5 thoughts on “GameSpite Journal 10: Killer Instinct”

    • Man, were digitized photo sprites already on the way out by then?

      Anyhow. My recollection is that prior to Killer Instinct Nintendo wouldn’t allow “Kill” or “Die” in its game titles (or sometimes even in dialogue — “We defeated the dragon, so the girl’s mother fell too”) — yet somehow “Fatal” and “Mortal” were fine.

  2. Don’t forget the soundtrack.

    The soundtrack from the first one was a lot better. Especially the main theme. Nice, simple, and to the point. And each characters’ theme was appropriate for them.

    Definitely worth your time for your ears.

  3. I had a lot of fun with the Super NES game. Wasn’t nearly as good at the arcade game, the N64 game wasn’t that good, and I never played the sequel in the arcade, either.

  4. Nitpickiness first:
    “Nintendo naïvely chose to censor Midway’s Mortal Kombat and sold fewer copies than the sweatless Genesis version, despite being otherwise the superior port.”

    Nonsense. The control in the SNES version was utter trash.

    “While Super Street Fighter II showed players their combo count, it usually reached no higher than eight, and that is if you were extremely skilled or used the super combo move to great effect.”

    Super combos didn’t exist in Super SF2. That was introduced in Super SF2 Turbo.

    “An early preview of Killer Instinct (from Game Players Magazine) commented that T.J. Combo was capable of a 15-hit combo. In the post-Marvel Vs. Capcom world, this seems laughable, but the foundations were set by RARE. ”

    Actually, KI’s Ultra Combos were far above that. The game took the combo-craziness and it’s MK ripoff tendencies to the logical extreme: you could start a combo when an opponent was deep in the red on health, and execute a specific motion to begin an “Ultra” combo, which was an insane string of attacks that that would regularly reach 50+ hits and, of many stage-fatality-capable backgrounds, often send an opponent to a gruesome demise to boot. Ironically, MK would steal this for their “Brutalities”, introduced in MK Trilogy.

    “Unfortunately, turtlers get screwed as each character has a top attack move specifically to hit players out of their shells and into a merciless corner romping…Top Attacks have manifested themselves notably in Capcom Vs. SNK and Street Fighter III.”

    Super SF2 Turbo had them, and virtually every Capcom fighter since then.

    All that being said, it’s kind of surprising that KI fell by the wayside. Nintendo never had the tech available to make a truly faithful home version, and the genre kept skewing more and more to expert players, so the game always had a soiled rep when, yes, it definitely had a lot of elements of casual-friendly play that would become exemplified in the Vs. games. Of course, Rare’s decline is a big factor in all that.

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