Find a friend with a DS and a copy of the cartridge and you can link and play exactly as if he was standing next to you at an arcade machine. So it's a darn good thing that Other Ocean put in extensive multiplayer modes for the Nintendo DS version. Playing this game by your lonesome just isn't any fun and can be damn near irritating. Even the best fighters do this in multiplayer, but not to the extent that Mortal Kombat does it. Like most fighters it's a far better two player game than it is a solo experience - the AI routines are ridiculously cheap and frustrating since the computer opponent can essentially read your controller inputs and react instantaneously and block and counter the attack. Even with its warts Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 still holds up relatively well over the past decade. All the spurting blood, fatalities, and gruesome violence - admittedly tame to today's standards - are in here.

The speed and gameplay is pretty near arcade perfect, and only the truly keen MK eyes are going to see the tweaks employed to get the game working on the handheld. The arcade conversion, pretty much an emulation with a few development compromises, is pulled off extremely well on the Nintendo DS. Both games were converted over to the Nintendo DS by Other Ocean, the same team that worked on the Xbox Live Arcade version of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3.

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