Mortal Kombat II: 32X vs SNES

[NeoVamp]

Ah I see. So, using the RAM cart, it would have been possible?

Totally, could maybe even load everything (2 fighters 1 bg +sfx) into the existing Saturn RAM.
But I'm not very familiar with the Saturn, read somewhere a stock Saturn has 16Mb of ram? that should be enough I guess.

But you'd still have loading times, so you'll never get the true Arcade experience.

[Mega Drive Bowlsey]

Totally, could maybe even load everything (2 fighters 1 bg +sfx) into the existing Saturn RAM.
But I'm not very familiar with the Saturn, read somewhere a stock Saturn has 16Mb of ram? that should be enough I guess.

But you'd still have loading times, so you'll never get the true Arcade experience.

Perhaps not but we'd still get a game a fuck sight better than what those lazy bastards at Probe gave us!

[Da_Shocker]

Well we have UMK3 though and I heard that is an extremely good port.

[Mega Drive Bowlsey]

Well we have UMK3 though and I heard that is an extremely good port.

That's true. UMK3 is excellent on the Saturn and very impressive on the Mega Drive too I might add.

[zyrobs]

The Saturn could have handled a completely arcade perfect port of MKII couldn't it? I'm not talking about the port it got, I'm asking if it could have ran an arcade perfect port? Like as in perfect to the last detail, sound, music, voices...everything. I'm sure it could have.

The arcade MK games run in a medium resolution that the Saturn can't do. So it either has to use lower res sprites, or run in hi-res with large borders.

So it couldn't do a "perfect" port, but it could pull off pretty good ones. I think other than the resolution, it would only need to cut back on some of the sound samples in quality.

[Silanda]

Shang Tsung would always have been a problem, but the Saturn solution was ugly: half resolution sprites + loading, yuck!

[gamevet]

Well we have UMK3 though and I heard that is an extremely good port.

It's a really good port. I busted it out a couple of months ago and had a lot of fun with it.

[Barone]

I always figured that it took an entire console expansion attachment such as the 32X just so the Sega Genesis port of Mortal Kombat II can be on the same level as the SNES port

Have a load of this:

[roadkill]

I was actually liking the 32X version better than the SNES version up until I got an SD2SNES that let's me play Mortal Kombat II w/ the actual arcade music and other arcade audio samples using the MSU-1.

Nonetheless I still prefer the Genesis controller and the graphics on the 32X version.

[Assman]

Have a load of this:

Wow, it's a total 180 from the MK1 ports. It's also interesting to note how, color aside, the Genesis sprites are far more accurate to the arcade originals. It looks like they edited parts of the SNES sprites by hand for some reason -- what the fuck did they do to Baraka's face?

That just makes it all the more perplexing that they cut so many key animation frames in the Genesis version -- frames that get the most time on screen, no less. Idle animations, which are mostly only seen at the beginning of a round, are smooth as can be, and yet the most prominent frames of Kitana's fan throw, Scorpion's spear, and Johnny Cage and Baraka's win poses got the axe. That doesn't make any god damn sense.

[NeoVamp]

That doesn't make any god damn sense.

I don't understand how two companies can port the exact same game yet one managed to lose a ton of frames and background details and intros/bios/endings and a shitton of voice samples and even a complete fucking stage!!!
How the fuck is that possible? I can understand that maybe the MD has a higher res so the sprites take up a bit more space, but how the fuck can so much stuff be missing???

But at least they managed to stuff in that gigantic dragon logo that we really needed!

[The Jackal]

I wonder how difficult it would be to hack MK 1 and 2 to have Puggsy music, they both use the same sound engine.

I'd actually pay good money if this were a thing.

[Silanda]

Wow, it's a total 180 from the MK1 ports. It's also interesting to note how, color aside, the Genesis sprites are far more accurate to the arcade originals. It looks like they edited parts of the SNES sprites by hand for some reason -- what the fuck did they do to Baraka's face?

That just makes it all the more perplexing that they cut so many key animation frames in the Genesis version -- frames that get the most time on screen, no less. Idle animations, which are mostly only seen at the beginning of a round, are smooth as can be, and yet the most prominent frames of Kitana's fan throw, Scorpion's spear, and Johnny Cage and Baraka's win poses got the axe. That doesn't make any god damn sense.

Check out Mileena's mask too; in the arcade and Sega versions her mask is different to Kitana's, but in the SNES version it's the same. The animation's missing from her hair too.

It is weird that Probe kept lots of little details but lost big ones. Perhaps they were stung by the criticism of MK1's butchered idle poses and overcompensated. Perhaps they were handling too many ports at the same time and it hurt their output (Amiga, Game Boy, Game Gear, Genesis/Mega Drive, Master System, PC, later Saturn and Playstation). While I generally like Probe's graphic conversions more than Sculptured's, Sculptured seemed to have a better grasp of which details could be sacrificed in order to maintain the integrity of the conversion as a whole.

[NeoVamp]

Perhaps they were stung by the criticism of MK1's butchered idle poses and overcompensated.

You might be on to something there, really weird how they'd have two different female faces yet they removed Raiden's white eyes.
Really weird that they'd have this gigantic dragon logo in the menu but then remove two frames from Baraka & Cage's win stance. (which really hurt the game imo)
Does Snes have better compression or something? or was Sculptured Software's solution of mirroring stages really that effective?

[Mega Drive Bowlsey]

I recently bought a SNES and am considering getting MKII for it just out of curiosity. I already have MKII for the Mega Drive and Saturn and would like to compare the different ports.

1000 posts reached! Whoop! That calls for a drink! Pity I'm at work...