evo.gg
I'm the same.
Really MK was always a question of right time right place for me, pretty soon after SF2 with edgy bloody combat. I think MK 2 held up the interest by going heavily towards easter eggs which were really popular(all the different fatalties, etc) in that era but after that point the teenage boy market I think shifting more towards Killer Instincts combos and then Tekken's 3D plus MK's designs were starting to look increasingly cheap.
MK2's presentation was incredible. That's how to make a game look sound and feel. It was so much better than the first game in every way. It was jaw dropping how different it was. The combat still wasn't deep....but for 1994 it was OK.
I actually thin something people ignore when it comes to popularity of games is whether they were "fair" or not, not such a big factor on consoles perhaps but in the arcade especially I do think developers making games overly hard to maximise arcade owners income was a factor. MK2 was obviously legendary there but Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo was as well.
It 100% was a factor. Games were designed to get players to spend more money. In old arcade fighting games they used to have bosses or mini bosses that felt impossible to beat, and in some cases were, just so you could spend more money on the machine. The amount of money spent before the average person became good enough to beat the game was a focal point.
I tend to think though when it really became an issue was when it wasnt just the boss which was unfairly difficult but the game as a whole. With Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat I think you could argue Capcom/Midway got greedy and bent to arcade owners too much with Super Turbo and MK 2 making the games so difficult from the early stages that they turned away casual players.
Video games weren't looked at viable due to their difficulty back then. It was just whether or not they were fun. Nobody gave a shit about how hard Megaman 2 or Battletoads was until I was in highschool. Thats when I first started seeing that kind of stuff. Street Fighter was still very popular and had 30 iterations of 2 despite that stuff too.
It depends a lot on the environment of course, in the arcade difficulty becomes more of a factor because your paying for each credit. Having a difficult boss is one thing, you could still get a lot of your moneys worth before then but something liek Super Turbo new players would likely have struggled to even beat the first CPU fight.
I didnt notice it back then.
Glorious japanese superiority
That last player probably had "Perfect parry Justin Wong with Ken" on their bucket list.
Justin had to face "Moment 37" several times in that video^
"Moment 37"
For those that don't know, in this iteration of Street Fighter, to perfect parry, you had to do it manually at the exact moment. It was ULTRA RARE to see it live and in person.
This is what made Daigo a legend.
