…Killer Instinct? For those of us who played arcade games in the 90′s, Killer Instinct turned a lot of heads. Sure, it wasn’t as popular as Mortal Kombat 2 or Street Fighter, but there were still hordes of people surrounding the machine, ready to play.
This was Rare’s game for Nintendo’s up and coming system, the “Ultra 64″ as it was called then. The game featured amazing silicon graphics and animation, mixed with interesting characters and a deep, intricate combo system. Oh man, and were there combos! You could link long, impressive combos called “Ultras (get it, Ultra..like Ultra 64….yeah…they really hit it ultra hard, there)” for great fight finishers to wow your friends. It definitely borrowed the fatality idea from Mortal Kombat (a lot of companies were ripping off Midway for that, then), but other than that, it was a great, solid game. It even had some pseudo 3D elements via the silicon graphics.
Sadly, the N64 never lived up to the beefy arcade engine as promised. They opted out of the whole silicon graphics thing for polygons. Killer Instinct 2 (called “Gold” for the N64) looked great on the home console, but still wasn’t quite as flashy as its arcade brother. Same goes for Cruisin’ USA. That was not near as good looking as its original arcade version. I remember being disappointed by it, but in the long run, polygon graphics were probably easier to do, and after seeing what games look like now with this, it was probably better this way anyway. Still, I would love to see both KI games on XBox Live Arcade…nudge, nudge.
That game was crap. You know what happened to it? It died. MK and Street Fighter series were far better and this was just another cheap imitation in the way. What happened to Go-Bots? They died. Transformers was too good for some ripoff. Optimus Prime crushed them. What happened to VR Troopers? Well, the Power rangers had a secret weapon on their side. The Green Ranger. Same story. The moral of the story is, if you’re going to saturate the market with something and you don’t want to be the brunt of Cory’s rant years down the road, make sure your product isn’t crap. Like KI was.
Shin Goku Satsu FTW!
Yes, those other games were better, and more popular, but Killer Instinct did have one thing going for it: The combos. For those of us who learned it, it was really quite brilliant and opened the door for some really amazing combinations. That was were it shined, not its awful fatalities. Oh yeah, and the silicon graphics were friggin’ awesome back in the day.