This was an instant hit with the family. It's adorable, relaxing, and easy for the kids to pick up and use, We play it together on the living room TV and I love it. I really think there's credit due any time a game developer goes for a look/aesthetic and achieves it. And in this case I think they did.
I really loved the original for n64 and this version is way better than I even remember the original being. Possibly because the mouse + keyboard works so well with it, it feels much more comfortable than the gamepad did. But also, this version handles high resolution screens beautifully. I fired it up on a 3440x1440 monitor expecting to have to tweak things but by default it looked GREAT. And another great surprise was that I installed it on Ubuntu 22.04 using regular WINE from the Ubuntu repo. It threw an error during install but still ran fine with no tweaking. I bought it knowing it was only supported on Windows and was willing to take the gamble but I am very happy that it happens to work!
No gfwl is literally a game changer. I am really impressed with how the game runs too. Looks great on my budget gaming PC and seems to run a bit smoother than New Vegas for me. Windows 10 GeForce 750ti 8GB RAM
I have played this more than most of the other games in my library. I played through it for the engaging and fun story and stuck with it for the modding. I have replayed it multiple times to try different styles of play. I've gotten the free modding tools and made my own mods for fun. It's really a game that just keeps being fun for a long time in my opinion. I can't recommend it enough.
MK1 for DOS is possibly the best home port of the game that was released (until many years later when the arcade version bundled with an arcade emulator was released). It is fast and fun, the visuals and sound are good, it's just a very fun game. MK2 for DOS has very good graphics for the time of its release. Its a major step down from the arcade but that's because the characters were gigantic and extremely high quality in the arcade. The gameplay in this has been tweaked from the arcade and, in my opinion, this is faster and more fun for casual matches. I don't know if competitively it holds up well. But I love that characters don't have to take complete steps when you tap a direction. Little things like that make it feel more responsive. The music, as many have noted, is not good. Its MIDI with no higher quality present. No idea why they did this. The arcade had gorgeous music. MK3 for DOS is something special. It's a version built just for DOS as far as I can tell. It has LAN play built in, which was impressive for a fighting game at the time of its release. And GOG has done a great job pre-configuring DOSBox to support LAN Play over the internet via DOSBox. GOG's config for the game makes it trivial to get this running. It adds a significant feature that the original release didn't have. I would also note that MK3 for DOS, in my opinion, is a much better game to have than MK3 for Windows. The Windows version appears to be a port of the PlayStation version. It is a step down in terms of graphics and even the gameplay feels rougher.
