had been constantly adding subtle gameplay tweaks to its franchise since the release of Mortal Kombat, its once exciting series was suddenly looking rather tired." Nevertheless, the game received largely positive reviews at the time. As of 2014, the review aggregator website GameRankings is giving it the averaged scores of 80.23% for the Super NES, 76.67% for the Genesis, and 70.33% for the Sony PlayStation. Electronic Gaming Monthly (EGM) gave the PlayStation version their "Game of the Month" award. EGM and IGN both criticized the heavy lag during Shang Tsung's morphing while assessing the conversion overall as a near-perfect replication of the graphics, content, and controls of the arcade original. However, IGN gave it a negative assessment based on the shortcomings of Mortal Kombat 3 itself, recommending Street Fighter 2D fighting games over it unless one is a "die-hard MK fan". According to a later IGN retrospective, "Despite the evolutions in gameplay, Mortal Kombat 3 was simply not met with same kind of enthusiasm as its predecessor. While the new 'cyber-ninja' characters were popular, the loss of so many favorites from the roster left many players feeling left out. A new Mortal Kombat was impossible to ignore, but the response wasn't quite what Midway had hoped for." Reviewing the Genesis version, a Next Generation critic remarked that the game actually looks better on a last-generation console, where it finds company with other 2D games and is better-looking than most of them, than it did in the arcade, where it seemed outdated against the increasingly prevalent polygon-based games. He complimented the game for delivering on the elements most important to the Mortal Kombat fanbase, but added as a final note that "as a whole, the MK series is getting stale and in dire need of some major reworking." In their review, GamePro similarly said that Mortal Kombat 3 is "just not original enough (like Tekken) or deep enough (like SF [Street Fighter]) to warrant space on the casual Genesis gamer's shelf." They also criticized the Genesis version as being a weak approximation of the arcade version, particularly the character sprites and sound effects. They assessed the PlayStation version as a much more accurate conversion aside from the lag during Shang Tsung's morphing, but concluded it to be "An awesome home version of a game that wasn't so great to begin with." Next Generation similarly felt the arcade-perfect quality of the PlayStation