The Mortal Kombat series has been saddled with some of the worst computer-controlled fighters in the history of the genre. It controls just fine on the DS, and it's still a lot of fun. It's goofy, but it's also one of the better 2D fighters from its era. It wasn't as serious as the Mortal Kombat games that came before it, and it's certainly not as serious as the darker set of MK games that appeared on the previous generation of consoles. For example, Liu Kang can make an MK2 arcade machine drop out of the sky to crush his victim.

But even the regular fatalities became crazier. The finishing moves got more ridiculous, too, with animalities-where your fighter turns into some kind of animal and does something to your opponent-joining the regular fatalities, babalities, and friendships. It added a run button that the previous games didn't have, amped up the combo system, and added a lot of interesting new characters, all while maintaining the game's digital, photographic look. Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 was the last 2D game in the MK series and, by far, the fastest of the bunch.

This is the best portable Mortal Kombat game to date. But if you're a fighting aficionado with a DS and wireless access to the Internet, this is a pretty cool package. By itself, as a single-player game, it's a bit of a dud. Fighting on the Nintendo DS goes online courtesy of Ultimate Mortal Kombat, a two-game compilation that contains a quality port of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 and a version of Puzzle Kombat, the MK-themed puzzle game that Midway inserted as an extra in Mortal Kombat: Deception.

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