Mortal Kombat 4 (Game Boy Color)
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 A 2D port of a 3D game? How do you make this not awesome?
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Mortal Kombat 4 is a fighting game developed and released by Midway Games in 1997 for the Arcades, and then ported into the PlayStation, Nintendo 64, PC and Game Boy Color in 1998. This page will cover the Game Boy Color version, which was developed by Digital Eclipse and relased in December 1998 in North America and April 1999 in Europe.
Why This Port Is a Fatality
- One of the biggest issues of this port is the fact that it is nothing but a lazy reskin of the Game Boy port of Mortal Kombat 3. Right away, you can easily notice that the "Choose your destiny" screen is the same as in the latter port, and the HUD is the same but with colours.
- In fact, Sektor's missile from the MK3 port can be found in the game's files.
- Terrible graphics that look like they were made in Microsoft Paint. Obviously, since the Game Boy Color is an 8-bit console and a 2D one, and the original Mortal Kombat 4 has 3D graphics, the developers had to make their own sprites and backgrounds that are based on the animations from the original version, but the result was very bad.
- For some very weird reason, Shao Kahn is the announcer in this version, despite the fact that he has been defeated for good after the events of Mortal Kombat 3, so it makes no sense for Shao Kahn to be the announcer in this version. In the original version, Quan Chi served as the game's announcer, not Shao Kahn.
- This version has some of the laziest (if not, the most laziest) fatalities in the entire Mortal Kombat franchise. Instead of trying to recreate them in 2D, the developers decided to make a short cutscene where your character performs a fatality on your opponent, before showing a bloody background coming in with the fatality text, What makes this even worse is the fact that the character you are performing the fatality on is the same character as yours, no matter which character you fight against. Additionally, due to the size of the Game Boy Color's screen, it can be difficult to see them on an actual hardware.
- Awful and repetitive soundtrack. There are only three songs in the entire game, and when you start the next match/round, the music randomly changes into a different one. Sometimes the music might not be really that fitting.
- Slowdown can occur easily, especially when you uppercut the opponent or use your jump kick when the opponent uses another move.
- Two characters in the game, Scorpion and Liu Kang, have misspelled names in the character hud. Scorpion's name is written as "SCORPIO", while Liu Kang's name in some versions of this port is misspelled as "LUIKANG". For Scorpion, it is understandable why his name was shortened due to the limit of words for the hud, but there's no excuse to misspell Liu Kang's name.
- Reptile is purple in this version, when he's supposed to be green like he's anywhere else in the series.
- There are no sound effects other than the regular sounds when you or your opponent gets hit by a regular attack.
- Stiff controls. Controlling your character is like trying to drive a truck on a canoe, not to mention that special moves only work whenever they feel like it.
- When you defeat Sghinnok, the game will show you performing a fatality on him, but most of the time, it will just shhow your character's ending paragraph of text and then cutting to the game over screen. That's it, nothing else, although this flaw was the Game Boy port of Mortal Kombat 3. Even the Game Boy port of Mortal Kombat II had a cutscene after you defeat Shao Kahn.
Videos
Trivia
- Unlike the other ports, which were rated M for Mature, this version was rated T for Teens, arguably due to less violence (as the Game Boy Color is an 8-bit console).
- Strangely, the back of the box shows Johnny Cage, Kai, and Sonya, but in the final release, they were replaced with Quan Chi, Liu Kang, and Tanya, respectively. Judging from that, it is very likely that early in development, Johnny Cage, Kai and Sonya were meant to be playable before being replaced with the aforementioned characters, although Midway probably forgot to replace the screenshots of them with the ones that show Quan Chi, Liu Kang and Tanya.
References
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