Mortal Kombat Gold

By this point the Mortal Kombat series has gone from big hit, to not much of anything. Midway promises a fifth installment like no other, but then, the last time we were promised that we ended up getting Mortal Kombat Gold.

Essentially Mortal Kombat Gold is the Dreamcast version of the arcade Mortal Kombat 4. And if you've played Mortal Kombat 4 in the arcade then you'll know it's not exactly the best arcade fighter on the market. But, what the hell, I feel like giving Mortal Kombat Gold a fair shake.

Graphically Mortal Kombat Gold is a better-than-the-arcade-port, with sharp looking backgrounds, and good looking character models. But too many of the backgrounds look a like, and the characters, while good looking, by and large aren't very interesting.

The control is a lot like Mortal Kombat 3, with a run button that is almost completely useless. Unlike Mortal Kombat 3, though, everything is in a fake 3D game play. It's not that the game fails because it's in 3D, it's that the game was never worth porting to 3D.

But I digress. There are quite a few characters available at at the start, including quite a few hidden secrets. I like a lot of the old characters more than the original, but then, maybe I'll a little biased.

One thing about the characters in this Mortal Kombat is how unbalanced everybody is. But then, those who notice that imperfection will have likely turned off the game LONG before this point.

Of course each character is fully stocked with a couple fatalities, and other finishing movies. Some are pretty funny, and others are just plain lame. Frankly the fire deaths bore me to tears, and it's even worse in 3D. Once you've seen all the fatalities you basically seen the whole game ...

But before you throw the game away, or toss it in the microwave, make sure you check out each of the endings. Finally REALLY good endings. And there are a whole bunch of quality endings, to boot. It's almost worth playing this game to see these endings ... almost.