I just hated that there was no pause button. If I get up to take a piss then Raiden will murder me.

Back in the day, no one really preferred it to Street Fighter, they just liked the violence and grittier theme. It was kind of a novelty to have a game that embraced that sort of over the top BS. The game was kinda lame, truth be told. How it got turned into some "hallowed" and respected fighting game I have no idea.

I remember liking Mortal Kombat better than Street Fighter back around 1994 or 1995. Mortal Kombat 2 and 3 changed a bunch of things, while Street Fighter, despite being a deeper game, was just the same stuff repackaged as Super this and Turbo that.

Then Street Fighter Alpha came along, and I went back to liking Street Fighter. Think I'll play it right now.

Mortal Kombat was was popular because it was basically Enter the Dragon: The Game, and it did that really well.

You guys should really nab the Komplete Edition on Steam; it's badass (and also pretty cheap).

I got the latest Street Fighter one awhile ago (also on Steam) and there really is no comparison: MK blows it out of the water (then rips out its scrotum then shits on the scrotum then feeds the scrotum back into Street Fighter's mouth with its children watching).

The Komplete Edition is indeed badass. Plus you can hack it so Kano does Shao Khan's fatalities and Johnny Cage does Mileena's sexy dance victory.

Oddly enough, I wasn't too into the original Mortal Kombat; I got my ass handed to me so badly the first time I played it that I refused to go back, even after all my friends got into it. But all that changed with MK2.

I'd say that, as far as the game mechanics go, SF2 was better than MK1. But MK had a lot more "heart" and "soul" (cue Kano and Shang); the story was better, the ambiance was cooler, and it was just overall more fun. This pattern continued all throughout the two series' lifespans; MvC3, for example, is probably the nicest playing fighting game I've ever seen (sorry, KoF '98!) but in spite of Jill Valentine and Hayato from Star Gladiator (why not June?!?!), I still got more out of MK2011. An exception to this rule was Street Fighter 4. Despite going up against (the admittedly rather lackluster) MK; Armageddon, I can say with no hesitation that MK:A had both a better story AND better gameplay than SF4. Mr Labatt is right about SF4, it's pretty terrible.

That's not to say that I'm a totally unreasonable MK fanboy! I have been known to take some rather unpopular and controversial positions in the past, positions which would make me almost as much of a pariah to the MK kommunity as notorious sprite artist "EvilRyu". For example, the age old question of who would win in a fight, the MK Universe or the Street Fighter universe. This is a very heated debate, and the answer traditionally serves as a shibboleth within the two fighting game communities; the one you pick is the one you smark for. Obviously, I'm an MK smark first and foremost, yet I firmly believe that the Street Fighter Universe would win such a fight. (this is a very nuanced debate, but to sum my position up briefly: look at the fatalities. When Scorpion gets blasted with fire, he dies. When Ryu gets blasted with fire, he falls down for three seconds and then gets right back up as if nothing happened.)

Whether MK was better than SF2 depends upon your definition of "better". But yes, bac, MK WAS better.

I actually think Street Fighter's held up better because it's not all that serious. SFIV is great; not only is there a lot to the gameplay, it also nails an all-important goofy exaggeration in both style and "plot." It feels like a fun cartoon, while Mortal Kombat feels like a bad comic book.

Of course, the best fighting game storyline always will be BloodStorm.

Dear God. Everybody had the exact same basic moves in MK and all moved at the same speed and had the same reach no matter which character you picked you basically played the same damn character. There was barely any variety all the way up until MK3 and then you could run and it introduced combos so hooray a smidgen of variety that it only took them two games to get too.

I'm not talking about franchises as a whole. I am saying Street Fighter 2 was and is a better fighting game than Mortal Kombat 1 and 2.

I will give you that MK had fun stories and working out fatalities with friends was always a blast. but the overall fighting content of the early MK games were about as shallow as a puddle.

As I said, the gameplay in SF2 was marginally better than that found in MK1 and, maybe, MK2 (although I'd argue that the tiers were better balanced in MK2, and that MK2s bare-bones approach to combo-making made it the "thinking man's game" of that era)

However, which game is BEST depends on a lot more than raw fighting mechanics. If raw fighting mechanics were all that counted, then UFC Undisputed 3 would be the best fighting game of all time. And clearly it's not.

SF2 provided you with a few minutes of distraction while you waited for the movie theater to open. MK offered you a way of life.

Where does Pit Fighter fit in to all this?

Bushido Blade or gtfo.