Mortal Kombat II (32X) Playthrough

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Published on September 14, 2023 9:50:40 AM ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V0Yhh1YFFEc

Game:

Mortal Kombat II (1993)

Category:

Let's Play

Duration: 19:12

6,284 views

269

A playthrough of Acclaim's 1995 fighting game for the Sega 32X, Mortal Kombat II.

Played through as Liu Kang on the medium difficulty level.

After tackling the Genesis version of the game (https://youtu.be/dHo1S4xy5qs), it didn't seem right to leave the upgraded 32X port out in the cold. (I'm sure that it had enough of that from its sales numbers.)

Mortal Kombat II for the 32X hit store shelves in March of 1995, six months behind its Genesis and SNES counterparts and one month ahead of Mortal Kombat 3's arcade debut. It reviewed well, but most outlets agreed that it though it was indeed better than the Genesis port, it didn't do enough to leverage the power of the 32X add-on, nor did it offer sufficient improvements to justify its $69.99 MSRP to anyone who already owned one of the 16-bit versions.

Both of those points were entirely valid. The game's presentation was a fair improvement over the Genesis version's, but it was still the exact same game beneath the facelift, and it inherited many of the limitations of the 16-bit hardware as a result.

The biggest improvements seem to stem more from the increased ROM size than the muscle of the new hardware. The Genesis and SNES games were 24 megabits, and the 32X game got a bump to 32 megabits. That's a pretty substantial increase.

Here's a rundown of the improvements in the 32X game:

-The game now has the intro and the character bio screens from the arcade game's attract mode, proper endings for each character, and large portraits of the fighters are shown at the Vs. screen in the 2-player game.

-The character sprites have been given more color and detail and now stand on par with the quality of the SNES version's.

-The Genesis version's oval blob shadows have been ditched in favor of more realistic ones.

-The backgrounds have been touched up, and many of the details and animated elements that were missing from the Genesis version are present in the 32X version. However, since the game uses the Genesis VDP to render the background layer, the stage graphics still suffer from the older hardware's harsh color limitations.

-Goro's MK1 stage is now used as the backdrop for the Jade fight.

-Many of the voice samples that were left out of the Genesis game were added back in (including many of the screams, the announcements from the beginning and end of each round, and the characters' names).

-The HUD looks much nicer.

I think that about covers it. It's not bad at all, but had you bought it hoping for a showcase for your new $150 add-on, you probably would've ended up being less impressed than you'd hoped.
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