8-Bit Memoirs: Taking it to the streets Pt. 1; Street Fighter 2 vs Mortal Kombat 1 and 2

Having spent a great deal of time during my youth crouched in front of a television pummeling any takers at a game of any Street Fighter 2 and Mortal Kombat, I thought it might be fun to compare and contrast the 16 bit era of the franchises to see (in my mind) which comes out on top. In this first installment of "Taking it to the streets", I'm going to discuss the basics of character selection and general gameplay.

If you are like me, you love to play a fighting game and win with every character while utilizing all of their special moves and combos and both of these franchises offer many different characters that utilize all kinds of crazy s@#t which is where we'll begin.

In terms of unique characters, I would have to say that Street Fight 2 takes the cake. In fact, it takes the whole f@#king bakery. Looking at the character select screen in any of the SF2 titles you will see an interesting array of characters from all over the world. Each character is not only uniquely detailed, but are of varying shapes and sizes. Not only can you be a huge badass sumo wrestler or an electrical current wielding beast, but you can actually play as the leader of the game. How cool is that s@#t. You don't even have to know a crazy ass code to do it. That is just flat out cool.

Don't get me wrong, MK 1 and 2 have their fair share of unique characters, but some of these guys just lack creativity. I mean, did they rush this game out the door or something. Who was the genius who said, "lets just cut and paste a bunch of ninjas and then change their colors." Pretty f@#king original Sega, I'm surprised you didn't color it blue and make it run really f@#king fast too. In addition to the cutting and pasting, MK 1 and 2 had a bad habit of blurry and poorly designed backgrounds, but we'll get to that later.

Control "C" + Control "V" = More Playable Characters

Anyway, in regards to overall character uniqueness the edge clearly has to go to the SF2 titles. Personally, I always enjoyed playing as Vega or Fei Long (who I think looks a tad bit like Noel Gallagher). As for MK 1 and 2, I always enjoyed Kano and Liu Kang, but all the players were essentially the same just different colors.

"I feel love in the shock of the lightning..."

Moving on to my general gameplay thoughts between these two franchises. On of my biggest complaints of fighting titles of the 16 bit era was the total lack of diversity between characters. I mean, yeah they all look a tad different (or just a different color...), but they all move and control exactly the same. Think about it. In MK 1 and 2 all the characters had the same moves and same motions while attacking. The only real difference might be the color of the s@#t that they fire from their fingertips or the one or two specialty moves character specific. Looking at SF2, the character all had unique moves that not only were visually different, but controlled differently. For instance, Balrog might wind up to punch whereas Ken strikes quickly. I mean, you actually feel like there are different characters for different fighting styles. In regards to MK, didn't it feel like all the characters where exactly the same. The game just felt rushed to me, it could/should have been so much more.

I am still to this day a bit frustrated that SF2 didn't have any type of "finishing move", but then again the game offered players so much more. Speaking of finishers, that was one thing that MK did really well. We had never seen anything quite like it in a game before and man it didn't disappoint (granted all this is laughable at this point, but it was cool to us back then). I think I would still give the edge in this overall gameplay category to SF2, but I would call it close due to the novelty of the finishing moves. Although MK did get laughable in the second installment with all that other s@#t that they threw in. You know what, f@#k that. SF2 by a mile in this category due to the aforementioned Friendship/Babality crap.

The final thing I want to tackle in this first installment is the difficulty of pulling off a special move or finisher. Personally, I feel that it is easier to find God than to execute some of the Fatalities in the MK series. Don't get me wrong, tearing out some poor bastards heart is pretty cool, but at the risk of having an aneurism to do it, no thanks. All of the other gameplay moves in MK are actually quite simple to pull off. In fact, there are quite a few similarities between both the series in this regard. I do feel like SF2 was somewhat limited in the special move category due to the lack of finishers, but it was still cool to have unique characters with unique moves. I mean, sure they all throw fire balls and s@#t, but in SF2 they have unique punches, kicks and uppercuts etc (and they talk when they do it). So yeah, this category is close with maybe an edge to MK cause I'm feeling generous and don't want to blow out MK on the first day.