*days may or may not be concurrent

When it comes to fighting games I always considered myself a Street Fighter guy. I prefer the visual style and the feel of the game a lot more then to a lot of the other fighter games (Sam Showdown coming a close second mind you). As much as I loved the game though I was never any good at it. While Street Fighter 2 may have been the first major fighting game on the consoles, it took a while before it reached the Game Boy. This gave Capcom’s major rival in the fighting game genre at the time to get a huge jump on them by bring fighting games to handhelds.


 
I’ll admit I’m not much of a Mortal Kombat fan these days, I look down on the series now as a lesser fighting game series for the people who can’t get the hang of the grown up fighting games and would rather play something with blood and guts as opposed to decent gameplay mechanics. But in the 90’s I was soo into the series, I enjoyed the movie (first one not the god awful last one), read the comics (which where awesome) hell I even watched some of the cartoon (which was crap).  I was young and I guess I could look past the crappy gameplay and just enjoyed it for what it was. Plus Mortal Kombat had a way better stroyline that just lended itself soo well to non gaming stuff I guess. And it had blood and gore and those things are always awesome to a 12 year old I guess.
 


I’ve not played Mortal Kombat 1 on the Game Boy, but from what I have heard of it, I don’t think I’m missing out. MKII on the other hand was very good and at that stage the best fighter I had played on the Game Boy. Having said that up until that point the only fighter I had played on the Game Boy was Pit Fighter so I think I could of played Dual Heroes on the N64 and I still would of played a better fighter then Pit Fighter. I got the game for Christmas 93 I think, don’t think I played it all that much must have gotten bored of it rather quickly for some reason, I guess once you finish a fighting game unless you have people to vs it gets old quickly.
 


The game was more or less a pretty faithful rendition of the console and arcade game albeit shrunk down to fit on the Game Boy Cartridge. One funny thing about the game is the character roster which was taken down from 12 to 8, fair enough I guess but it’s the choice of characters which is awesome. Playable in this game is, Liu Kang, Jax, Sub-Zero, Scorpion, Reptile, Kitana, Mileena and Shang Tsung. So that’s 2 sets of clones and another character who can turn in the clone characters. So all up they have only 5 character models for the playable characters. I always thought that was funny, granted I don’t blame them for doing that, it saved on memory space, but I was still missing being able to play as Raiden. Gameplay is good and feels just like Mortal Kombat but in your pocket. Of course having 2 attack buttons instead of 4 reduces you to only having 1 button for punch, and one for kick. It’s a compromise so the game could be brought to the Game Boy its nothing game breaking and it works fine.
 


Other cuts to the game include the complete lack of blood, not that you’d really notice on the Game Boys screen. All the fighters are reduced to only one Fatality and Babeality as their finishing moves. Also the ten stages have been cut down to three and finally Kintaro has gotten the flick and the end boss is just Shao Khan. But for a Game Boy game they squeezed in as much as they could. And for someone like me who was never that good at fighters and always wanted to be, this was the perfect fighting game. As with any good fighting game multiplayer was a must, unfortunately I never got a chance to experience it, I don't remember knowing anyone who had another copy of it. I guess thats the one problem with multiplayer gaming back then for Handhelds, if you don't know someone else with another copy of the game there is no way to play multiplayer. Its not like today with online and all. Ahh simpler times.



Mortal Kombat 2 will always be the high point of the series, at least for me anyway. It was the last time I really cared about the series. Sure I played 3 and I would even say I enjoyed 4 on the N64, but after 2 I became more and more interested in the Street Fighter games. You go back and play Street Fighter 2 and Mortal Kombat 2 and there is just no comparison between the to. Mortal Kombat 2 on the Game Boy was a good game when it came out. Sure it was surpassed by much better fighters on the system but for a brief time it was the best fighter the system had to offer and still holds up well in today. Yes its limited in a lot of areas compared to its console and arcade brothers but this is handheld game we are talking about and back then you didn't expect a full console experience. You just expect a good game thats gonna kill 30 mins and this game did that perfectly. I think for the next game, a return to the world of Colour is in order, see you guys later.