Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat | Video Gaming Memories by Imraan Nazir 🎮🤜💥🤛 #RetroGaming #SuperNintendo

Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat were two of the biggest rival fighting games of the early 90s. I remember at school we would ask each other the famous question of that time.

‘What do you think is better: Street Fighter or Mortal Kombat’?I remember playing Street Fighter 2 in the arcades with my older brother. When it came out on the Super Nintendo that was a dream come true for me because that meant you could play the game in the comfort of your own home for free, without inserting coins.

After playing Street Fighter 2 I heard of another fighting game that was out at that time called Mortal Kombat.

I remember seeing the advert for Mortal Kombat. In the advert you see someone shouting MORTAL KOMBAT! in the middle of the street.

Mortal Kombat had an age rating of 15 which I was shocked about because I had never seen a game which was for ages 15 and over. When I saw that this game was for ages 15 and over I wanted to play it and wanted to find out why that was the case.

Before playing the game I saw the reviews in the computer games magazines. The game used blood, real people and something called finishing moves which was pretty gruesome and unique at the time. After seeing the reviews in the magazines I really wanted to play and I could see why this game had such a big hype.

I remember one day my brother borrowed Mortal Kombat from his friend. We had the Super Nintendo version and I was excited to play it. We put it on and started to play. The first thing I saw was this 4 armed being shouting on screen which later on I found out was one of the bosses of the game. After that it went to the title screen and on the title screen you could either select Tournament or options. I selected Tournament and saw 7 characters that you could select. The first character I chose was Liu Kang.

I started to play and pressed the buttons to see what they did. In every fighting game that I play I try to pull off the movements that I would use in Street Fighter to see if any moves come out from the character. When I was Liu Kang I tried to pull off the Hadouken movement on the control pad and hoped something would happen, but nothing happened. I tried to do the hurricane kick movement and still nothing. Then I tried back for three seconds forward and punch button and still nothing. For some reason I tapped forward twice and the punch button and something happened. A fire ball shot out of Liu Kang’s hand. I pressed random buttons while using the D pad and some moves randomly came out. 

Through time I had learnt some moves for different characters. I found it difficult to execute the moves on characters and also the finishing moves. The moves were not as straight forward as Street Fighter 2.

I remember once I was facing the computer and I was trying to block the moves by pressing back and found out nothing happened. Then I realised you had to press R to block which I found strange and took me a while to get used to.

Another thing which I found strange was that you could not pause during a match. The only time
you could pause was at the battle plan. On the SNES version there was no blood which I was disappointed about.

What do you prefer, Mortal Kombat or Street Fighter?

Thanks for reading

Imraan Nazir
YouTube channel:
Retro Gamer Strikes Back
https://youtube.com/@retrogamerstrikesback?si=KG8kKjkY2w96HonY