Mortal Kombat II Special is a pirated fighting game developed by Hummer Team and published by JY Company. It is based off Mortal Kombat II and has similarities with the pirate of the same name, which confusingly enough is based off the original Mortal Kombat.
Overview
Mortal Kombat II Special's gameplay. Note that unlike the MKII pirate, Sub-Zero's freeze special freezes the opponent.
This game has a total of 14 playable characters, those consisting of the 12 normally playable characters, Goro and Shao Kahn, (the former of which wasn't in the original game) and there are no repeats in the original release. All of the characters are playable at the start. The fighting engine is a modified version of the one used in the Mortal Kombat II pirate, altering the special moves to make them function like they're supposed to and adding blood. The fatalities however, are still omitted from this game, with the fight simply ending when you win. The menus are similar to those of the MKII pirate, with the options screen being completely identical, although the character select screen was changed to look like the official MKII's and the main menu uses the MK logo as the background like in the official MKII.
Some of the music and backgrounds are new, while others are reused from the MKII pirate, which are based off the original Mortal Kombat. Because of this and the inclusion of Goro, the MKII Special is somewhat of a mix of the first two Mortal Kombat games.
This game was later rehashed under the names Mortal Kombat III Special and Mortal Kombat 3 Special 56 Peoples, (misspelled "Pepoles" in game) the latter of which has a completely different title screen. Both of these add palette swaps, with 28 characters in total in MKIII Special.
JY Company Logo
The JY Company logo in MKII Special
This is one of the numerous games to incorporate the JY Company logo into it, which can be seen on one of the stages. The full-screen version of the logo is in the rom and presumably accessible through a cheat, but it's currently unknown how this is accessed.
Trivia
- The "Divfficulty" typo in the options screen of the Mortal Kombat II pirate was carried over to this game. However, Shang Tsung's name is spelled correctly here.
- This game has a dip switch to presumably change between games, but the only differences are that when extended mirroring is on, the difficulty options are always rendered in white, the backgrounds are glitched and the HUD is rendered in different colours depending on the stage.
- The undumped version called Mortal Kombat IV Special (which was reviewed in one of the issues of Great Dragon magazine) doesn't have the J.Y. Company logo on the floor of Sky Temple but retains it on Kahn's Arena. The roster of the characters there is identical to MKII Special, not counting the fact that bosses are unplayable now.
Packaging
