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Excellent hack! Overall, a great improvement over vanilla UMK3, adding a lot of new stages and minor improvements such as having infinite time for the arena select cheat, and an actual palette for Noob Saibot

My favourite addition was Idels, he's kinda buggy, but having a chameleon in the SNES port of the game is pretty cool in my opinion.

The graveyard was another great addition, I always wanted to see it in the SNES port since I saw it on the beta magazine screenshots from TCRF.

There is more to say but that was my general opinion.

Oh! and before I finish, I think it would be cool to see some of these things in the game:

• a better palette for Idels and his projectiles (both of these look wrong)
• title screen from the arcade version
• status bar from Sega genesis (I think I could help you with the gfx for this one)
• a better palette for Noob Saibot (the lightest hue of grey is actually a yellow color)
• Portraits for Sheeva, Idels and Human Smoke

I really, really appreciate the effort put in this mod: My major letdown back in the day, was not the absence of animalities (really, who cares, it's just so out of the box), or the absence of Sheeva (who select her???), but the lack of almost ALL of MK3 arenas (only Rooftop, The Portal and The Pit 3) was left out of the game, killed it for me. I had the MK3 cartridge, and then, when I rented UMK3, it felt like a downgrade, not an upgrade for me.

So, this hack simply corrected this and finally, it feels like the upgrade intended, back in the day.

But I have a complaint: I wanted this game to be as close to arcade as possible. But some creative liberty plays a role here, and man, the feeling that I'm just playing one of those horrible mugen games stroke me. It would be great if the mod creator could fix this, by removing any non official UMK3 character, restore the tombs in the Cemetery to it's original names (anyways, great job porting this stage, that it's absent in the MK3 port). Those creative liberties, should be an alternative IPS file in the package, so you could select what you want to have in your game.

Certainly, this mod is a 9 out of 10, and if it could left the non original content out, it could be rated as 20 out of 10!

This is one of those hacks where at the end of the day, it's a huge step up from the base game, but I'm not entirely sure if I'm fully sold on the direction that it goes, and I'm left walking out of it with mixed feelings.

Without a doubt, this is a vast improvement upon the original game, which had a lot of original content stripped away to make it fit on a SNES cart. Nearly everything that was omitted is restored, including Sheeva, Animalities, numerous stages, and more, so this has everything that the base game was unable to deliver. Lucas Dext5r even made human Smoke conveniently selectable on the character select screen. For those who endured the frustration of UMK3's numerous issues, this will finally make your day.

Unfortunately, that's where the party stops. One problem is that the Readme reiterates the hack's description, but provides no instructions, so you're left to figure out everything on your own. While it's not hard to figure out, it wasn't clear to me that Sheeva has to be unlocked through the hidden options menus, and while I like the one-button unlocks for the cheat menus, I would have appreciated quick instructions on which buttons unlock which. Then perhaps I would know why I can't seem to unlock Scott's Stuff.

Beyond the restored content, there are also a few creative liberties taken, but I don't know the creative vision that Lucas had for this hack, so as I took note of them, they left me wondering, why? Changes like the purple background in the character select screen, and the altered cryptic message in the opening title cards, don't feel significant. If anything, they feel less faithful to the arcade original, which is strange because usually the goal of a massive restoration hack like this is to make it more faithful.

I also can't quite wrap my head around the new hidden character Idels, a male ninja with a sloppy brown color pallet, a buggy portrait, moves borrowed from Rain and Sub-Zero, and a unique "MASTER" victory message that displays after beating an opponent. I'm all for an expanded roster, but Idels lacks that sense of intrigue or mystique that past secret characters had, and he leaves me more baffled than amazed. If anything, I think a better idea would have been an alternate Reptile with Scorpion and Sub-Zero's moves. That would have been a fun callback to his MK1 roots.

Overall, I can't say that I'm fully sold on this hack, but I don't hate it either. I think it did right by restoring nearly all of the original content, and that deserves applause; but the uninformative Readme is a problem, the creative changes feel insignificant, and the new hidden character is a glitchy, uninspired mess. The restoration is excellent though, so give this hack a shot. Kudos to Lucas Dext5r for a wonderful job.

Anyone who got Mortal Kombat 3 back in the day remembers how good the SNES conversion was, there weren't too many compromises overall, but it was missing the ninjas overall, Ultimate brought that and many of us would get Ultimate shortly after.... that said it was a glitchy mess with some extreme examples of bugginess, Kitanna tossing her fan two times in a row would lock up the game, Lui Kang doing his juggle would literally cause any following attack to register as something like .000000000001%. This patch has made it significantly more stable... on top of that it adds back Sheva,

I really liked this hack with the new stages, new modes on the hardest ladders and the easy way to access the cheats of UMK3, so it's way more fun to play this version than the vanilla version. However I feel that the OC character (the brown ninja after Human Smoke) is kind of unnecessary. He is all glitched (more than Jade) and not fun to play with, specially if you noticed that he replaced a spot for characters like Shao Kahn or Cyber Sub-Zero.

I had been searching for a hack for the Super NES port of Ultimate MK3 for a long time and now I'm glad that there's finally a hack in the work to improve this game. This hack offer a lot despite it's still in the beta stage at the moment. All the original MK3 stages were added to the Ultimate MK3 ones making it feel closer to the arcade original, the only drawback is that you must enable Stage Select from the cheat menu to access them as the stage cycle still only cycle through the five new stages. Also the Stag Select is still quite buggy as well with stages such as The Bridge difficult to select as it kept disappearing from the Stage Select list if you press Right on the d-pad. Also the Balcony stage though was included could only be access through the stage transition from the Soul Chamber instead of from the stage select menu. I do love that we get infinite time to select a stage with this.

Also a few minor drawbacks with the old stages is that you can't perform any stage fatalities on the Subway, Bell Tower, and the Pit 3, only at Scorpion's Lair can you perform a stage fatality. I understand why the Subway and Bell Tower didn't get their stage fatality here but the Pit 3 stage fatality doesn't work also which is kinda weird as it works just fine in the default version. Considering the SNES port of Ultimate MK3 having 2 different versions of the Pit 3 stage (one which had the stage fatality and one where you only fight Shao Kahn) I guess the hacker choose the one where you fight Shao Kahn since that one doesn't feature the stage fatality. Hopefully those stage fatalities are implement in a future update for this hack. I also enjoy playing Sheeva again, seeing Sheeva going one-on-one with all the ninja characters for the first time on the 16-Bit version was a dream come true here and she even had her Trilogy Brutality here as well which was a nice bonus. Animality are still missing which is okay. Also Sheeva's name was not shown when she win and all the name shouts from Shao Kahn are still missing. The tournament latters are all still the same so I hope there's some changes to that in future update of this hack.

If there's any improvements I could see for this hack, I had to say add back the stage fatalities for the Subway, Bell Tower, and the Pit 3. If it could be done maybe add in all the name shout and more of Shao Kahn's encouragements like Frosty and Crispy which will make it sould closer to the arcade game. Also maybe make The Bridge and Balcony stages more accessible, fix the stage cycle so that it cycle through not only the 5 new stages but the regular ten as well. Perhaps also add Sheeva somewhere at the character selection screen instead of sharing the slot with the 2 bosses. Animalities could either be added back or discarded altogether as I don't really care much about them, if we should keep just one though Liu Kang's Dragon Animality would be the only one to keep, all the others could just stay gone. Also if it's possible maybe put Shao Kahn's Lost Treasures at the end after we beat Shao Kahn as well so it feels closer to the arcade that way.

Overall I really enjoy this hack and look forward to the many more changes this hack had to offer. I play test this through SNES9x emulator on my PC and through SD2SNES on my Analogue Super Nt and original Super NES. Runs great. keep up the good work Lucas Dext5r.