Review: Mortal Kombat II (PlayStation 3 EDI. Midway, Sony Online Entertainment)

We're confused. Angry, frustrated and confused. Was Mortal Kombat always this difficult?! Is it just us, are we really this crap? Way back when The Shed owned a copy of MK II for the Sega Mega Drive and we remember being able to finish it effortlessly. We mastered fatalities, babalities, friendships; we could pull off special moves with ease and give any player a damn good run for their money. All this with only three attack buttons on the MD's funky boomerang-shaped pad and a minimum of gaming experience. What in the name of Shao Kahn has gone wrong?! Let us take you through our horrific MK II experience one step at a time.

The second we spyed Sub-Zero's frosty visage on the PlayStation Store games page we leapt at the chance to snap up a piece of gaming history. £1.99!? Bargain! Count us in, we hastily proceeded to download it to our PS3's hard drive, rubbing our hands and flexing our thumbs in anticipation. We're going to rock Outworld, just like we used to, so look out Shao Kahn, Shang Tsung and all you other crudely digitised characters, you're gonna get yours.

Title screen, good, we remember this. Convoluted intro story? Check. Character select screen: we remember all these guys! Ah, it's good to see them again. We choose old favourite Scorpion, taking on our first opponent, Sub-Zero, this should be a cake walk. We win, though not very comfortably, we realise that we remember nothing, no moves, no fatalities, not a thing. Johnny Cage up next and we so want to knock his whitened teeth out but he beats us again and again and again until we lose count of the pathetic beatings and decide to give up. Bested by only the second character, we're not off to a good start and this experience is beginning to marr all those rose-tinted memories of Mega Drive MK II. We study a few moves lists on gamefaqs.com and resolve to retry with a few special moves committed to memory. We pick Liu Kang this time round, his bicycle kick made him a force to be reckoned with, so we figure we'll be wiping that big spiky smile off Baraka's face. Wrong. Humiliating defeat after agonizing defeat, uppercutted into spikes, acid and other unpleasant stuff, it suddenly hits us. We're truly awful at this. Is this arcade difficulty? The level which was designed to rob underage kids at Blackpool pleasure beach of their hard earned twenty pence pieces? We suspect so and this being the case it seems frugal for us to bow out, research more moves and come back a lot later. We don't want to end up hating Mortal Kombat II, we really, really don't.

Nevertheless, memories of Street Fighter II come flooding back. To us it was always immeasurably better than MK, far more balanced, deep and rewarding, time hasn't been kind to Mortal Kombat II and placing it next to SF II makes it pale even more by comparison. Between SF II and MK II, give us Street Fighter II every time, better characters, better style, better game. Still, for a couple of quid, Mortal Kombat II is a real coup for gamers, a classic beat 'em up for the price of a tall cappuccino from your local corporate coffee house. A genuine bargain if ever there was one.

So, in summary although our experience of Mortal Kombat II was a deeply negative, dream shattering ordeal, chances are you may not be as unspeakably shit as we are. You may even have the balls to take the fight online where tearing an opponent's head clean off their shoulders will be ten times more gratifying when your rival is human controlled. Just don't expect to see The Shed participating online anytime soon, we have too much to prove against the horribly unforgiving, psychic AI that has consistently trounced us thus far. Plus, we'd quite like to retain a shred of our dignity. Give us time though and we'll be throwing a spear your way shouting, "come here!" Maybe.

<~ Liu Kang looks like he's having a good time in the pool there, check out his smile. This is a familiar sight for us, as acid-swimmer Kang, not victorious Zero.