(This article was written… umm… must have been two years ago, now? December ’06? I can only assume my writing’s improved over that period of time… for a earlier, crappier site bearing the same name as this one. I present everything as it was back then, except that I had to move the image captions to alttags because my HTML sucked. Onwards!)

In 1992, an arcade game called Mortal Kombat became considerably popular due to the sheer difference between it and other fighters like Street Fighter – things like juggling, a separate block button, digitised characters… oh, and a little something called the “Fatality”, a special move to kill off the loser of the match in a hilariously violent manner. This of course caused a great deal of controversy, which resulted in, yes, more popularity!

A year later, Acclaim went on a marketing blitz for it’s many home versions of the game, giving them all one release date – “Mortal Monday” – and going so far as to run TV ads, a rarity for games back then.

Now, we’ve all heard the SNES versus Genesis arguments regarding both consoles’ home ports, but little has been written regarding the portable versions. Far from the sleek multimedia powerhouses of today’s PSP or DS, the portable devices of the time were fat, bulky, battery-chewing 8-bit bricks. So you’d expect pushing a detailed beat-em-up onto the console would end in dismal failure, wouldn’t you?

Well, let’s look at each such port with a vaguely trained eye.

First, let’s start with the Game Boy. The major failing of this device is it’s ability to only display from a somewhat limited palette of four shades of grey. This, as you’d perhaps expect, does MK’s digitised sprites no favours. Okay, that’s a bit too polite… it turns the normally easily recognisable characters into blurry, indistinguishable blobs of grey crap. There, that’s better. Presumably, redrawing the sprites a tad to play to the console’s ability would take more effort than the moth-in-a-empty-wallet budget this port was presumably made on, leaving the characters as indistinguishable blobs with six frames of animation each. Which, let’s face it, would be bearable if the gameplay and controls were as razor sharp as the arcade, since the processor won’t have to deal with graphics, am I rite?

The game suffers from a disease called too-much-animation-itis. Upon hitting your kick button, your chosen smear will spend the next second stuttering through a five-frame kick animation that on a more powerful console would flash by in a quarter second, but in this version is as easily dodgable as a bed-and-breakfast. Thanks to these slow animations from smudgy avatars, the gameplay chugs along like the ever-predictable riff of a bad Metallica clone.

Each of your pugilistic ink blot tests has two special moves (good luck hitting with one, though!) and a finishing move that has been extremely – to use a scientific term – pussified. While Scorpion’s classic Toasty fatality is intact, pretty much everything else has been reduced to a mockery of itself – Kano’s ever-popular heart rip has been replaced with a high kick, for pete’s sake!

Perhaps the only notable thing about this port is the addition of a cheat code to play as the famous mini-boss Goro, who in the arcade towered over players and viciously pummeled them, but in this version… uhh… slaps you in the face in a very awkward “I want to hit you but don’t want to touch you” way, and jumps limply on your chest like a retarded kitten. Way to go, Acclaim!

Now, as for the Game Gear version… it’s actually bareable! (Boy, you weren’t expecting that, were you?)

While the game suffers from a pinch of control lag, it seems most of the portable MK budget fell to this version – the characters look almost exactly the same as their arcade counterparts, the blood-code is in, the sound is pleasing, and the game overall feels like a decent replica of the original. Which, let’s face it, is probably not what we expected from Sega’s Harvester Of Battery Souls.

Where the Sega port suffers, however, is in variety of backgrounds. Somehow, Acclaim only saw fit to include two backgrounds in the game, so chances are you’re going to get sick of Goro’s Lair very quickly.

All things considered though, the Game Gear port not only beats the Game Boy version up easily, but caps it off by uppercutting it off a bridge onto a pit of spikes.