A stupid idea? Mortal Kombat II Sega CD?

[Skippy B. Coyote]

Just curious -- how old are you -- or more specifically, how old were you when MK was big?

 

(Testing my theory that the biggest MK fans were of a certain age when it came out. Kinda like how people born around 1970 are way more into Atari than younger people. I'm sure there's a reason I want more space shooter games but the mass market does not -- I'm sure that me being 7 when Star Wars came out has a lot to do with that)

 

I'll help out with your research. Mortal Kombat has always been my favorite fighting game series and it was a huge deal when I was a kid. No one I knew wanted to play Street Fighter, all the kids I knew back then were all about Mortal Kombat (thus why everyone I knew had a Genesis and not a Super Nintendo). Anyway, I was born in 1985 so I would have been 7 years old when Mortal Kombat first came out in the arcades and 8 years old when it arrived on home consoles.

[derFunkenstein]

To add to the research, I was 14 when the original came out in arcades, 15 when it came out for consoles on Mortal Monday. I had been saving from every odd job I could do and had barely scraped together enough to buy it on launch day. I was the only person with a Genesis at the time and I was quite popular for a couple of months there.

 

Great game. First 4 games were great games (counting Ultimate MK3 here, not MK4). I'm personally a Street Fighter-first guy and always have been, but it's got a special place in my heart.

 

A Sega CD or CD + 32X version of the second game might be cool, but we already have basically arcade-perfect on the Saturn. The only arcade-perfect port of the original that I know of is the DOS PC version, which I had on floppy disc. It ran like crap on the family 486/SX but much better on the Pentium MMX 166MHz we got a few years later. My parents still have the floppy disks and manual (required for password lookup copy protection) in a desk drawer.

[Austin]

but we already have basically arcade-perfect on the Saturn.

We don't, actually. Have you played it? It may look perfect in screenshots, but it's full of glitches, moves at the wrong speed, uses a different soundtrack, and has many other issues. Among MK fans it's fairly infamous for being the version that should have been perfect, but was far from it.

[The Usotsuki]

My experience, although I've never played any of the 32-bit home ports, is that the SNES port is the best home version. It's also the only one that was NOT done by Probe Development.

[derFunkenstein]

I don't remember any glitchiness in MK2 Saturn, but I know it stops every time Shang Tsung transforms. That's true of any CD-based port of any Mortal Kombat game, though.

 

The SNES one is good. The 32X one is better. It uses the 32X layer for characters which lets the Genesis/Mega Drive use its whole available color palette on backgrounds. Many of the voices are improved, too. Lu Kang still sounds like a giggling gopher when he does the bicycle kick, but that's all I hear that's obviously wrong.

[Austin]

I don't remember any glitchiness in MK2 Saturn

You remember wrong.

 

The SNES one is good. The 32X one is better. It uses the 32X layer for characters which lets the Genesis/Mega Drive use its whole available color palette on backgrounds. Many of the voices are improved, too. Lu Kang still sounds like a giggling gopher when he does the bicycle kick, but that's all I hear that's obviously wrong.

I disagree. The backgrounds still look ugly in the 32X one, the music is still the same (ugh), and it's still missing many animation frames on basic movements (including jumping), that you surprisingly don't see missing in the SNES one. While the 32X one has some clear advantages, it also has some major disadvantages. The SNES version is a much more well-rounded package and holds up better today.