And even a single day after its release, there seems to be a lot of competition on the servers ready to go. You're still going to have random asshats that love disconnecting after they lose so you don't get the victory, but never once in several hours of fights did the link just randomly drop. But this is the Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection. Some connections were pretty darn solid and felt as tight as a local wireless link, but a few worsened over the course of multiple fights…but never to the point of losing connection entirely. Most of the game's flaws pop up over the Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection due to the fact that battles can have lag, so when it slows down you're going to have to cope with some odd glitches and pops. If you don't have a friend at the ready, you can go online and fight with random players or buddies you've added to a Friends List…and this is one of the game's big selling points. If all he has is a Nintendo DS, there's a Download Play mode where you can send a 'demo' version to his system and fight with a small sampling of fighters (the color-swapped ninja characters). 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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