Kombat Kolumns: Mortal Kombat II for PS3 (SOE) Review
The latest version of Mortal Kombat II has been released on April 12, 2007 for PlayStation3's Sony Online Entertainment Network. This version of the game is surprisingly good. It's not fast like the Midway Arcade Treasure versions, doesn't have sound issues and slowdowns, nor loading times or moon gravity lol. Random select and Smoke finally make their return.
There were only a few things that I noticed while playing the game. It seems that Mortal Kombat II for PlayStation 3 runs at the same framerate as Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 for PlayStaion 2. What that means is that sometimes (rarely but it happens) it drop frames. Something else that cached my eyes is that the characters don't have shadows on the Dead Pool stage (they had in the arcade and in many other versions). The screen you get when you're about to fight a hidden character has some elements missing and also, the Fatality music cuts off and the game goes nearly silent if you do the first part of Sub-Zero's two-part Fatality over and over again. In the arcade version, the music just keeps looping. Sometimes, happens completely random, after you beat the game and get the character's ending the music during the credits goes silent. It doesn't happen often but the glitch is there. Also, for some reason if the round is too long (the timer reach 40 secs), the background music goes silent and all you can hear is just the sfx.
The main focus of this release is to play online against someone else, but of course you can play in single player mode. The game has currently senseless online leaderboard. The scoreboard just represents the number of wins you get in a row but you basically have to get them from one person because the statistics resets when they leave. On widescreen monitors, the game screen is surrounded by images of the characters taken from the versus screen (some from Mortal Kombat 3 o_O, and in early versions of the game the background was just a blue fade screen). The game is 1080p capable. Still you can stretch the image and hide the borders if you want. The menus, while functional, look and sound terrible. Everything, right down to the font, looks like something that the developers meant to replace at some point but never got around to cleaning up before release. And the sound that plays when you move between menu options is a loud, grating ping. The game audio is usually accurate, but it also sounds muffled and as if it is at a low bit rate. That lines up with the arcade original, but on some home theater systems, the audio only seems to come out of the center channel and subwoofer, which is weak.
As a conclusion I can say that Mortal Kombat II for SOE is definitely a great port, and no doubt the best home version of the game so far. The total size of it is 250mb, which is kinda weird since the complete arcade revisions dump is about 30mb, and I doubt the extra content takes that much space. The game currently costs $4,99. The quality of your connection, as well as the connections of the other players in the game, will dictate the quality of your experience. A mistake is that there is no voice chat in the online mode, and for people who play the game at first, it will take a while to realize that they have to hit "Start" button to start a two player game.
At the end I would like to say thanks to Patrick McCarron of The Realm Of Mortal Kombat for his assistance.
Visitors Rating
9.1
Rated by 70 Visitors
Written by: ded_
Date: July 18, 2009