Mortal Kombat II raises the bar

This is my favorite 2D mortal Kombat to date. THIS is the Mortal Kombat I used to run to everday with quarters jingling in my pockets.
Back when this was all the rage tons of people played it and it was a great experience. I walked up to the machine back in '92 and I was very pleasently suprised that they had come out with a sequel and I was blown away by the new artwork, the improved gameplay over MK1 and of course the fatalities. No other Mortal Kombats had illicited this kind of responce from me except maybe the newest one (MK Deception). The overall darkness of the game and the new characters and improvement upon the looks of the old put me in Mortal Kombat heaven.

The graphics and sound where unbelievable for the time and the newer 2D MK's didn't improve upon it. If you paid attention you could see the characters teeth at times, individual fingers, eyes, rippling muscles, etc. all thanks to the fact that they digitized live actors to make the characters and they did a hell of a better job on it in this version than they did in part one which looks like a blurry mess compared to this. They had a palette of a lot of colors to choose from and that resulted in very smooth graphics, the best of it's time.

The sound was also fantastic as midway used their then new DCS sound system. Which allowed them to compress high quality sound effects and music onto the arcade board. All the voices and explosions had satisfying sounds which some also helped with the gameplay for example: When you do a jump kick to Shao Khan it makes a heavy thud which you can practically feel which lets you know just how tough he is supposed to be.

The gameplay was also really good. This game I played over and over and always figured out new combos, new ways of doing things, since they weren't preset you had to do them manually, with juggling. And in the beginning it was always fun to find new special moves and fatalities, friendships, babalities, etc.

Onto the subject of home versions, none come close except the rare sega saturn version which still has bugs. Both the Genesis AND Super Nintendo fall WAY short of looking like this in lots of ways, too many for me to list. And the same goes for the sound. The gameplay was there in both which was good but other than that, they dissapointed me. I was hoping for the SNES version to be perfect considering the graphics in part one and Nintendo had allowed midway to put in the blood and fatalities this time around but I know now that any of the 16-bit systems didn't have enough power to do this game 1:1.

The PC version had better graphics than both but still fell a bit short because of how they used MIDI for the music and it was made for DOS way back in the day when there where only 4 button gamepads for the PC. And they had some missing sounds, and elements which made it not as good as the previous PC version. Then in the CD version that is in the MKI-MKII collection CD they did not give it the same treatment as MK1 with the sound which did not help.

So for home version if you want to play it at home your best bets would be to play it on M.A.M.E. since it IS the arcade version, get the Saturn version (but it's still buggy) or get it on midway's new collection cd's.

This game raised the bar for me which none of the later arcade Mortal Kombat's never matched.