Mortal Kombat II - Official Players Guide (1994) [GB, GG, GEN, SNES]

What better way to celebrate the recent digital release of Mortal Kombat Legacy Kollection (October 30, 2025), which contains 23 games in the series, than with the release of this look at Mortal Kombat II that has codes and move lists for four home versions. This book comes from !nfotainment Worlds and the selling point is the three authors brought in to make this. GamePro Magazine Contributing Editor Matt Taylor, Jim "MK" Fink who worked on the home console ports, and Graham Wolf, a top-ranked arcade MK player. This only covers the versions on the SNES, Genesis, Game Boy, and Game Gear. The Mortal Kombat Legacy Kollection contains Arcade, SNES, Genesis, 32X, Game Boy -- but NOT the Game Gear version. While Atari and Digital Eclipse have promised more content is coming to the Legacy Kollection in post-launch support, they have never directly mentioned if MKII on Game Gear would be a part of it.

If you grew up on the SNES and Genesis versions of MKII, then you probably will love this book. It covers all 12 fighters for each system, with not only the exact button combinations to pull off the moves, but also strategies and tips how to use them best. You get write-ups on a lot of stuff. They really give you a lot of info on how to use each fighter, like Liu Kang alone has 10-pages dedicated to him for just the SNES/Genesis versions. It also covers all known codes, like 29 kredits, go directly to certain hidden characters, and additional tricks like having the bosses destroy the Acclaim logo. You will be able to find Jade, Smoke, and Noob Saibot on all four platforms. I would imagine that many of these tactics would also help on the arcade versions, given two of these authors were experts on that platform.

This is the Mortal Kombat II - Official Players Guide (1994) with 162 pages, full color, and shows you all the basic moves (with screenshots), specialty moves, kombos, and fatalities. They even try to help you with jump in kick combos and cross up combos. They tell you how to use counters, ground attacks, and how to use defensive strategies for each fighter. When it comes to the Game Boy and Game Gear versions you don't get as much help, usually just getting the button presses themselves and not much else, but it's not a big deal. There might be better strategy guides out there on the arcade games, but this works well for the 16-bit versions.

I bet @Rando1975 is filling up your shelves with all these books/issues he has been donating over the years (relax its hyperbole, they're all digital). @dablais does the scanning and edit.