Foreboding, vaguely Asian tunes compliment the game’s dark themes and seedy locales. The music seems to have been sampled directly from the arcade game, and it sets the stage for battle nicely. Given the abilities of the Sega CD unit, there is no reason why the graphics couldn’t have at least come close to those of the arcade original, yet we’re left with a half-hearted hack job that rests somewhere between the Genesis and the SNES ports. Most backgrounds look decent, but some are mysteriously empty (such as the Buddha temple stage). His teeth are nothing more than a white blob, where as in the arcade version, one could practically count his fillings. Johnny Cage’s portrait on the character select screen, for example, is a blotchy mess. Unfortunately, the fluid animation doesn’t save the graphics from looking grainy and washed out, thanks to the Sega CD’s limited color choices and the already lacking Genesis game on which MKCD is based.
Moreover, Sub-zero looks like he did in the arcade, meaning he no longer has to share his fighting stance with his palette swapped rival, Scorpion, in the name of saving ROM space. Kicks and punches flow much better, and characters bob up and down instead of performing the same three frames of animation indefinitely. But thankfully, the reinserted frames turn the stiff, “cardboard cutout” characters of the Genesis version into much more fluid and realistic fighters.
Instead of emulating the superior graphics of the quarter-cruncher, or even the problematic but pretty Super Nintendo offering, the programmers had simply added a few more frames of animation to the existing Genesis game. Those who had waited months for the definitive home version of the bloody brawler were sorely disappointed with the final Sega CD product. The much-anticipated Sega CD version was supposed to remedy all the problems of the previous releases and deliver a true arcade experience. The result was still Mortal Kombat all right, but the Genesis version lacked the visual punch of its big brother, and the graphically-superior SNES version suffered from watered-down violence and stinted controls.īut for the arcade perfectionist, there was a light at the end of the tunnel.
Both of these ports underwent drastic changes in the process, including audiovisual alterations and downgrades, in order to compensate for both of the home systems’ limitations. Soon after making a killing in the arcades, Mortal Kombat was released on several home systems, including the Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo. What they finally heaped on violence-starved customers was essentially the old Genesis version with a CD-quality soundtrack. While Midway Games was programming the Sega CD version of the arcade powerhouse Mortal Kombat, the publisher, Acclaim, promised the result would be “bigger, better, louder and meaner” than any of the other home versions available. Genre: Fighting: Developer: Midway Games Publisher: Arena Ent.