#1070

Gameplay of the hidden boss Noob Saibot in the arcade release of Midway’s/Netherrealm’s Mortal Kombat 3.

Nothing quite like being reminded how much you detest a game. Garbage, thy name is MK3.

I covered MK3 before when I did a video on Smoke, who was a hidden character and hidden boss in that game. Noob Saibot returns as a hidden, unplayable boss too but…well, I’m not sure if I could even call it a return.

I also covered him in UMK3, where he was quite incomplete, but this is definitely something else. The great Abystus managed to make MK3 Noob Saibot playable in the time after my initial MK vids, just like he was able to do with the hidden bosses in MK2. While those were a joy to finally be able to play as in the arcade version, with Noob Saibot here we REALLY weren’t missing much.

You see, this is the infamous Kano version of Noob Saibot. MK3 had no ninjas, of course, or instead of bothering to make a unique sprite for Noob, they instead just took Kano’s sprite and painted it black, slapped Saibot’s name on the healthbar, and called it a day. If you ever wanted more proof that MK3 was something of a hackjob, well, I’d say this is it.

Hilariously as well, Kano does quite literally just seem to be a modified version of Kano, in the way that Reptile was of Scorpion in MK1. So, yes, in terms of programming complexity they actually went backwards somehow. Go figure. He even has Kano’s combos and special moves, although I don’t think the AI ever uses the specials. Kano has probably one of my least favourite move sets of the classic MK games, and in a game with AI as awful as this it made for an experience so bad that I just threw on an infinite health cheat to at least be able to get through a couple of rounds, something which I last did…well, with my MK3 vid on Smoke. Good God the MK games are flawed. Kano Noob Saibot is a sort of anomaly we laugh about nowadays (hell, he even made it into the Saturn port of UMK3, would you believe), but in a retrospective it really is a painfully dumb to behold.

Indeed, I still can’t stand MK3. 3 is just a bad number in general when it comes to media. The first one sets the scene, the second is the high-point, and the third-one is underwhelming and/or flawed. There are some exceptions to this admittedly; Street Fighter III is great, KOF 96 is brilliant, and Tekken 3 was brilliant, but in general the third game in a series tends to be underwhelming compared to the first two. I really feel like that with MK3 here. Gone was the interestingly dark, fantastical world of MK2, instead replaced with this dreary, dare I say uninspired attempt at a post-apocalyptic one. I don’t like the UI, I don’t like the music, I detest the clunkiness of the gameplay and that somehow even more insufferable AI; there’s very little redeemable about it, in my opinion. It’s just this weird, lazy mess of a title and there’s a reason why most people just skip over this and focus on UMK3 instead, although that game has its fair share of issues as well. That said, curiosities are always good to cover, even if this was one of the less enjoyable ones.

Oh, and I also showed the Galaxian minigame here for a laugh. It’s balls to the wall ridiculous, as you’d probably expect.

Next up, it’s a little more of Noob Saibot as we return to MK4.