UMK on the DS runs so fast and so smoothly that we have to assume the game was actually ported to the DS hardware from the ground up rather than rigged to work with emulation of the original arcade machine. When you start up, you can jump into the standard Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 arcade game, allowing you to pick from all the characters of the arcade version, choose your difficulty, and then fight it out against the arcade game's famously lousy artificial intelligence. As far as we can tell, the game preserves pretty much all of the characters' animation frames from the original, and there's no slowdown whatsoever.

The gameplay is spot-on with the DS controls. Anyone who spent time playing any MK on a Super Nintendo pad will feel right at home here, and even if not, it won't take you more than a few minutes to get up to speed. As veterans of UMK3 ourselves, we were able to jump on then start whipping out combos and fatalities almost instantly. And even if you forget how to do any of your characters' special moves and finishers, you'll see a display of all your moves on the other screen throughout any match. (Which screen displays the fighting and which one shows the move list is configurable in the options.) The bottom line is that we're amazed at how much this game feels like the original arcade game; it's a surprisingly high-quality version of UMK3, from what we've played so far.