Abystus tweaks Mortal Kombat 2 to make hidden characters playable

[dlevere]

By Alexa Ray Corriea

A hacker has cracked 1993 fighting game Mortal Kombat 2 to allow access to three CPU opponents as playable fighters, as detailed in a post on the Pugsy's Cheats forums.

The hack, discovered by forum user "Abystus," requires rewriting the game's code to allow characters Jade, Noob Saibot and Smoke to be selectable.

Normally, players get a chance to fight these three characters in Mortal Kombat 2 after certain in-game conditions are met. According to Abystus, the characters retain all special abilities as well as their speed, health, damage amounts and projectile invulnerability from their respective boss fights.

Fighting against the CPU with these characters will also ramp up the difficulty level. He notes that this version of the modifying code is not final and could be somewhat buggy in a few areas until he refines the method.

The steps to do this are detailed in the hacker's forum post — a somewhat more complicated measure than simply swapping out character sprites, which has been done in the past. Abystus' post also details the moves available for each fighter as well as work-in-progress moves.

Jade Playthrough

Source
Pugsy's Cheats
Via CVG

[bungholio]

People are still working on this to this day? I thought this was already done a few times.

[Mezmorize]

Congratulations Abystus on making the news!

[bungholio]

I'm still baffled on this. It seems like I've read this sort of thing twice over the past few years on the romhacking.net website. People were saying you couldn't just use a simple character select cheat because the game was made in a way that those characters were never given normal controls for players to use and trying to use them instantly crashes the game. Then there's been a few people that remade them multiple times, but I never looked into it because I haven't played a Mortal Kombat game in eternity. I never even had the 2nd MK game to even see the characters, so I've maybe fought one of those characters once and thought "That was sure some cheap ass character to fight."

[Abystus]

I'm still baffled on this. It seems like I've read this sort of thing twice over the past few years on the romhacking.net website. People were saying you couldn't just use a simple character select cheat because the game was made in a way that those characters were never given normal controls for players to use and trying to use them instantly crashes the game. Then there's been a few people that remade them multiple times, but I never looked into it because I haven't played a Mortal Kombat game in eternity. I never even had the 2nd MK game to even see the characters, so I've maybe fought one of those characters once and thought "That was sure some cheap ass character to fight."

The home consoles have had this hacked made for most of the ports already (I'm one of the hackers for that too), though it has never been done in the arcade version (which is what all console ports are based on). People have swapped movesets before to make them playable in the arcade version, but it removes all their special attributes (pretty much makes them play like Kitana and Scropion with a different palette) which kinda defeats the purpose. My hack allows for them to retain all their special attributes while allowing a player to control them (normally they crash the game). I'm not even sure how this got so much attention, as I never reported it to these sites (it is still a WIP at Pugsy's).