Ultimate Mortal Kombat Preview

Soon Midway will further its quest to bring classic Mortal Kombat games to every imaginable platform with Ultimate Mortal Kombat on the Nintendo DS. It's become woefully evident in the past few years that improved hardware doesn't necessarily equate to proper emulation of classic arcade games, so we were a little wary of how well this one would play on a system as relatively simple as the DS. Luckily, it seems our concerns were misplaced because it looks like Midway has managed to efficiently cram the entirety of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 (and then some) into this cart.

In fact, this doesn't seem like a simple emulation job at all. UMK on the DS runs so fast and so smoothly that we have to assume the game was actually ported to the DS hardware from the ground up rather than rigged to work with emulation of the original arcade machine. When you start up, you can jump into the standard Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 arcade game, allowing you to pick from all the characters of the arcade version, choose your difficulty, and then fight it out against the arcade game's famously lousy artificial intelligence. As far as we can tell, the game preserves pretty much all of the characters' animation frames from the original, and there's no slowdown whatsoever.

The gameplay is spot-on with the DS controls. Anyone who spent time playing any MK on a Super Nintendo pad will feel right at home here, and even if not, it won't take you more than a few minutes to get up to speed. As veterans of UMK3 ourselves, we were able to jump on then start whipping out combos and fatalities almost instantly. And even if you forget how to do any of your characters' special moves and finishers, you'll see a display of all your moves on the other screen throughout any match. (Which screen displays the fighting and which one shows the move list is configurable in the options.) The bottom line is that we're amazed at how much this game feels like the original arcade game; it's a surprisingly high-quality version of UMK3, from what we've played so far.

You'll also get a smattering of multiplayer options for the arcade mode. You can do local versus with two carts and get full support for all characters. There's also a download play option that loads up surprisingly fast. But it's obvious why it's so fast when you get to the character select because only Scorpion, Reptile, Kitana, and Jade will be playable in this mode. Finally (and most surprisingly), the game will support full online versus play, though with only one preview version of the game, we were unable to test it out as of press time.

Then you've got Puzzle Kombat, a rudimentary clone of Super Puzzle Fighter that has appeared in recent console iterations of Mortal Kombat. The game has you and your opponent dropping blocks of four colors onto your respective boards then trying to eliminate groupings of each colors with like-colored gems that occasionally drop down instead of the blocks. This mode lets you select from one of six characters, each of whom has a special power that can be used occasionally during a match. For instance, Sub-Zero's freeze move will freeze the opponent's board, preventing him or her from eliminating any blocks for several turns.

Finally, there's a bit of extra content in the game that you can unlock. You can get a few additional characters for play in Puzzle Kombat, and the three hidden characters from the arcade version of UMK3 can be accessed in the traditional manner (that is, by inputting the correct "kombat kode" during a game over screen). In addition to the unlockable characters, you can unlock a few other light extras, such as a demonstration of all the fatalities in the game back-to-back or an endurance match that pits you against all five of the game's characters in one brutal endurance match.

Ultimate Mortal Kombat's high level of playability certainly surpassed our expectations the first time we tried the game out. We'll bring you a detailed review of the package's lasting appeal closer to its November 12 North American release date.