This is Mortal Kombat Advance, which was Midway's misguided efforts to bring the fun of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 to Nintendo's Game Boy Advance. I reviewed the game all the way back in 2002 and haven't played it in over fifteen years. That is, until now. This is Review Rewind, the show where we revisit my old reviews to see if I like the games more, less or about the same as I did all those years ago. Join me as I attempt to play Mortal Kombat Advance and rip apart my original 2002 review in this episode of Review Rewind.


Last week, I reviewed a game called Cruz Brothers, which I called "one of the worst fighting games I've ever played." I stand by that opinion, but want to make the distinction that it's not the absolute worst fighting game I've reviewed. As far as I'm concerned, that honor goes to Mortal Kombat Advance, a game that came out in 2001 that I had the displeasure of reviewing a few months later on the now-defunct website UGO. At the time I mentioned that "this, my friends, is not merely a fighting game. Oh no, this is the single worst fighting game to ever be."

Given how much time has passed since I came to that hyperbolic conclusion, I figured it might be fun to spend some revisiting this abortion of a fighting game. Okay, maybe "fun" isn't the right word, but I'm curious if my any of my seething hatred for the game has subsided in the last sixteen years.

"What has been dropped on unsuspecting gamers is something so awful that it defies all reason. Every aspect of the presentation of this game is so insanely bad it's hard to even imagine what was going on during the months of programming. Take the control, for example, you'd think you'd be able to move your character forward and back without troubles, but that is certainly not the case here. There's a good second or two lag after each push of the button."

When I think back to my first go-around with Mortal Kombat Advance, the laggy and imprecise controls is the first thing I remember. And then I'm reminded of the terrible collision detection and the fact that projectiles would fly through the opponents like they weren't even there. These are the issues I braced myself for, prepared to hate the game all over again.


On the Game Boy Advance SP, my experience with Mortal Kombat Advance was almost identical to what I remembered from 2002. I was immediately transported back to my grandparent's old house, holed up in a bedroom putting my hands through pure torture just trying to get past the first fight. The year and location may have changed, but the pain the game inflicts on my hand remains the same.

"There may be a wide assortment of characters to choose from, 23 right from the start, but none of them are worth playing. Like so many other Mortal Kombat games, there are a few fighters that use the exact same character model, but change their name and colors differ slightly. You don't just get Classic Sub-Zero, a masked blue ninja, but you also get Ermac (a purple ninja), Noob Saibot (black ninja), Rain (red ninja), Smoke (gray ninja), Reptile (green ninja), and Scorpion (yellow ninja). And that's not even including the new and improved Sub Zero."

For as much as I love the series, this is a knock you could make against pretty much any of the Mortal Kombat sequels. Revisiting the game now, I think the selection of characters is actually one of the bright spots. Sure, it has a few too many masked ninjas, but it also has pretty much everybody from Mortal Kombat 3, including Cyrax, Nightwolf, Sindel, Stryker and Mileena. These aren't great characters (and they look terrible on the Game Boy Advance), but it's a wonderfully varied selection of fighters.

But here's the thing: I get the feeling that developer Virtucraft would have been better off removing some of the clutter and focusing on maybe 10 or 12 characters. They may have modeled a couple dozen fighters, but they didn't have the time to make sure everybody felt unique. None of these characters are easy to control, and there are moves that are nearly impossible to pull off using the original hardware. There are barely any moves, the balance is all off and the fatalities all suck. Actually, that reminds me of something I said in my original review ...

"Problem is, no matter how many fatalities (and friendships) you do, all of them are pretty lame. None feature the dark mood of the original two Mortal Kombats, and none are very humorous, either. The fatalities are just lame. They are also poorly drawn and animated. When a character is blown up, for example, their bones are tossed all about, but not actually ON the ground. Some bones just float there, while other bones mysteriously fall through the ground. There are a number of these glitches scattered throughout the fatalities."

Sixteen years ago, the most I could do was simply tell you how dumb the fatalities were. Now, I'm able to show you. Here's a montage of just a few of the fatalities found in Mortal Kombat Advance.


So a funny happened to me as I went to capturing footage for this episode of Review Rewind. As I mentioned before, I decided to pull out my original cartridge and my Game Boy Advance to get the proper experience, but had to turn to emulation in order to get the footage needed for this episode. I don't know if it's the version of the game I found online or the fact that I was using a PlayStation 4 controller, but I found Mortal Kombat Advance to be significantly easier to play on the computer.

Don't get me wrong, there is nothing you can do to make Mortal Kombat Advance a good fighting game. But with the DualShock 4 and a save button, I was actually able to make progress and see parts of the game I didn't even know existed. I was finally able to see Motaro in all his glory. I also discovered that you can spam Shao Khan to death by simply throwing fireballs until his dies. But don't let up, because he has this uncanny ability to kill you in just a couple seconds. Had this been the way I experienced Mortal Kombat Advance, I can tell you right now that my review wouldn't have been nearly as scathing.

And the truth is, I have a hunch my review was a lot worse than I can show you here. This is one of those cases where the site I freelanced for went out of business and many of those old reviews have been lost forever. I was able to salvage two of the three pages of that 2002 review, but can't seem to access the final page. But even with only two of the pages, my original review was a staggering 943 words. On Mortal Kombat Advance. There's good chance that this dumb write-up is longer than my Yakuza 6 review. How much energy did I have in 2002?

This is one of those rare times where I'm not sure if my opinion has changed or not. On one hand, my original cartridge is every bit as bad as I remember. It has awful collision detection, moves that are hard to pull off and so many bugs that you wonder if anybody even tested this game before release. On the other hand, the emulated version I download seemed a bit more stable and didn't have characters literally falling through the floor for no reason. If you have a choice between those two, play neither.

Before I cut to black, I wanted to highlight one part of Mortal Kombat Advance that showed up in both versions I played ...

"At least half of the matches end with you kicking your opponent flat to the ground only to have him get up and then fall back down once the computer realizes that you've already depleted his health."

Now where have I heard that before?