Released in 1995

Available in

Genre: Fighting

An immensely popular arcade game, Mortal Kombat II saw a 32X port in 1995. Published by Acclaim and developed by Probe Entertainment (who also did the Genesis version), this port is one of the major examples of the lack of improvement between the Genesis and 32X versions of the same game. Improvements include more colors, some more background details, more voices and more animation frames -one of the main changes is that characters now have their low punches, in the Genesis version the low punches were all uppercuts. The intro was partially added, featuring all of the story scenes, but the brief clips showing characters doing moves are all missing.

And now on to the negatives, which there are a lot of. This version only runs at 30 frames per second, leading to some choppiness at times. This seems to happen a lot on the deadpool stage, and the stage where you fight Kintaro. The endings don't feature the correct images (the SNES version had these!), instead they just use character's profile images. The trees don't roar in the forest stage (again, the SNES version did have this) and Kitana/Mileena/Jade have the wrong death scream. I also felt that there was some input lag whilst playing this, it probably doesn't help that the CPU AI is absolutely horrendous, at it constantly cheats and reads your inputs all the time. Air throws don't seem to work anywhere near as well as they do in the arcade version. The music is also the same as it was in the Genesis version.

Overall if you already have the Genesis version you definitely don't need the 32X version. And due to the absurd difficulty level, I can't recommend this unless you're a big MK fan. It's better than Cosmic Carnage, but if you want a good fighting game for the 32X, get Virtua Fighter instead.

The game lets you choose from twelve different characters, each of which has punches, kicks, special moves and finishing techniques. There are two buttons for punches, two for kicks along with a button for blocking. Using a three button controller for this game is near useless, to get the most out of it you'll need a six button pad.

The single player mode has you fight against everyone else in the game. The CPU opponents in Mortal Kombat II are notoriously difficult, and whilst the first few will fall easily, it won't take long for their aggressiveness to spike up, to the point of madness. You'll quickly tire of having your uppercut perfectly countered with another uppercut, and the CPU will read your move inputs like crazy. The different difficulty settings don't seem to make any difference, and should you manage to make it through to the end you've still got to deal with two unplayable bosses: Kintaro and Shao Kahn.

The only other mode is the 2 player option, which lets two human players fight each other. This is probably a much better alternative than the single player mode. Aside from that, you might get a laugh out of the various finishing moves each character has -all characters have at least two fatalities, which will kill the opponent. By meeting certain conditions, you can also use "friendships", where your character will do something silly. Babalities let you turn your opponent into a baby, whilst you can also perform stage fatalities on certain backgrounds, which let you do things such as knock your opponent into some acid or send them flying off a bridge.

Test mode
Go into the options menu, highlight "DONE!" and then press left, down, right, right, down, left, left, left, left, right, right, right. A "test modes" option will appear which adds several options to the game, including free play and one hit kill modes.

Fight Smoke
During any match in the portal stage, if you ever see Dan Forden appear and say "toasty!", press down and start. You will then get to fight Smoke.

Fight Jade
At the match before the ? box in the single player mode, defeat your opponent with low kicks only. Your next opponent will be Jade, who looks like Kitana and Mileena, but has a green outfit.

Fight Noob Saibot
Win 25 two-player matches in a row. You will then fight Noob Saibot, who is an all black ninja.

Random select
At the character select screen, highlight Liu Kang and then press up whilst holding start. A random character will be selected for you.

-Like with the majority of console ports of Mortal Kombat games released in the early '90s, there is annoyingly no way to pause the game, even with a six button controller.

-The Japanese version features English text for the character profiles and endings.