Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 arrived in 1996 as Midway's expanded revision of Mortal Kombat 3, and it exists largely because fans were vocal about who was missing. MK3 had dropped the series' beloved palette-swap ninjas, so this update brought back Scorpion, Reptile, Kitana, Jade and Mileena, folded in Human Smoke, and rounded the roster out with hidden fighters and unlockables. The result was the most complete arcade-era Mortal Kombat you could get, and it later formed the backbone of the console-spanning Mortal Kombat Trilogy.

Mechanically it kept everything that made MK3 feel faster than its predecessors: the dedicated Run button, chain combos (the infamous dial-a-combo strings), and a wider set of finishing moves. Beyond the trademark Fatalities you had Babalities, Friendships, Animalities, Brutalities and the cryptic Ultimate Kombat Kodes entered at the character-select screen, which turned the game into a playground of secrets shared on schoolyards and in magazines.

This is the Super Nintendo conversion, which trades some of the arcade's crisp sampling and animation frames for cartridge-friendly compression, but keeps the digitized-actor look and the core roster intact. Today UMK3 holds up as the definitive expression of the 2D digitized Mortal Kombat formula before the series moved on to 3D. It is fast, deliberately over-the-top, and still one of the most enjoyable ways to relive the mid-90s fighting-game craze.