rather than clean bloodless games, and this was around the time games began obtaining ratings based on age group. A lot of what can be seen is bodyparts being removed, blood splattering into a pool, and more that would give this game a "mature" rating. The story itself basically consists of fighters (Sub-Zero, Scorpion, Kano, Liu Kang, Sonya, Johnny Cage and Raiden) who are trying to make it to the top by defeating the sorcerer Shang Tsung and his minion Goro after facing all of the other Kombatants. It's all survival from start to end.

Controls: Mostly everything is pretty simple to learn, although you may want to use a 6-button pad rather than a 3, it's much easier to do things with. Fatalities are simple as well, but you'll probably want to look on Gamefaqs or something for these. I'm a lucky owner of an old strategy guide for the first 3 Mortal Kombat games on the Genesis and SNES that has all of the special moves and fatalities! Perhaps you can get lucky at a store, probably Ebay.

Overall: A great fighting game and obviously a very well-known one. Any Mortal Kombat fan must have this game, or even if you have a Sega Genesis, you shouldn't get away with not owning this (unless you simply don't like the games). It is a bit easy and choppy, but that won't take the fun or the classic value away. Wonderful multiplayer too!