What was or is top gun: Street Fighter or Mortal Kombat series?

[sonnyburnett]

Wow. You do realize Fighter's History/Data East has NOTHING to do with King of Fighters/SNK, right?

Amen Brother!!!!
I tried to tell him this but I think he doesn't understand anything about what he is saying.

You also realize that Fatal Fury & Art of Fighting (which would eventually merge to become King of Fighters) was the brainchild of the original developers for Street Fighter, who left Capcom shortly after its creation, right?

Probably not, judging by this statement.

Honestly, the KOF and SF series are very different from each other in terms of tone. While SF was always about playing defensively and waiting for your opponent to open themselves up (just look at the Shoryuken - the move with the most priority, and it was meant to be used as an anti-air), KOF was about creating openings and playing offensively (Tech Rolls, Low Jumps and Runs were always meant for overpowering your opponent with rush-downs, mix-ups and ambiguous cross-ups.)

Whether you consider one play-style superior to another is just a matter of taste. Both are the top-dogs in their field, however.

Personally, I prefer KOF because of the team mechanic - you can have one member cover for another member's weaknesses. It gives you a lot of options. It's the same reason I consider Vampire Savior to be one of the most balanced games of all time - even when one character is clearly superior to another, every character has so many options at their disposal that an 8v2 match-up in the opponents favor can still go to you. Hell, I've seen VS tournaments won by Victor and Anakaris, who are considered the lowest tier in that game. With fighting games, it's all about options and mobility - and in SF, almost every character moves slow, and tends to have the same options (Fireball + Uppercut + Forward-movement skill like Hurricane Kicks, Psycho Drive, etc.)

Lack of options is actually another problem I have with MK. Every characters' Back+LK, Back + HK, and Down + HP is the same. Heck, almost every normal attack in the game is exactly the same. Special moves are the only thing that makes a character unique, yet mostly they are easily punished - a whiffed or blocked Shadow Kick, for instance, will leave you standing there for almost a second, just waiting to get punished. This just means that people are going to pick one of the maybe three characters with specials that can't be easily punished. (I remember Cyrax in MK3 being EXTREMELY popular.)

yep well said!!!
Great info on the developers being the ones that created SF.


I also love the team mechanics in KOF, I been playing since Fatal Fury, Art of fighting never appealed to me much, so I was extremely happy when in 95 the ultimate fighting game was born in my opinion.
Much love for 97, 98 and 2002 which I love a lot and my favorite team is: Ralph, Joe and Rugal.


Even the newer stuff like Kof Maximum impact is quite nice, at first I didn't like it because of the 3d but after a few games I found out that they left the gameplay intact, awesome.
Often played this one with my son.

 

[CHALLENGER]

SF series all the way.

This shold be a poll.

Hector

I agree, in fact I wanted to add one. However, I didn't see an option for a poll.

 

[bear1]

Killer Instinct is the best fighting game ever. I really like the Mortal Kombat series, but never got heavy into the Street Fighter series. KI has the best characters, sounds, music, backgrounds, animations, etc. And unlike MK, where several characters have the same voice and look the same (except for different colored clothes), the KI characters are all fully unique. Too bad KI2 was not as good!

 

[LeeB99]

Take away all of the fatalities and blood, and the original MK would have been just another example of a US arcade developer FAILING at attempting to make a good fighting game. Keep in mind that when the original MK came out, Street Fighter 2 was already in it's THIRD iteration. So, comparisons between the original SF2 and MK1 are not really valid. MK2 was a WORLD better than the first game, but that is really just because they ended up making the game that MK1 SHOULD have been. My guess is that MK1 was rushed out to market because they wanted to take advantage of the craze surrounding Street Fighter 2 and it's "enhanced" versions that were already out. I never was comfortable with the block button or the play mechanics of the game, although I DID at one time own a dedicated MK1 in excellent shape that I outfitted with a MK2 board set (but left all the MK1 artwork intact). I sold that game to my parent's next door neighbors, and it is still in their upstairs game room. They recently told me that, due to the difficulty that surrounded moving it up the stairs, they didn't think that they would EVER move it out of the room. But I digress...

Street Fighter 2, and it's successors, are without question better than the MK series. The sales numbers prove it, the number of arcade kits sold prove it, and the fact that there have ALWAYS been active Street Fighter competitions EVERY YEAR for the last 20 years straight proves it. There have been quite a number of years where MK was completely off everyone's radar, and unless I am mistaken, there has NOT been yearly MK organized competition every year since the first game was released. Am I mistaken?

Lee

 

[Drew57366]

There have been quite a number of years where MK was completely off everyone's radar, and unless I am mistaken, there has NOT been yearly MK organized competition every year since the first game was released. Am I mistaken?

Lee

I thought maybe I could Google something as I was curious about this. Ended up on a vid link and I had to share.

LOL
http://www.collegehumor.com/video/5803611/mortal-kombat-is-not-a-tournament

 

[Broodwich]

Killer Instinct is the best fighting game ever. I really like the Mortal Kombat series, but never got heavy into the Street Fighter series. KI has the best characters, sounds, music, backgrounds, animations, etc. And unlike MK, where several characters have the same voice and look the same (except for different colored clothes), the KI characters are all fully unique. Too bad KI2 was not as good!

"amen brother" -sonnyburnett

 

[mecha]

I'm bored with the repair sections lately, glad I found this place. lol, this is a very interesting age-old discussion.

speaking as someone whose family operated arcades in the 70s, 80s and 90s, they were always on the cusp of all the latest and greatest shit. they passed on SF2:TWW, cause who knew that game was going to go over as well as it did? when Champion Edition kits started flying out, we were there right as it was released. ours was in a Dynamo Z and well... magical things happened that summer.

after the summer ended, and I'd finished beating the game with every character (that was my goal in '92) that was it for SF2... then spring '93 rolled around and we got this game called NBA Jam, and after school one day I saw the rest of the room filled with Mortal Kombat and Time Killers.

I initially was reluctant to even touch MK. had nothing to do with the blood, it was just I felt like my allegiance was to Street Fighter. then I played it, and my life was changed. in the short term, back between 1993-1994, Mortal Kombat received the nod over Street Fighter in my book. the violence and shit, that was edgy, and it was cool.

then I discovered Killer Instinct in 1995, and I didn't care about either game anymore. KI had a unique perspective on how to do fighting games, and we joke about the Japanese/American thing like it's a joke for Americans to do a fighting game, but these were Brits doing this one! the whole combo theory thing, I thought that was awesome. I get absolute pure joy from playing that game now that I have dedicated KI and KI2 machines... the whole muscle memory thing of executing combos, that's so badass to me.

but go back to 2000, that's when I discovered arcade game emulation. the timing was so weird, cause a lot of the games I played back in the day were just getting emulated around that time. one of those, was Mortal Kombat 2. by my senior year of high school, then MK3 and CPS2 followed. so that's when the obligatory reflective shootout began between the two series...

if you want complexity and depth, and an overall polish that's so gleaming and sparkly that it blinds you, then Street Fighter and its off-shoots is where it's at. Capcom took the concept started with Karate Champ and Yie-Ar Kung Fu and made it not suck (which is further debatable because SF1 did in fact suck when you consider the laggy controls) and perfected it with Street Fighter 2. you can joke about them releasing the same game 5 times, but what Capcom was actually doing was cementing a legacy in the fighting game world by continuously polishing the game over and over until it was perfect. while I don't agree that Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo was Capcom's finest moment, there are millions of people that do think that.

Capcom really did some magical things with the Alpha series, because it took all the depth and added new features and corrected SF2's long standing problem by making the game flow so much more fluidly. Super Turbo was not the definitive game in the series for me... for me, it was Street Fighter Alpha 3. it had a massive roster that didn't skimp out on anyone's favorites and implemented the 3 fighting style system, and its overall presentation was just beautiful in the art and sound departments.

in arcades, I only got as far as Mortal Kombat 2 in regular circulation. I played MK1 and MK2 with an obsessive pattern. memorizing everything in MK1 was easy... it was "just" 7 characters. but with MK2, it went beyond the 7 up to 12, and instead of just fatalities, now you had the silly friendships, babalities and stage fatality moves to all remember now too. I would study the strategy guides all hours of the day to have a vast knowledge of all of that stuff, because it felt like the cool thing to do at the time of being the ripe age of 11.

what Mortal Kombat lacked in the areas of precision and depth, it compensated with the gimmick of blood and gore. I think even Ed Boon would tell you that. with the advent of the internet some time afterward, it was revealed that Mortal Kombat wasn't devised to be a serious contender to Street Fighter 2, but rather a small project that the Williams/Midway guys got to do to more or less create a response to it. what they discovered was they had a mass marketing phenomenon. the small project blossomed into a monster. Mortal Kombat 2 is widely considered the finest moment in the franchise, and while I give equal love to all the original 4 games, I have to tend to agree that yes, MK2 was where it was at.

with MK3, the expectations riding on it were extremely high. and in the grand scheme of things, it did fail to deliver on many levels. Killer Instinct creeped into the domain along with many others around the same time... it wasn't just a Street Fighter vs. Mortal Kombat world anymore. each game had a different fresh perspective to them rather than all the SNK Street Fighter wannabes. MK3 tried to be revolutionary with adding the combo craze to it in the form of dial-a-combos, but it wound up actually restricting its depth rather than expanding upon it. Mortal Kombat as a whole is not known for being a "combo" game, unless you factor in weird exploits and glitches and standing punches to lead in to other hard-hitting moves.

Mortal Kombat as a whole just doesn't flow like Street Fighter as a fighting game. Mortal Kombat however created an entire mythos of character backgrounds and storylines that all of that took on a life of their own, and lent to a massive expansion with the PS2 and Xbox games that followed.

so, if you want a "deep" fighting game, Street Fighter and its ilk wins out, handily.

if you want a complex story with a cool bloodsoaked atmosphere, then Mortal Kombat's for you.

and if you want something that crushes everyone with no story at all, then there's Killer Instinct.

in reality though, there's room for all of them. I don't really view any one series of games as being better than the other, they all offer something different, and variety is good. additionally, I'm also a sucker for Tekken, Tekken Tag Tournament is another one of the games I own. try doing what I do: beat SFA3, MK2, Tekken Tag, KI and KI2 all in one sitting one after the other.

EDIT: this apparently is my 2500th post on here. what a good one to save it for lol

 

[CHALLENGER]

Your 2500th post was a good read. I can't imagine having family owning an arcade, had to be awesome.

I loved the arcade as a kid when given the chance to wonder around one. I'll never forget my earliest time in a arcade in some mall in Wisconsin somewhere, don't know if it was in Racine or what. But I walked around kind of clueless and seen some games that I had on the Atari 2600. Pacman was one of them, and so was Pole Position that was my mom's favorite and would try to get me to play. The graphics were a better along with sound, but I had them at home and wanted something different.

As I made my way around a Berzerk machine, I heard it speak. I was shocked because the one I had for the 2600 only bleeped a few sounds, there was no speech never heard these games talk. I played that thing for a few rounds until I realized that this games was also harder than the 2600, but it was a cool experience.

Then the first games I probably fell in love with were Wizard of Wor and Sinistar. They both also spoke and it just sound so bad ass and yet so creepy. I must have been 6-7 years old at the time (1986-87 time frame)

So for a long time until 1990 I never really went to an arcade of any type except CEC. I was more of an outdoor kid if anything, and loved only a few games.

Around 1990-92 Our school field trips took us to a skate ring (Skate University) and they didn't have SF2:WW yet, must have been too new or not out yet. But I got my second dose of arcade madness playing 4 player games with my school buds. Bucky O' Hare,TMNT, Simpsons, Offroad, and even enjoyed Rush N attack and Rambo. LOL I would wear skates and go around the ring once or twice and go play games the remainder of the time there. Never got to play SF2:WW in the arcade until many years later though.

Then getting a SNES truly opened up the gaming world for me and the SF madness came.
I was never addicted to any game other than SF (Until tekken tag came out).

Mortal Kombat came out amd again school ground talks...The way my friend first explained MK to us sounded unreal, and almost like a lie. But he wasn't the type, and he was the same guy who always got all the new game mags and introduced me to SF. I'll never forget him trying to tell us about the game.

"It's so FRESH! there is this old man who sits in the Back ground on a chair and watches you fight. Then when the matches are over he stands up and yells FINSIH HIM! and there is these secret death moves you can do. I seen one guy pull this ninja's head off."
We all just surrounded him in awe as we tried to picture this crazy violent game.

So one day me and my brother gets dragged to Walmart with my mom and aunt. LOL out of all places this is where I first see MK in it's original machine in all it's glory blood and all. The guy playing was using Johnny Cage and the game I think was like 50 or 75 cents. I remember it being so damn expensive to where I didn't get to play because of it. It was cool however I got sick of it fast when it came out for SNES.

Not only was it watered down. But with only 7 characters and I was still in SF mode so Mk didn't really have a chance. I remember at the lunch table we would trade games for the weekend every Friday or Thursday. I remember one time getting a deal, I forgot how I got this game, but I ended up with Rival Turf or something like that. And my friend wanted to trade me for MK1, he was getting sick of it and MK2 was hot on the press. Monday morning came and he wanted his game back LOL.

KI was just short lived and disappeared. Why they never came back around is beyond me, many fighters fell off. Years later we have SF and MK as one of the top fighters. I've winded long enough so I'm not even going to start on Tekken.

But in the End SF pioneered fighting games and dominated for many years period. Mk came a bit late like many other fighters out there, some were able to cash in on the craze some were not, some fell off faster than others. But SF has been there from start to finish.

 

[Les Manley]

First time I ever saw Mortal Kombat in the arcade was at the Mall of America. The more adult upstairs arcade had one and so did the more kiddie downstairs arcade. I will never forget it because I was so intimidated by the machine. I literally felt like I wasn't worthy of playing it for some reason. Don't know why, maybe it was because so many older kids were playing it. It took me a while to get past that though and I have never felt that way about any other game.

 

[sonnyburnett]

"amen brother" -sonnyburnett

 

[martimagico]

my MKII cabinet has a SF2 CE Rainbow jamma and marquee in it enough said!!!


SF2 and 4 RULE!!!

 

[therealmogwai]

i was an avid sf guy
i even won a sf2 tournament in which the prize was a sega cd.
anyone talk the lack of depth in the mk series has not graduated to the next level.
best sf is 3rd strike due to depth and parrying
best mk... all too different
mk wins