I've already wasted too much time recapping my love affair with Mortal Kombat so I'll skip the history. To put it briefly, I played a lot of Mortal Kombat in the arcade and had the misfortune of working during the home version launch.
Unlike Mortal Kombat II, none of the Mortal Kombat home editions were all that great. I think they all missed the mark pretty badly in one aspect or another. Still, they managed to sell mountains of copies. The Sega Genesis version was by far the top seller back in 1993. The contributing factors were a larger install base than the Super Nintendo, and of course the lack of fatalities in the Super Nintendo version. There were also portable and PC versions available, even more than a decade later a direct-to-TV version was published. Which one of these various games were really the best though?
Games are ranked on the following criteria:
Play Control: How close does this edition come to replicating the original controls?
Graphics: How does the game look relative to hardware capabilities?
Sound: Is the sound accurate or annoying?
Other Factors: A miscellaneous bucket for all the various irritations these ports contain.
Instead of a mundane 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..