First and foremost, let’s get the obvious question out of way – how did we not get this game? The answer probably lies in the release date. While Japan had gotten this in 1996, at the same time American audiences were getting Midway’s upgraded kit-bash version of Mortal Kombat Trilogy. Considering that Mortal Kombat II was under Acclaim’s license, and the US Saturn version of MK2 was getting less than great reviews, Acclaim probably saw it as a good business move to not compete against a game that had everything yours had and more.

Now, the fact that this is by Acclaim and came 5 months after the Saturn version, the alarm bells begin to go off that it was probably a port. You’d be right, and the evidence to support that theory is pretty peculiar.

We’ll start with the option screen. There is an option to have the announcer call out the character names. It’s set to off by default. Having just played the Saturn version, I never realized it was missing the voice samples. There’s probably a good reason for that – the voice adds another few seconds of quick load time to wherever the voice is needed. This includes the end of the round when you win; the game literally pauses as needed to load up the voice and other assets that should have already been in RAM. Oddly enough, the infamous problem of having to load the moves during play on Sega’s machine is a bit hit or miss here. It’s still there, but not as bad as the Saturn versions. Where the PlayStation loading becomes disastrous is within the Fatalities.

By example, Scorpion’s “Toasty” fatality – where he pulls of his mask, sets the opponent on fire, and they then explode, is a collision course of bad. It loads three separate times, and when the opponent explodes, the fatality is actually glitched. The ‘explosion’ part happens off screen randomly – all you see on screen is the head and bones drop. Every so often you’ll see bits of the explosion animation rise up from the bottom of the screen letting you know it’s somewhere down there. The Deadpool fatality has to load about three times as well. It looks like you’re watching a jerky web video. Depressing to say the least.

There are also other minor issues with the disc that keep it from being a worthy pick-up. For some weird reason many of the in-game fonts are both pixilated and missing their drop shadows. Music is also a concern, as it doesn’t sound like it should. Granted, I’m tone deaf as they get, but after playing the arcade version, PS3 PSN version, and this one, something isn’t right.

From the graphic standpoint, the levels seem to be okay, but there are minor hiccups in the characters. Playing in S-Video, some of their animation frames look terrible – Kitana’s win pose looks insanely pixilated. Overall they aren’t as sharp as they could be, but then that could be the limited RAM of the PlayStation, the quick port syndrome, or any number of reasons.

With all that said, this is a collector’s site and the question is…do you bother importing it? Were this several years ago, I would have said, “probably” due to it being an oddity. But with the PSN version on PS3 basically the arcade-at-home and the always insanely amazing Super NES version, there really is no reason to own this piece of PlayStation history. Acclaim was in the right for performing an American Fatality on it.

Jason.