I need to get the negative part out of the way first, as it's a well-worn criticism of early MK (at least for me): the MK games pre-remake had no idea how to handle difficulty levels. This was kind of a Big Deal in those days: without online play, you would inevitably spend at least a bit of time playing the single-player mode, and unfortunately the annoying AI made the single player experience pretty terrible.
More than just making it difficult, the AI's specific flavor of bullshit made it a bad game at teaching you how to get better. If I played Street Fighter 2 on a high difficulty level I'd get my ass kicked but I would see the neat ways the opponent chains their attacks together and try it out later. I remember getting thrased by the AI in Tekken 3 but learned the different ways of getting up from a downed position from the AI, and that marginal gain made me improve as a player. With MK3 (and 1 and 2 as well), the AI's difficulty comes from pixel-accurate millisecond-perfect input reading, and there's nothing that I can learn from that as a human player, so the process of getting better at the game was slow, arduous, and unfun.
With that out of the way though, this game is probably the best 'classic' MK to play with a friend, and feels really good in a way the previous games didn't. The run button and dial-a-combo system made matchups more entertaining by discouraging turtling, and the game looks and feels a lot smoother than both the previous games (thanks to technical advancements) and the later games (thanks to a dodgy transition to 3D). It's definitely the best MK game pre-remake, and a decent time provided you can find a few friends of the same skill level.
More than just making it difficult, the AI's specific flavor of bullshit made it a bad game at teaching you how to get better. If I played Street Fighter 2 on a high difficulty level I'd get my ass kicked but I would see the neat ways the opponent chains their attacks together and try it out later. I remember getting thrased by the AI in Tekken 3 but learned the different ways of getting up from a downed position from the AI, and that marginal gain made me improve as a player. With MK3 (and 1 and 2 as well), the AI's difficulty comes from pixel-accurate millisecond-perfect input reading, and there's nothing that I can learn from that as a human player, so the process of getting better at the game was slow, arduous, and unfun.
With that out of the way though, this game is probably the best 'classic' MK to play with a friend, and feels really good in a way the previous games didn't. The run button and dial-a-combo system made matchups more entertaining by discouraging turtling, and the game looks and feels a lot smoother than both the previous games (thanks to technical advancements) and the later games (thanks to a dodgy transition to 3D). It's definitely the best MK game pre-remake, and a decent time provided you can find a few friends of the same skill level.
6 Comments
It's entirely possible that I'm just bad, given that my most-played genre is JRPGs :) I know lots of people who got pretty good at the game! But yeah, my experience with single player here was rougher than in most other fighting games I dabbled in. I did get to see a decent chunk of the game but it was more through learning to exploit AI quirks rather than getting good.
does umk3 improve on this by chance? i tried mk2 without knowing prior and i had to start using constant savestates by like the last bosses bc it was so broken
Haha I had the same experience with MK2! What made it worse was that even the easiest difficulty level would default to the hardest setting once you got to a certain round.
This game is significantly better about it - I was able to get rather far and never resorted to save states, but still not particularly polished in terms of balance. Haven't played enough of UMK3 to tell if it's a further improvement on this!
This game is significantly better about it - I was able to get rather far and never resorted to save states, but still not particularly polished in terms of balance. Haven't played enough of UMK3 to tell if it's a further improvement on this!
I swear to god UMK3 on arcade is decently, marginally balanced but the SNES version is absolutely brutal. I don't know why I always got that sentiment.
ok lmao so on novice tower on very easy i am getting my entire ass handed to me as early as second opponent how do you even improve at these games
Dief88
2 years ago