Mortal Kombat Advance

Let's get some positives out of the way: Graphically, this tries to do what it can regarding the screen crunch. Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 was originally on the big arcade screens, so naturally, everything had to be shrunk to fit into the GBA's screen. I'm fine with that, some sacrifices have to be made to fit UMK3 into the GBA. Speaking of which, some stages are missing, and Sheeva is not a playable character. The soundtrack is decently ported here, at least the songs that are available since, you know, some stages didn't make the final cut. Except for the Pit's theme song, that is laughably short. Whatever, that's fine as long as the original gameplay is represented well enough.

That is unfortunately where this game fails, to an unacceptable degree.

If you're familiar with other ports of UMK3, like the one on Sega Genesis or the SNES, this will look familiar at the start. You have some options to look at, the 1 player mode, and the 2 player modes where you can have either a 1-on-1 match or a 2-on-2 match. Good luck finding anyone that wants to play this with you.

It really doesn't matter because after you pick a character, everything goes downhill. In the 1 player mode (the only one I could play), you can still choose the amount of opponents you'll face on the way to fighting Shao Kahn. Again, this doesn't matter because fundamentally, this game got the fighting system all wrong.

As you face your first opponent, you will notice that you're really far from each other. Already, that's a sign that the developers (Virtucraft) had no idea what the hell a 2D fighting game even was at the time. Then the AI opponent starts moving, and you'll notice another problem: they made the AI really, really cheap. For example, Scorpion is able to pull off his teleport punch repeatedly, at a comically fast speed! What gives?

The answer is simple: Virtucraft had no idea what they were doing, and for that reason, special moves do not have recovery. To the unfamiliar: recovery is the last part of an attack, which is usually leaving the attacker open to the opponent's offense if they missed. It exists so you can't just, for example, spam a projectile attack several times in quick succession. In Mortal Kombat Advance, you can do this, and in fact, you are encouraged to do that. If you try to play fair, you're not going anywhere here. The AI will just torture you until the round is over. Forget about the dial-a-combos, that's likely not happening with the controls. In fact, I'm not sure why they didn't simplify the fighting system to being like MK2.

Remember, the GBA doesn't have enough buttons for everything in UMK3. You got the D-Pad, start, select, L, R, A and B. This is not optimal for a game that has High Punch, High Kick, Run, Block, Low Punch, and Low Kick for fighting. Virtucraft made the decision to let you punch, kick, run and block, mixing up whatever they could to fit the uppercuts and leg sweeping.

To summarize, forget trying to play this game like any other version of UMK3. That's just not how this was designed.

Virtucraft had no idea of what to do with this game.

You can only win via being very cheap, and spamming jumping kicks, or projectiles, and that's while fighting with inconsistent controls when it comes to inputting commands for special moves. Going over the roster is really meaningless, since you will not be able to really sink your teeth into any of them properly. This game is a piss-poor effort at bringing an arcade classic into the GBA. That said, I am stunned that Motaro made it into this game. He's a sub-boss that players face just before fighting Shao Kahn. What is crazier is that Motaro is quite easy in this version, compared to any other one. Just spamming jumping kicks can do a lot of damage to the big guy. I personally wouldn't have bothered to bring him into the game. Instead, I'd have brought Sheeva and promoted her to being a sub-boss.

Or better yet, I wouldn't have made such a miserable pile of garbage game. Shao Kahn is even more of a cheap bastard in this version of UMK3 due to the previously mentioned issue with special moves. He spams his moves harder than ever, and thus, you will have to spam against him as soon as humanly possible.

That's all there is to this. Spam, bam, thank you, ma'am. Mortal Kombat Advance sucks. Something else that surprised me is that this game actually has endings for the playable main cast. Granted, the endings are just the versus screen portraits next to some text, but it's something. Shao Kahn's lost treasures are nowhere to be seen, though. That's the menu you get after beating the game, you can choose what you'll get as a reward.

One final detail worth mentioning: there are some fatalities, but they all look terrible. Brutalities? Nah. Animalities? Nope. Babalities? Lol. Friendships made it in, so that's neat, I guess.

If I could give this game a 0, I would. This game is the equivalent of when many Simpsons characters rebuilt the Flanders' house and it collapsed. In fact, watch that episode of the Simpsons instead of playing this.