Over the past few weeks, I've been trying to find every single NES ROM that exists. There are some pretty bad games in the NES library, and maybe I will get to those at some point, but for the time being I'm going to post about the unlicensed games and ROM hacks.
Before I get into this post, I should give a little bit of background. NES never had an official Mortal Kombat release. 1, 2 and 3 were arcade games that got ported to SNES, Genesis and various other consoles once home consoles became advanced enough for ports. 4 was also an arcade game, and was immediately ported to consoles due to the PS1, Saturn and N64 being released. Imagine my curiosity when I saw Mortal Kombat 4 in my ROM library.
The Game List
When I started typing up this post, I only saw one Mortal Kombat game in my library. It turns out there are a lot more, and some of the game titles are quite colourful. These are the ones that I have, but I'm sure there are more out there.
- Mortal Kombat II
- Mortal Kombat 3
- Mortal Kombat 4
- Mortal Kombat Trilogy
- Mortal Kombat III Special
- Mortal Kombat 3 Extra 60
- Mortal Kombat 3 Special 56 Peoples
- Mortal Kombat V1996 Turbo 30 Peoples
The "Peoples" will become clear once you see the character select screen.
Title Screens and Menu Screens
Most of the title screens have the Mortal Kombat logo, like MKII for example. Others have their own - here is MK4. Some of them are a bit weirder.
I think my favourite one is Mortal Kombat Trilogy. The title screen is pretty normal compared to some of the others, but when you press start, you get another title screen that says you're playing Mortal Kombat 5.
Character select screens
These are some of the worst character select screens I have ever seen. I will start with Mortal Kombat Trilogy, because that is actually one of the better ones.
Here it is. If you look closely, you will see that the bottom row of characters is exactly the same as the top one, just in a different order with different colours (all of which are horrific). You do get a preview of your character in the bottom left when you switch through different ones though, which is something the other games don't have.
This one is Mortal Kombat II, and is the only game that has one of each character on the select screen. The layout on this one really fucking irritates me.
From this point on, it gets more and more bizarre.
This one is my least favourite. I know you only need to use the top row to select a character, because all the rows are the same, but for some stupid reason they made it so you can't go down. You need to press left/right to scroll through the entire character list. Why?
It's like they were having a contest to see how many of the same characters they could fit on the screen. Look at this shit.
Special 56 Peoples takes the cake though. I did not crop that image. They literally could not fit everything on the screen.
Gameplay
Sometimes the games work, sometimes they don't. You can control your character, but you're playing against an AI that does nothing. If the game does work, you will be fucking crushed by the AI in most of the games. It is worth pointing out that I haven't figured out how to use a single skill move in any of the games, but the AI can all use them. Here is "Nightwolf" in MK4. He is just a different coloured version of Shao Kahn.
Here is "Skang-Tsung" from one of the other games. Do you remember him? I sure don't.
The games are full of small annoyances. Some characters only have a standard punch and kick, and will not do a roll in the middle of their jump. Others have some different moves that are kind of like the ones in the real games. As far as I can tell, there are no fatalities.
I recorded some footage of "Nightwolf" kicking the absolute shit out of me without being able to land a single hit.
I can not fully explain this madness, so I've uploaded what I have if you want to waste some time you will never get back. I recommend using Fceux, because half of the games don't work on Nestopia.
EDIT: To add a little more context as to why these games exist, they most likely feature on some of the shady compilation carts. They packed a ton of badly made games, in some cases clear ripoffs of other titles, into "150-in-1" compilations.
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