Mortal Kombat 3 - Sega Master System (Full Playthrough & Opinion)
4Mortal Kombat 3 was originally a hit arcade game from 1995 that was a little bit of a disappointment compared to its predecessor as the developers decided to bring in a bunch of new characters and discarding the old ones. It’s part of the reason why they ended up making Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 later that year, completed with a pretty cool Sega Saturn port. But anyway Mortal Kombat 3 originally came out for the PS1, Mega Drive, SNES, Game Boy and Game Gear. The Game Gear version was only released in Europe and later spawned a Master System version via Tec Toy and only released in Brazil. The Game Gear version is therefore essentially the same as this port, but I’m told there’s no background music in the fights, but I haven’t played it myself so I cannot confirm this.
Just like the other Mortal Kombat games this is a one-on-one fighter which sees you select a fighter and try to beat all comers over three difficulty settings. You can’t play as everybody in the arcade original but here you get Sindel, the robot ninjas Cyrax and Sektor, the masked Kabal, multi armed Sheeva, the strangely unmasked Sub-Zero, Kano and series regular Sonya Blade. Apparently Smoke is also available as a secret character in this build as well as Shao Kahn appearing as the final boss, although the Centaur Motaro has been dropped.
It wouldn’t be a MK game without the fatalities and once again the fatalities return for all the characters as well as babalities. Unfortunately the other finishing moves have not made it across to the 8-bit version.
Graphically the game is a mess, it looks far worse than the other two Mortal Kombat games on the platform. The characters are very glitchy and the animation is far from smooth. Whilst there are more than two backgrounds in this game, the backdrops just look horrible. It’s like someone has taken a screenshot of the arcade version and put it through a converter to output it to the colour limitations of the system. The colours used make it look awful and could have done with someone to draw over them to clean them up. The music tries its best to replicate the original scores, but it just sounds terrible on the Master System’s sound chip.
Game play wise it is not great especially with the jerky visuals. It’s easy enough to pull off the special (when they do actually work), but overall it’s just not a fun game to play. It’s also worth mentioning that the difficulty selector doesn’t make much difference. Asides from having to battle more enemies the enemy AI doesn’t seem to get any better and it’s pretty dumb to begin with. If you ever play this one and I don’t recommend it, then just play on the master mode, because if you can beat the novice mode then you can beat expert.
Not only is the 8-bit version of Mortal Kombat 3 a terrible game on both the Game Gear and Master System ports, the Master System build is by far the most expensive version in the trilogy. You can buy the much better MK 1 + 2 together for less than half the price of this one. Unless you want to complete your Master System collection, I really would not recommend buying this one.
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