Tears of the Dragon (Mortal Kombat 2)

Member Name: Frankingsteins

Product:	Mortal Kombat 2
Date:	21/07/06 (197 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Fast 1 or 2 player fun, with a variety of characters and special abilities

Disadvantages: Too repetitive. Doesn't hold up to modern equivalents.

The sequel to the hit arcade fighting game ‘Mortal Kombat’ did everything a good sequel should do: improve upon the original, expand the series’ potential, and stand alone as an independent game. Developed for arcades by Probe in 1993, and released on home console / computer formats in 1994, Mortal Kombat II held its own in the face of increasing competition on both formats, most notably from the ‘Street Fighter’ series.

Although very similar in premise and gameplay to its rivals, Mortal Kombat II achieved popularity for its addictive two-player option and replay value, aided by the comparably vast selection of playable characters available. The game’s emphasis on (attempted) realism through the graphics led to more graphic violence than was common for video games of the time, as graphic capabilities continued to evolve. As expected, this led to a difference of opinion among young players and their over-protective parents.

The premise of Mortal Kombat II is similar to its later three-dimensional successor, the ‘Tekken’ series, and is evidently inspired by the Bruce Lee film ‘Enter the Dragon.’ Competitors have been gathered from across the globe to compete in a series of brutal, one-on-one matches for their lives. In one-player mode, the player selects a character and proceeds up a figurative mountain of competitors in the form of the other playable characters, the final battles being with the mighty Kintaro and the mysterious Shao Khan.

There are twelve playable characters this time round, twice as many as in the first game, although most of the old faces return and some of the new ones are similar enough as to be considered pretty identical and interchangeable. The masked ninjas Scorpion and Sub-Zero are supplemented with the third ninja Reptile, capable of green acid attacks and telepathy, and as with the new female faces Mileena and Kitana, these characters are visually identical in all but their colours. The Bruce Lee rip-off Liu Kang, heavyweight Jax, bandit Kung Lao and Hollywood scoundrel Johnny Cage represent the more human side of things against the mutant Baraka and the thunder god Rayden (thunder’s the flashing electrical stuff, right?). The disappointing enemy Shang Tsung from the first game is now a playable grunt like the rest.

Mortal Kombat II learns from its predecessor, resulting in a vastly improved playing experience. As usual, victory is achieved by attacking the opponent until his, her or its health bar is reduced to zero and they are either knocked unconscious or, as the second best-of-three round permits, destroyed in all manner of grisly ways. This time round there are no distracting mini-games, and the score system has been completely removed due to its irrelevance. The Amiga version of the game boots from three floppy disks, and gameplay is controlled entirely with the joystick or joypad, exempting additional keyboard commands to pause the game and enter cheat codes. In the two-dimensional environment, characters can be moved left and right, thus towards or away from the opponent, as well as being able to jump and duck. The fire button controls arm and leg actions; advanced moves and special attacks are carried out through a combination of joystick waggling and button bashing.

The primary fun of this game comes in the two player rounds, as long as both you and your competing friend, relative or arch enemy are of a comparable standard. The number of continues can be set up to a maximum of 30, and round time is still automatically set to 99 seconds. Unless you’re playing two-player with a complete coward this is always going to be far more than enough time in which to kill or be killed. The one-player game has the advantage of unlocking secret characters and levels, as well as the satisfaction of completing a personal quest, but can still prove fairly daunting even with the game difficulty set to a feeble ‘very easy’ standard. As such, two-player is more fun and can even provide an arena in which to test out a character’s special moves and fatal blows without an Amiga-controlled character relentlessly jumping in your face.

As mentioned earlier, the Mortal Kombat series strives for realism, and this is enhanced by the photographic style of the characters. All proportions are anatomically correct for humans, unlike the cartoon style of Street Fighter, and the shading and realistic faces are evidently based on photographic actors. The blood itself isn’t too realistic, and the primitive sound effects aren’t going to have anyone wincing, but the violence itself may be a cause for concern. The backdrops are all rendered quite nicely and there are enough of them in rotation that it never becomes too repetitive, but the limited colour palette in some areas does lead to some visible errors of colour bleeding and substitution.

There are some nice touches to the sound beyond the suitable but unimpressive oriental music score, primarily in the sampling of a booming voice that commands and commends the characters appropriately, especially in the lethal command to ‘finish him!’ Mortal Kombat II expands massively upon the special fatality moves of the first game, providing hours of fun as codes are tried out to make the characters kill each other in really horrible ways. As well as the fatalities, players can cause ‘babalities’ (turning the defeated opponent into a miniature baby version of itself) and the ridiculous but entertaining ‘friendship’ in which all is forgiven and the loser is given a nice present, rather than having his, her or its arms ripped off by Jax.

Mortal Kombat II is a classic beat-em-up that’s a lot of fun, but one that’s really been usurped by its more impressive three-dimensional successors. The game suffers for its limitations such as the basic similarity of all the characters beyond a few individualised tricks, and for the fact that some very simple moves, such as the ever-popular uppercut punch, are incredibly easy to perform and are very damaging, while more complex special moves may not be worth the effort. The Amiga version is particularly annoying for its constant disk-swapping, although this can be avoided if the computer has three floppy drives, which was common in the early 90s. The game couldn’t be loaded onto the hard drive, and this lack of virtual memory meant that some edits had to be made from the superior console versions, mainly additional graphical touches such as animated backgrounds. The joystick was also a little difficult to handle in comparison to joypads or the classic arcade set-up, but this computer version was nevertheless an enormously popular, now enormously dated fighting game.

Summary: Released on Amiga in 1994