Neither SNES nor Genesis UMK3 had Sheeva, but SNES has Invisisheeva, if you do the 8 on 8 team mode and do random select, and get the "E" that will be a 3 floating dot super fast glitch laden character called "Sheeva."

MK3 however has everyone who was in the game. Sega's gameplay is closer to the arcade, but SNES is nicer to look at and listen to.

Matt

I prefer the Genesis version, just because of the six-button layout. It worked better for the game. It may look worse, but gameplay is where it's at.

UMK3 and MK3 were great when I was playing them on the Genesis, but I play the arcade versions...and I can see a lot of what was missing.

I occasionally throw the home version games on once in a while, but only because I enjoyed them so much years ago and like to see what was so different in each game.

I liked MK3's AI and UMK3's character selection. I liked MK3's stages more than UMK3's 1 player cycle of stages. To me, they felt like two different games instead of an upgrade.

But I played both on the Genesis more than the SNES, so I can't judge quite fairly.

I don't really like either all that much, both's gameplay feels very off.

I'd say SNES is a lot better though. Genesis is just so shoddy. Everything looks bad and halfassed. Just look at the Pit III or Kahn's Tower stage fatals. With UMK3 Genesis has the advantage of having more stages, but thanks to UMK3's level cycling you rarely see them anyway.

It's kinda weird how so many people talk about this level cycling in UMK3. This is mainly because:

People play mainly play the CPU, starting on the Blue Portal, and not fighting enough characters before the old stages start coming up usually. If you play on double master I think the last stage is the Subway, and then you fight Motaro on the Balcony, and Shao Kahn on the Pit 3.

I play people online all the time for 30 or 40 matches at a time so I always see the old stages. The stage cycling in UMK3 is definite, whereas in MK3, if you uppercut someone through the Soul Chamber, it messes up the order of the stages and resets to the Soul Chamber after the Bridge because that's where it ends and starts if you just go the whole way through, the Balcony isn't supposed to come after the Soul Chamber, but on the Bank and the Subway, the knock through stages are the following stages in the order line up. The first stage however is random. In UMK3, no matter what you do, knocking people through the ceiling on Scorpion's Lair or not, you will do a definite run through of the UMK3 and MK3 stages, seeing the Lost stage once and all the others up to twice, then go to the Subway, it's kind of a strange way they did it, but the old stages have to come up eventually.

Matt

I played UMK3 on SNES and that only had 7 stages:Lost, Waterfront, Scorpion's Lair, Kahn's Kave, Jades Desert, Rooftop, and Pit3.



Fa-Q

Yeah Genesis has 11 stages surprisingly enough.

Matt

MK2KungBroken Wrote: Yeah Genesis has 11 stages surprisingly enough. Matt

Not too suprising. The genesis had far fewer colors so storage would have been much easier.

To be more precise, graphic tiles in Genesis were 4 bits per pixel meaning any given 8x8 pixel tile could only be made up of 16 colors. SNES on the other hand had 8 bits per pixel allowing up to 256 colors in any given tile.

I gotcha, that makes sense, have you noticed that when Dan Forden pops out for Toasty that he is generally a mesh of onscreen colors? He ranges from black and white to hues of brown...very sad.

Matt

I gotcha, that makes sense, have you noticed that when Dan Forden pops out for Toasty that he is generally a mesh of onscreen colors? He ranges from black and white to hues of brown...very sad.

Matt

It's weird how both Saturn and Genesis UMK3 kept the Bank stage when it's not in the arcade.


One thing that bugs me is how the Genesis and SNES MK3s messed up The Pit III. On arcade the left side has an entrance and the right side has Kahn's throne. On the home versions both sides have thrones. WTF? So how in the world did they GET THERE? There is seemingly no entrance and the stage is a bridge with a huge pit below! There is no way they could have gotten there unless they somehow dropped in from the ceiling. So dumb. If they had to mirror the stage why not just make both sides entrances?

I guess it's all a matter of what they felt was good at the time. I'm pretty sure SNES and Genesis can pretty much call things at any time to load them like the arcade, but it's more limited, which is why they could have each and every character run by for Stryker's friendship, but only one at a time. Mirroring the stages made sense, there's more examples of it here and there as well. About the Bank though I think it's more a question of why they took that specific stage out, even though it's still there, it just doesn't get loaded, Jade's Desert takes its place. Genesis kept the Soul Chamber, but not the Balcony so you can't uppercut through. Just a matter of what they had to work with I guess.

Matt