Mortal Kombat II (MK2) was released right at the start of my loser phase. For those that don't know me (which is basically everyone reading this) this was a period from 1992 to 1996 when I was a certified junior college dropout working at an Electronics Boutique. Needless to say I had a lot of spare time to blow at the local arcade, and a lot of that time was spent perfecting MK2. I'm not going to claim I was unbeatable, but I always managed to play for an absurdly long time on a single credit.
MK2 was the pinnacle of fighting games at the time, it was the last great 2D fighting game. It had a wide selection of characters each with their own array of moves and combos. They lacked the balance found in the original MK where all the fighters were pretty much equal for a skilled player. This caused players to actually weigh their selection carefully based on their opponent. Even the Street Fighter series, where 2-4 characters where considerably better than the rest, missed this element. A while later MK3 was released but I never got into it. The first time I watched it in action I saw someone hit an arbitrary button sequence which caused his character to break out into a frenzy of moves. A little message appeared that said something like "combo +5". I thought "gee, it's not really a combo if the game did all work" and I never looked at MK3 again. When the later sequels came out there was no longer a local arcade nor the time to play them.
Anyway, back to MK2.. Being an arcade smash there were several home versions made. At the ol' Electronics Boutique we sold a ton of them. Maybe I even sold you a copy. All the time customers would ask "hey dude, what's the best home version of MK2?" I'd usually recommend the Super Nintendo version without thinking about it too much. It was much better than the Sega Genesis version but shoppers were rightly skeptical after the censorship debacle with the original game. Despite the expanses of free time I had back then I never got around to trying the different versions to see how they checked out. So roughly 11 years after their initial release, I decided to take a step back in time and try them all again with the intention of ranking them from best to worst.
Games are ranked on the following criteria:
Play control: This is considered the most important factor. The port should play like the original arcade game with working combos and whatnot.
Graphics: It's unrealistic to expect the home versions to look exactly like the arcade but it should be as close as the hardware supports.
Sound: The same goes for the sound effects, music, and voices.
Extras: Was anything extra added to the home version?
Instead of a boring 10 point scale I'll use the following system based on my personal ranking of the characters:
I suppose at some point I should explain why I ranked the characters in that order. Maybe I'll save that for the future..