Retro Consoles

Arcade 1UP: Mortal Kombat Cabinet Mods

Posted by BinaryMessiah on 07/03/2020

Posted in: Blogs, Hardware, Retro Consoles. Tagged: 1up, arcade, cabinet, costco, edition, mods, mortal kombat, mortal kombat 3, mortal kombat ii, ultimate. Leave a comment

It might be common knowledge of the even the most casual fan of Arcade 1Up’s cabinets that mods are needed for quality of life improvements and to make it that much closer to the original that 1UP either had oversight on or just plain refused to include. Thankfully, these cabinets are fully moddable with real arcade parts and require little knowledge or knowhow to do. I’ve included the mods I’ve done to my cabinet to make things better and improve the quality of life and make it more unique and stand out from the crowd. There are plenty of other more involved mods like running a RetroPie which essentially makes the cabinet an arcade emulator (which I feel is pointless when buying a specific machine), LED coin slots (requires a lot of wire splicing and even a brand new control board), various sound mods like adding a subwoofer, new speakers, and amp. But these are more involved and some aren’t worth it in the end as they won’t greatly improve the playing experience.

Cosmetic Improvements

While the artwork on these cabinets or gorgeous, high quality, and true to the originals, there’s a few things that have been overlooked. Mainly the screws and screwholes are eyesores. Seeing bare wood and silver screws is just plain ugly. This goes for the cabinets and risers on every single unit. Thankfully for a few dollars, or even free, you can change this with some time and attention to detail.

Screw holes

The first thing you want to do is get rid of those unsightly bare screw holes. These can easily be covered up with a black sharpie or a matching color of your panel art. Mine was easy as the MK cabinet is mostly black where the screw holes are.

Screws

The silver screws are unsightly silver and stand out against darker artwork. You can either paint your screws to match the artwork around them or buy kits online for a few dollars that include painted screws. If you pain the tops of yours, they must also be treated with an anti corrosive spray so it doesn’t wear off over time.

Controls

Buttons

The buttons are the only major things that need to be swapped and can be the best upgrade and improvement you can do. Casual gamers might not mind them, but anyone familiar with real arcade hardware or fighting games in general might know the difference. This goes for any arcade game. The best option is buying already made kits available on diyretroarcade.com for around $50. This also includes awesome LED buttons, but you can also forgo that if you really want to. These are Happ button as regular Sanwas won’t snap into the wood deck as it’s too thick. The guys at DIY Retro Arcade have already wired everything up for most 1UP cabinets, including power splitters. The kit only requires you to plug stuff in and no changes to the design are required. These new buttons are like night and day, and the LED looks awesome.

If you want to turn the LEDs off without unplugging the machine, you need to buy the optional switch and this requires drilling a 1/4″ (6.5mm) hole in the slanted panel under the control deck to use. If you are too scared to drill, it’s not a big deal and you can practice on small wood squares from a local craft store.

Joysticks

The ones included in the Costco edition of the MK cabinet are actually great clones and most people won’t notice a difference between these and real Sanwas, however, some cabinets have terrible joysticks. Sadly the joysticks used are proprietary and have a smaller hole layout over the Sanwas and require drilling new holes in the deck which also isn’t that scary. DIY Retro Arcade also sells kits with pre-wired harnesses that allow you to plug these up without needing to solder.

Restrictor Gates

Depending on the game you are playing, you need specific restrictor gates. These are plastic plates that go under the joystick to give it a movement pattern. Fighting games should be octagonal, and games like Pac-Man should be square or diamond. Sadly, 1UP didn’t have the foresight to include these for each machine and the MK one comes with a diamond gate which feels off. These are extremely cheap mods to make and super easy to install. They just pop off and on with no extra tools and can make a huge difference.

Retention Springs

This is a super cheap mod that makes the joystick stiffer depending on the game you are playing. Fighting games should have stiff joy sticks for more accurate combo execution, but of course it’s down to preference. There are 2lb and 4lb springs as the ones that come with the 1Up arcades are under one pound and allow that floppy joystick feeling.

Arcade 1UP: Mortal Kombat – Costco Edition

Posted by BinaryMessiah on 07/02/2020

Posted in: Blogs, Hardware, Retro Consoles. Tagged: 1up, arcade, costco, edition, mortal kombat, mortal kombat 3, mortal kombat ii, ultimate. Leave a comment

Let’s face it, we all want full size arcade machines, but they are either too large or too expensive to collect. Most arcade collector’s rent warehouse sized storage rooms or open an actual arcade room. You can collect a select few to keep in a room or basement, but they are very expensive to restore and maintain. They require a lot of knowledge and research and every machine is different. That’s where 1Up Arcade comes in. Some might say they are smearing the sanctity of the arcade scene but I say they are saving it. There are a lot of people who love arcades, but can’t get a hold of them. This allows these people to collect arcades at 3/4 scale and have a room of them without much knowledge. These machines run off emulator boards and are easily put together and are faithful to the originals.

I’ve always wanted a Mortal Kombat arcade cabinet and when I saw this get announced I flipped. It’s my favorite game franchise of all time and I couldn’t be happier with what has been released. The cabinet features the artwork of the Mortal Kombat II cabinet and looks beautiful. The installation process is rather painless, but does require a good 2-3 hours of your time to put together properly, as it’s large and there are a lot of pieces. The price you pay for these cabinets is about 1/4 the cost of a full size arcade minimum. Mine cost $350 from Costco and I will get to why this is a special version later.

When you open the box everything is laid out nice and easy with good enough instructions. You are basically putting one side together with all the center pieces on its side and then you put the other side panel on. There is one ribbon cable that connects the video screen with the control deck and you’re all set. The cabinet may look heavy, but it’s very solid and light enough to move around with only one person. The control deck has an acrylic cover on top and the screen panel has instructions on how to select games. Once it’s plugged in and you’re booted you’re greeted with a 1UpArcade splash screen and the option of all three MK games. These are prefectly emulated arcade ports and you can even access the master options like in a real arcade cabinet to change things around.

Let’s start with the controls. These aren’t the best buttons in the world, but they do for casual users. They do eventually get a little squeky and don’t depress evenly across all buttons. They are concaved and look and feel decent enough. The joystick is actually a pretty good Sanwa clone and comes with nice bat tops, but the restrictor gate is a four sided one underneath despite this being an eight direction game so some mods will need to be made if you really care. Having only four directions feels off and the cabinet should have come with an optional gate. I also think the joystick spring should be a 4lb spring and not a half pound spring that’s included, but it’s all down to preference.

The sound quality is actually quite good and this game gets extremely loud. The single mono speaker has great sound and there are three volume settings. Off, normal, and extra loud. I found the sound was great across all three games and emulation in general is fantastic. There weren’t any glitches, slowdown, pops or crackles in audio. I felt like I was playing in an actual arcade. The screen is also fantastic as it’s a 17″ LCD with a Hor+ aspect ratio so the characters aren’t stretched upwards. The colors are bright and vivid and not pixelated. There are no brightness settings for the monitor, but it looks great at stock settings.

Let’s get into what makes the Costco version so special and superior over the regular MK arcade release. This version comes with a light-up marquee, bar stool, and MK riser as well as a superior speaker and monitor. The original monitor is a Vert- aspect ratio so everything is stetched upwards and the colors are off. There is popping and crackling in the sound and the buttons are a little better here. Overall, the Costco version is the only version I actually recommend for this cabinet.

With that said, 1Up’s MK cabinet is fantastic and a must have for any Mortal Kombat fan. It’s one of my favorite gaming pieces that I own and is a centerpiece for my gaming room. With various mods to the cabinet you can easily make it better and unique, but for the price I feel 1Up should have added some stuff. For one, there should have been real Sanwa buttons and sticks, it doesn’t cost much more. Second, stereo speakers would have been nice. You can add your own regular speakers as there is a 3.5mm jack on the back of the LCD, but something better stock would have been nice. The wood could have been slightly higher quality and black instead of silver screws would have been nice. These changes would cost little to no money and quality of life changes are a must for these cabinets.

Resident Evil 3: Nemesis

Posted by BinaryMessiah on 05/07/2019

Posted in: Dreamcast, Gamecube, Nintendo Consoles, PC Reviews, PlayStation (PS1), Retro Consoles, Sony Consoles. Tagged: adventure, capcom, dreamcast, horror, nemesis, raccoon city, resident evil 3, scary, sega, zombies. Leave a comment

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Publisher: Capcom

Developer: Capcom

Release Date: 11/17/2000

Rating: Mature

MSRP: $49.99

Also Available On

Resident Evil has been more about tense action, inventory management, and puzzles more than horror. RE3 polishes up the already not so smooth gameplay of Resident Evil and ports it over to the Dreamcast to make another buck off of it. RE3 doesn’t really have much of a story, but the tense action, puzzle solving, and always looming Nemesis boss make this one of the tensest games of the era.

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You play as Jill Valentine (the star of the first game) and are back in Racoon City this time to try and find out what happened during the outbreak. Being a direct sequel to the second game, you visit a few familiar areas and some Easter Eggs are tossed in. Outside of running around collecting ammo, healing items, documents, and various things of that nature you solve puzzles and mow down armies of the undead and genetically modified. New enemies crop up that are freaky and challenging and the only boss in the game is Nemesis who is a tough monster and choices are thrown into the game on where the story goes. These choices impact where you start in locations and how you approach fighting the Nemesis. One choice kept the Nemesis from chasing me around town, but I was going to have to fight him early on. You can totally avoid fighting him in most cases, but he becomes stronger the less you fight him.

I honestly recommend playing this game on easy mode the first time as you get tons of healing items and weapons at the start as well as infinite save ribbons. This mode should be used first for another reason and that’s to learn the layout of the game. Resident Evil is a game where enemy location, map layout, and puzzle solving are a must before attempting harder modes. Now with all that said, I do find earlier Resident Evil games tough outside of just combat as without a guide you can get lost and frustrated quickly as puzzles are obtuse, there might be objects you saw hours ago that you have to go back and get such as the Downtown/Uptown maps in this game. It’s imperative to write things down if you don’t have a guide as you will run around for hours trying to find that one item that you can’t remember.

The story and characters are nothing special but the voice acting is surprisingly decent for its time. We don’t learn much about Umbrella outside of someone going in and trying to pop off the supervisors throughout the city and cover up the T-virus outbreak. There’s no character development or anything like that so you’re mostly playing for the action. The visuals are rather nice, but at this point, the pre-rendered backgrounds were getting tiring and the Dreamcast version is a slightly smoother PlayStation version, but there’s not much of a difference. I would have liked to have seen more modes, better visuals, and new content for a new $50 release, but what we get is mainly for newcomers.

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I highly recommend RE3 on the Dreamcast. At this point is the definitive version of the game and the best the series has to offer up until this point. Don’t expect a deep story, have a guide ready, and you’ll be in for a good 8-10 hours of intense action and fun.

Mortal Kombat Gold

Posted by BinaryMessiah on 05/05/2019

Posted in: Dreamcast, Retro Consoles. Tagged: dreamcast, ed boon, eurocom, exclusive, fatality, fighter, fighting, gold, midway, mortal kombat, sega. Leave a comment

Publisher: Midway

Developer: Eurocom Entertainment Software

Release Date: 08/31/1999

Rating: Mature

MSRP: $49.99

Available Exclusively On

Mortal Kombat 4 was a rough start into the realm of 3D gaming for Mortal Kombat. Midway Chicago were experts at 2D fighters and somehow MK4 seemed a little rough around the edges. It looked decent, and better than most 3D fighters back in the day, but Gold was an opportunity to release the arcade port of MK4 which looked the best and ran the best over the PlayStation and Nintendo 64 versions.

Gold is pretty much an unchanged version of MK4 with just added content. We get added characters such as Mileena, Baraka, Kung Lao, Cyrax, and Kitana, and hidden characters such as Noob Saibot, Sektor, and Meat. That a large roster change and just these added characters make the game worthwhile, but there are no added modes or anything like that. Despite this being an arcade perfect port it still looks dated compared to current Dreamcast games like D-2, Soul Calibur, and Sonic Adventure. On top of all this, Mortal Kombat has never been known to be a very deep fighter and it’s extremely clear in this title.

Another added feature were weapons that could be brought out instead of just picked up off the ground, but they don’t add any depth to the game and are actually quite useless. Once you get hit the weapon flies out of your hand and your left defenseless. There are also no real combos in the game, there’s an over-reliance on cheap fighting with character special moves that are hard to break from and there’s a lack of grappling. Even the Fatalities, which are iconic staples of the series, are lacking in this game with only two stage fatality levels and most of the new characters have repeated Fatalities from MK3 or both of their Fatalities are similar such as Mileena who throws sais and then nails. I have to say the Fatalities in Gold are some of the weakest in the series, but there are some great ones at least.

Because of the lack of depth in the game after you see all the Fatalities and endings, there’s really no reason to back to the game, especially when there are better fighters on the Dreamcast. It’s great to have an MK game on this system, but why not port MK Trilogy over? Even UMK3 would have been nice at this point.

Overall, this is the definitive version of MK4 so take that how you will. If you never liked MK4 you will like Gold even less, but with the arcade version of the game intact it’s a nice fighter on a system that has few of them. If you can ignore the weapon system and enjoy the added roster of characters and the Fatalities then this is a decent fighter at best.

D-2

Posted by BinaryMessiah on 05/04/2019

Posted in: Dreamcast, Retro Consoles. Tagged: adventure, d-2, d2, dreamcast, exclusive, horror, kenji eno, scary, sega, warp. Leave a comment

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Publisher: Sega

Developer: WARP

Release Date: 08/22/2000

Rating: Mature

MSRP: $49.99

Available Exclusively On

D was a strange FMV based game for PlayStation that didn’t get much attention or very good reviews. D-2 is a spiritual successor of that game with more gameplay and stunning visuals, but still has a fair share of issues. This is by far one of the strangest games I have ever played, and for being my first Dreamcast game, it helped put the system into perspective.

You play as a woman named Laura Parton who is a flight attendant and is on a plane that crashes in northern Canada in a remote area and wakes up in a cabin to discover strange creatures that “blossom” and use humans as hosts. The game’s intro is well done with combat and navigation being introduced as a tutorial which was kind of rare back in the day (we had manuals back then). The game is a first-person light gun shooter mixed with a first-person adventure game and a third person tank game like Resident Evil. I wouldn’t really call his survival horror as it didn’t feel like it. When you’re inside buildings you can only turn to objects you can interact with like adventure games back in the late ’80s and early 90’s on PC. When you’re shooting enemies you can turn in a square pattern using the face buttons and aim with the analog stick. It’s really strange, but I have to commend WARP for trying to use the Dreamcast’s weaknesses in its favor and making this game work control wise.

The third person adventure part is the weakest part of the game as it’s literally just a mode of transportation between random JRPG style battles and buildings. There’s a lot of boring walking along just white endless tundra. You can use a rifle to hunt animals and use them for health so you don’t use up your first aid sprays, but hunting is a real pain and only the hares are worth shooting as they give you 2 meat. The scope is incredibly shaky and most of the time I always missed. Outside of the hunting I just ran back and forth between cut scenes as that’s really all you’re doing. There is probably a good 2-3 hours of cut scenes in this game so it’s only for the most patient gamers.

Combat consists of shooting a gun at these creatures that can attack you as much as three at a time. They start out easy but towards the end of the game I died a lot, but part of this was the strange design of the combat system. Face buttons flash on screen when an enemy is nearby and pressing that button makes Laura turn towards the enemy and the analog stick is used to aim. The aiming is really sensitive and there’s no way to dodge or block so you take damage no matter how fast you are swinging around trying to kill everything. I had to strategize filling up my health by leveling up versus wasting health items. You gain experience from combat but it only increases your health and that’s literally it. You also have unlimited ammo for your machine guns, but your handgun and shotgun are limited. The handgun is literally limited to 6 bullets in the entire game as far as I could see. I used the gun once and it was done. The shotgun ammo is hard to find and I saved it for bosses, but the bosses usually only are beatable with the machine guns as you need rapid fire to shoot everything they throw at you. The same goes for grenades that are useless against bosses because they move around so much.

Outside of combat the story just makes zero sense. Each disc feels like its own story with one of the weirdest endings to a game I’ve ever seen. So, there’s an apocalypse coming as the game is playing off the Y2K scare and it’s supposed to be the same one that wiped out the dinosaurs. There are so many plot holes that you can literally separate each part of the story and just ask yourself, “WHAT?!” There’s a man named David that is never explained and he whispers to Laura at the end of each disc, there’s this plant parasite thing that is explained in disc 3 and makes a little sense, but then there’s a weird priest that randomly has the power of the apocalypse then there’s Jannie who is a little girl and we have no idea what her connection to anyone is and is a pointless character. You then can be resurrected every time you die as you’re some sort of “chosen one” and that is also never explained. Then at the end of the game, time rewinds back to 1999 and you meet David and then there are 10 minutes of white text on a black screen of statistics about various issues the planet is facing from the late ’90s and before that was footage of wars and various world events. What does that have to do with the rest of the game?! It made no sense and thankfully the game was only about 6-8 hours long.

Various elements of the game just slow everything down such as a cut-scene for picking up items, a cut-scene for opening and closing a door, laying down in bed, examining simple objects, all of this adds up to maybe 30 minutes of time just being burned, and the constant backtracking to pick up a key at this house, walk all the way across the map to this house to talk to this person, walk all the way back across the map to then trigger another event, and in between all of this there are dozens of random battles that also slow down the game. After the first hour combat just isn’t enjoyable and becomes a nuisance. I have to give WARP credit for the amazing monster designs and some incredibly disturbing images that weren’t really common on the Dreamcast or anywhere back then outside of Silent Hill. The animations are well done and the bosses are the best part of the game combat wise as they make the most sense with this combat system in place.

The game itself looks amazing with great lighting effects and everything is rendered in real time instead of pre-rendered backgrounds like Resident Evil. The voice acting is even passable without being really cringy and laughable. Overall, the game has a lot of good elements that are just not tied very well together. It’s playable and aged fairly well, but it’s incredibly slow and cut-scene heavy with flawed combat and a story that makes zero sense. It’s an obscure title that shows how unique the Dreamcast was, and it one of the rarest games to find for the system, but if you have the patience give it a chance.

Mortal Kombat Games Ranked Worst to Best

Posted by BinaryMessiah on 10/22/2018

Posted in: Blogs, Dreamcast, DS, GameBoy Advance, Gamecube, Mac, Microsoft Consoles, Nintendo 64, Nintendo Consoles, PC Reviews, PlayStation (PS1), PlayStation 2, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, PSP, Ranked Worst to Best, Retro Consoles, Sega CD, Sega Genesis, Sony Consoles, Vita, Wii, Xbox, Xbox One, Xbox360. Tagged: 3, 4, armageddon, dc universe, deadly alliance, deception, gold, ii, mortal kombat, mythologies, ranked, shaolin monks, special forces, sub-zero, trilogy, ultimate mortal kombat, vs, worst to best, x. Leave a comment

My favorite video game of all time is Mortal Kombat. Something about the characters, violence, lore, and overall atmosphere that the game brings is just so satisfying to me. It was also the first video I ever played at 2 years old which was the original game on Sega Genesis back in 1993. From Fatalities to special moves, stages, and rocking industrial techno music, Mortal Kombat is one of the best, and longest running, video game franchises of all time. That’s not to say the game went through some ups and downs. I have listed every main Mortal Kombat game from worst to best. I didn’t include various ports as they varied by quality, and discluded any handheld version as they were just dumbed down ports of larger games. I will also list the most superior port or version of that game as every port varied wildly due to various hardware limitations.

16. Mortal Kombat: Special Forces – 2000

Is this really a surprise? Only beating out Mythologies by a fraction, Special Forces was a 3D action game disaster created by co-creator John Tobias and putting a damper in any future Mortal Kombat spin-offs. The game was near unplayable with awful graphics, terrible controls, a lame story, and nothing to really do with Mortal Kombat itself. It’s worth a play just to see how far down Mortal Kombat got, but this is by far its lowest point, but not lowest timeframe.

15. Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub-Zero – 1997

Not much better than Special Forces, but at least the game was somewhat playable and felt more like Mortal Kombat. a 2D side-scrolling platformer, you play as Sub-Zero and run into awful live action cut-scenes (the N64 version was spared of those) terrible controls, and boring gameplay. This game is probably not even worth touching unless you’re just curious.

Best Version: PlayStation

14. Mortal Kombat Gold – 1999

A direct port of MK4 and Dreamcast exclusive, Gold was too little too late with Soul Calibur and various other fighters pushing the genre into the next-generation. It was clunky, tiring, old, and just didn’t feel right on the system this late in the game. It’s very playable, and MK4 fans will enjoy newcomers like Cyrax and Mileena, but it’s probably the worst game in the main fighting series.

13. Mortal Kombat: Armageddon – 2006

While being the next-generation MK Trilogy of sorts, Armageddon was a lazy cop-out for keeping the series at its yearly releases and was the end of this generation of 3D MK games. It featured every single MK character ever made up to Deception and shoved them all in the two-style martial arts that this trilogy of MK titles gave us. By this point, MK was really going downhill and fatigue was setting in with a bloated disc full of weird mini-games and cheap generic Kreate-A-Fatality that was more complicated and irritating than ever. Press certain button combos to create the same gory move for every character and just string them together as quick as you can, yeah what a waste. A few years of development and this could have been a game to remember. The Kreate-A-Fighter mode was the only new and original part. Mortal Kombat Kart racing was awful with shallow race tracks and no thought put into it, the Konquest mode was much better than Deception’s but was still a weird thing to even exist. Overall, it’s very playable and fun, but it’s just the most generic MK game ever made.

Best Version: Xbox

12. Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance – 2002

Deadly Alliance shot the series into the next-generation with brand new fighters and an all-new realistic martial arts approach to the game. With a story mode that’s really just a giant training mode, a fun Krypt area to unlock extras, and two awesome Fatalities per character, it only beats out Armageddon due to the originality within the game. The new characters are great and mostly untouched throughout the later games, however, the graphics were dated and everyone looked like plastic dolls with blood that looks like Jell-O. It was still gory and fun, but far from the greatness, the 2D games offered.

Best Version: Xbox

11. Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe – 2008

This threw fans for a loop as MK mashed with DC to create a weird and forced fighting game no one asked for. The biggest hit was the Teen rating with DC character performing “Heroic Brutalities” as they never kill and the MK character performing the most basic “Fatalities” that felt more like Wile E. Coyote ACME stunts. The fighting core was a slight departure from the previous games with a 2D plane and seemed pretty solid, but there was something off about the whole game. It’s decent, and quite playable, but very forgettable.

Best Version: PlayStation 3

10. Mortal Kombat: Shaolin Monks – 2005

Shaolin Monks would be the last MK spin-off and actually did it right. Created by another development team, Monks lets you play as Liu-Kang and Kung-Lao with an over-the-top 3D brawler that is set in the MKII storyline. Using assets from that game such as stages and characters and even lore, the game recreated the MK experience with a fantastic fighting system that was fluid and even more fun with a second player. There were many secrets and the game is highly replayable. The only issue was the game was only 4 hours long, had awful voice acting and a stupid story. Other than that, this is a must play for MK fans.

Best Version: Xbox

9. Mortal Kombat 4 – 1997

This was the biggest turning point for the entire series. The game went forward into 3D forever and the result was some weird clunky stuff, but it was fast-paced and violent and somehow just worked. Not many games did 3D fighting very well at the time and the great roster and some of the best Fatalities in the series make for an awesome fighting game. Use of weapons was introduced for the first time as well.

Best Version: PlayStation

8. Mortal Kombat 3 – 1995

MK3 had a lot riding on it at this point in time as it had big shoes to fill after MKII. The game was darker, more realistic, and added some mechanics such as running, Brutalities, and a secret code menu. MK3 also had some of the most memorable characters the series will see such as Sheeva, Kabal, and Smoke. The problem was the combos were so difficult to pull off a lot of people were turned off that the game relied on this system, and not to mention the cheap ass AI.

Best Version: PlayStation

7. Mortal Kombat – 1992

The original is far down the list due to the fact that so many games in the series improved upon it, but it’s higher than others due to the originality and the fact that it has a one of a kind atmosphere that no other game in the series nailed. The original roster and Test-Your-Mights combined with the Fatalities and simple moves make this one of the best video games ever created. There’s quite a story behind this game and the fact the ESRB was created because this game says a lot. It’s a very simple and basic game, but it holds a huge piece of gaming history.

Best Version: Sega CD

6. Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 – 1995

An upgrade version of MK3, UMK3 is widely considered the best 2D MK game ever made as it perfected what they were trying to do with MK3. Adding new characters such as Rain, Noob Saibot, and Khameleon, and adding an Aggressor meter as well as making combos much easier, UMK3 was fast, looked good, and was dark with everything the series had to offer up until then.

Best Version: Nintendo DS

5. Mortal Kombat II – 1993

Most people will say MKII is the best game in the series due to the perfect balance and style between MK1 and MK3. It was a little darker, more sinister, and had an imaginative roster of new characters such as Baraka, Kitana, Mileena, and Jax. The stages were amazing and the introduction of Babalities and Friendships helped set the tone for the series from here on out. The controls were tight and the game looked amazing.

Best Version: Sega Saturn

4. Mortal Kombat Trilogy – 1996

MKT was a best-of compilation of the series up until that point. Taking every single character, stage, and mixing several -Alities together, the game was a massive success and was a blast to play. You could also play as the bosses which were completely unheard of back in the day and it was so much fun. Trilogy remains one of my favorite MK games of all time and I spent hundreds of hours perfecting this game.

Best Version: PlayStation

3. Mortal Kombat: Deception – 2004

Deception was the best 3D game up until this point and had a lot to offer. It improved immensely on Deadly Alliance’s realistic martial arts and added new game modes and some amazing characters and stages. The game was just dark, gritty, and hit that perfect style that people loved. While the three martial-arts style was a bit clunky and memorizing long combos was silly, most people forgave it for the amount of content available. Chess Kombat is still one of my favorite MK game modes of all time. Play chess like normal and then duke it out to take over the square. Puzzle Kombat took the Street Fighter version and added Chibi MK characters duking it out on screen. However, Konquest mode was a nasty ugly chore to unlock stuff in the Krypt. It was also the first online fighting game ever made and was buttery smooth across the board with a lobby room, ranking system, and various other features. I played this game for so many hours I lost count. The Fatalities were amazing and the new Hara Kiris which were “reverse Fatalities” blew my mind away. It was as competitive as it got and holds a special place for me as it was the first game I had ever pre-ordered as well.

Best Version: Xbox

2. Mortal Kombat – 2011

With DC Universe disappointing fans so much we had all lost hope. Thankfully many consider this version to be the best 3D MK game to date and rightfully so. It builds off of MKII’s balancing and uses most character up through MK3 so it keeps it old school. The X-Ray moves shook the industry and added a whole new meaning to gore and violence to video games. The new Challenge Tower was a blast and it featured the best story mode in any fighting game to date with halfway decent voice acting for once. Sadly, the game was quickly abandoned and only featured 4 DLC characters before being cut loose.

Best Version: PlayStation 3

1.Mortal Kombat X – 2015

MKX not only pushes the entire series in a new direction but shows fighting games a whole new level of production values and content. Taking the best from MK 2011 and the 2D games, MKX feels heavier, chunkier, and more violence than ever and that’s a good thing. Using the Unreal Engine 4 and creating some of the sickest Fatalities to date, MKX also introduces some great new characters for the first time since Deception. The stages are awesome, the DLC characters rock, and the story mode is actually quite amazing and pushes the last game in the back corner. The new Krypt mode is more interactive and can almost be a game all on its own, and the new online towers make the game feel like it’s 1992 all over again.

Best Version: PC

Shenmue

Posted by BinaryMessiah on 08/26/2018

Posted in: Dreamcast, Microsoft Consoles, PC Reviews, PlayStation 4, Retro Consoles, Sony Consoles, Xbox One. Tagged: remake, remaster, shenmue. Leave a comment

Publisher: Sega

Developer: d3t Ltd.

Release Date: 08/21/2018

MSRP: $29.99

Rating: Teen

Also Available On

Shenmue is one of those games I never got a chance to play and have wanted to all these years. You always hear people talking about it, it pops up in “Best Of” videos and “Worst Of” videos, especially for the Dreamcast system itself. Shenmue was a beast all on its own back in the day as no one had tried these gameplay ideas before. Sure, it’s an adventure game on the surface, but it’s also a life simulator, fighting game, and mini-game extravaganza all in one. It’s weird, beautiful, ugly, and frustrating all at the same time and yet somehow it all kind of works.

You play as a high school boy named Ryo Hazuki. He gets home one day and his father died while fighting a Chinese man named Lhan Di. He steals something called the Dragon Mirror and you must somehow get it back. The weird thing about the story is that the end goal never really matters, but all the stuff in-between. What is this Dragon Mirror and why does Ryo need to get it back? It’s really never explained except something about fulfilling a prophecy and the end times will come if Di keeps it…I don’t know, the story is so unbelievable and weird.

The game starts out like any other adventure game as you wake up in your room and commence rummaging around the house pulling open drawers, finding items, and trying to figure out where to go. Thankfully that’s something Shenmue does do right as I rarely didn’t know what to do or where to go. After setting foot in the village I watched a few cutscenes, knocked on about a dozen doors, and kept going through the town figuring out where to go. Eventually, I ended up in the main city where half of the game takes place. The first few hours have Ryo running around asking questions to get clues to then go to that person or place for either a cutscene or more clues. This continuous cycle of clue finding felt satisfying as I met some interesting characters and felt connected to the world of Shenmue.

Sadly, there’s a huge disappointingly frustrating factor about all of these events: They are time sensitive. You have to wait for in-game time to pass before certain events unfold. That wouldn’t be so bad but you can’t skip time so I literally went and did other things like chores, cook, or play a different game while time passed. Sometimes it would take almost 45 minutes for time to pass where I need it to be, then a small cutscene would play out, then it’s back to waiting again once I find the next clue that requires more waiting. It would also be fine if there were things to do, but outside of a few real Sega arcade games, and collecting Gotcha prizes there’s no side quests or anything to do. It’s so incredibly boring to sit and wait through all of this, and if you miss your time frame you have to wait again. Waiting also goes for catching the bus to the harbor and working a real forklift job.

Oh my God, yes the infamous forklift section of the game. This literally took up an entire 4 hours of the game. You work 8-5 for 5 in-game days driving a forklift from one end of the harbor and loading boxes into a warehouse. It’s both beautifully addictive and stupidly frustrating and annoying. All of this is so the Mad Angels, a drug cartel, in the game will pick on you because you’re new and you can obtain information from them after every fight. Not to mention the annoying forklift race at the beginning of each day with the same track. Man, it’s so stupid and frustrating and I both loved it and hated it.

After the forklift section, there are a few more fights and the game is done. The fighting itself is surprisingly impressive with responsive controls, fast and fluid animations, and plenty of combos. Outside of the Free Battles, there are QTE battles which can be hard as well as the reaction time they give you is literally milliseconds. The visuals of the game haven’t been updated all that much. There’s newer lighting effects, better shadows, and the characters have smoothed over textures, but overall it still looks like a 20-year-old game. There are still plenty of bugs and glitches such as being stuck in first person mode after driving the forklift, hard crashes, and objects disappearing completely.

The music is annoying and repetitive with only one short track per area and it just isn’t very good, the voice acting is awful and even the Japanese voice track is questionable sometimes. The audio in general still sounds compressed and really bad, and the game is just really rough around the edges. So why should you play it? It’s a weird piece of gaming history on a system that died faster than it could blink. The characters are interesting and the various activities are fun, but the long waiting and various missteps keep Shenmue from being a fantastic game.

AtGames Sega Genesis Ultimate Portable Game Player

Posted by BinaryMessiah on 10/11/2017

Posted in: Hardware, Retro Consoles, Sega Genesis. Tagged: atgames, retro gaming, sega genesis, ultimate portable game player. 8 Comments

Manufacturer: AtGames
Release Date: August 2017
MSRP: $59.99

When it comes to playing classic games on a portable system I usually stick with the real deal or use my PSP to emulate them. I just so happened to come across a portable Sega Genesis emulator and it seemed fairly solid. It had licensed games, and original, ranging from Sonic the Hedgehog 2 to Mortal Kombat and Altered Beast. This was a spur of the moment buy and I didn’t do much research.

I can’t say I don’t regret my purchase, but I did at first. When you open the box you don’t get any fancy packaging like you would from a first party company. It’s the game player in a cardboard tray, a loosely packed USB cable, and a manual tossed in. I realized it was probably a Chinese knock-off, but still of some sort of quality.

The system itself is extremely light and some would say feels cheap. We are used to the weight of portable systems like the PSP, GBA, or even DS. This has no moving parts and only needs a small battery. It has a 2.8″ 4:3 screen which is perfect for these older games as widescreen was not a thing at home at the time. The D-Pad rolls rather than rocks which is nice for fighting, and it includes A, B, C button as well as X, Y, Z which are used for a fighting game. There’s a start button and a menu button as well as an on and off switch. All the essentials are there and the buttons feel quite nice and I was pleased.

The screen itself is of surprisingly decent quality. The game looks great and I didn’t experience only washed out visuals like on some cheaper players. The biggest issue, hardware wise, is the speaker as it’s really bad. If you only turn the volume up about 3/4’s it’s not so bad, but all the way up and it sounds blown out and tinny. Thankfully these older games don’t need surround sound or anything, but a slightly better speaker would have been nice. Thankfully, it sounds way better with headphones on and the sound was quite nice and can get pretty loud. Shame on you AtGames for such an easy oversight.

Software-wise, the menu lacks any flair. It looks like a third party emulator menu with a list of games and a box shot next to it. You can flip through the 85 games and they play! Surprisingly at great speed as I had no slowdown or any crashing as of yet. The major software issue was with the SD Card and loading your own ROMs.

It states to put a “game” folder on the SC Card and use .bin Genesis ROMs. That’s easy enough, however, no matter how many different cards I used the system would not read the files. I tried formatting it as exFAT, FAT, FAT32, etc. and Google didn’t really come up with much. I found a small comment somewhere stating that Windows 10 does not format the cards properly and doesn’t play nice with this player. I had to download a drive partitioning software and it finally read the cards. This is just absolutely absurd and is a huge oversight by AtGames. Clearly, their SC Card driver is awful and 99% of users who buy this system won’t know how to do this.

With that said, it loads games of the SD Cards, and I didn’t run into many issues. There are a few games that won’t play on here, but they are more obscure titles, but all your popular go to ones will.

Overall, this is a decent player if you’re a hardcore Genesis fan. Albeit, you can emulate these games on your PC or even a PSP and a DS if you have the hardware for it. However, when you getting a Genesis kick it’s not to pull out a dedicated player and pump out some time real quick or pull it out of your backpack while on break or something. Maybe their 2018 model will fix these major issues, but the hardware itself is pretty nice.

Nintendo DSi XL

Posted by BinaryMessiah on 05/25/2010

Posted in: DS, Editor's Choice, Hardware, Nintendo Consoles, Sega Genesis. Tagged: burgundy, camera, ds, dsi xl, hardware, nintendo, stylus. 2 Comments

Manufacturer: Nintendo

Release Date: 11/21/2009

MSRP: $189.99

Colors: Burgundy, Black

Nintendo is known for making several iterations of their handheld systems and the DS is no exception. With the original DS being launched on November 21, 2004, this makes the fourth model in 6 years. That’s 2 per year with a fifth model due out at the end of the year. I feel that this is what the DS should have originally been, but I guess the technology wasn’t quite there yet.

Techno Jumbo

As always I’m going to go in depth on comparing few models. The DS has two processors the ARM9 and 7 which control each screen. The DSi XL has the same hardware as the DSi, but it’s significantly different than the DS Lite. The DSi hardware has the ARM9 running at 133 MHz which is twice as fast as the ones in the original DS and Lite which were at 66MHz. The processors are also smaller which in turn uses less power. The DSi has more RAM at 16 MB which is four times as much as previous models (DS Lite and the original only had 4MB). The upgraded hardware allows for smoother gameplay and games can look better and do more thanks to this.

The biggest thing about the XL is well…it’s bigger. It sports two 4.2″ screens which are 1.2″ inches larger than the original DS and Lite. Does this make a huge difference? Oh yes, you bet. The XL also has two 0.3 megapixel cameras that are on the DSi. There is also an SD storage slot that can hold up to 32GB cards. The DSi also has an internal flash of up to 256MB, unlike the first two models. This allows for downloads from the DSiWare store.

So this makes the DS a powerhouse compared to the last two models. The speakers are louder and are more clear and this is a huge steal at $190.

New Looks

The XL doesn’t just have new looks on the outside, but on the inside as well. The new DSi firmware allows a Wii like a menu that allows you to select your games in a horizontal list. You can also press L or R to take pictures on the fly which is a nice touch. The first two DS models had a simple interface that allowed you to select your game and go into the options. In the DSi software you can press the power button the reset the DS and go back to the main menu, unlike the first two models. The power button is also on the inside, but thankfully, away from accidentally hitting it. The DSi also allows for updated internet security and a faster wi-fi chip.

Another thing you’ll notice is the larger pen-sized stylus, but there is the mini toothpick built in as well. One major thing gone is the GBA slot, but this isn’t all so bad since you can buy any GBA model for under $20 now. This sacrifice had to made to fit the cameras, SD slot, and flash memory. You do have to realize, however, that the first two DS models had actual GBA hardware in it and wasn’t software emulated (downloadable GBA games anyone?)

The Experience

Playing the DSi XL is sublime. I have fairly large hands so seeing the huge screens not only is easy on the eyes but also the hands. The longer larger frame of the console gives you more handle and control on what you’re doing. Using the pen-sized stylus also helps and I feel I have more freedom. Everything looks bright and crisp on the excellent TFT LCD screens and the 4 different brightness settings help this a lot (unfortunately there is no button for this). The games sound sharp and even more clear than other models. When playing the same game on the DS Lite you notice sounds on the XL that you couldn’t hear before unless you had headphones.

I also have to mention the cameras. They aren’t great (lower end cell phone quality), but it’s pretty decent in good light. The browser also is not that good. Using the same Opera browser from the Wii the DSi browser is slow and doesn’t support Flash. It couldn’t even load this site very fast. The DSi browser is a good concept, but if you have a cell phone or laptop stick with that. Another thing that I was disappointed in was that you can’t save your game saves to the SD slot…maybe a future update will allow this.

The DSiWare store is easy to use and familiar if you have a Wii. Unfortunately there nothing but shovelware on the store (with a few slight exceptions), but hopefully some good games will follow. The system also comes pre-installed with two Brain Age games (reviews will follow soon). The battery seemed to last several hours for me as well even when playing system-heavy games. The DSi XL is a perfect investment for anyone who has a DS. If you own any other models (even the DSi) trading that in towards an XL is probably the smartest thing you can do.