It was in the mid 90s when I first played Killer Instinct on the Super Nintendo. I remember my brother borrowed it from one of his friends. The game cartridge was unique as it was black instead of grey and it also came with the soundtrack on a separate CD.
This game was violent like Mortal Kombat with blood and finishing moves but the gameplay was similar to Street Fighter 2. Executing moves was similar to street fighter and saw you inputting button and d pad combinations. For example, Jago's fireball move is the same way you would do a hadouken. Jago's moves are essentially all the same as Ryu and Ken's move set from Street Fighter 2. I enjoyed this game as the gameplay was similar to Street Fighter and learning the combos was a challenge as you needed to execute them quickly and at the right time.
The game was not as fast paced as street fighter but there was a cheat where you could make the gameplay faster. At the Versus screen you needed to press certain buttons to make it faster. I never knew what the cheat was so <Hold RIGHT and all 3 punch buttons. - Ed> I kept on pressing random buttons and the cheat some how worked. I only knew that it had worked as I would hear a sound to confirm the cheat was successful.
There was a huge difference between the arcade version and the SNES version. First thing you could notice was the graphics. The graphics on the arcade was I think 64 bit graphics and I think was originally meant to come out on Nintendo 64. The game ended up coming out on the SNES which was a 16 bit console.
I never did play or see the arcade version out in the wild until recently and as expected there is a huge difference in terms of graphics and animation. The sound track on the SNES version was decent and they kept the arcade announcer which was good.
Another thing about Killer Instinct which was odd was that you could not select the stage you want to fight in on 2 player mode. You could do stage select in Street Fighter but thinking bnack I don't think mortal Kombat had that option.
I found the last boss Eyedol very difficult to defeat. When it came to the second round Eyedol had the
ability to put his own energy bar back up which I found so annoying. It took me multiple times to defeat
Eyedol but I got there in the end!
Overall I have always enjoyed this game and I still play it till this day.
Thanks for reading 💙
Presented by:
Imraan Nazir
