[Playing…] Killer Instinct (1994)

Today I'm going to talk about a game that came out of nowhere and that shook the foundations of a very popular genre in the 90s, fighting.

After the success of Street Fighter II, many Japanese companies sought their piece of the pie and gained some fans who had already tired of the Capcom saga and its updates. American companies tried to do the same, but they were not as successful (only Mortal Kombat gained enough fame and it was due to the controversy it unleashed).

In 1994 it arrived in arcades Killer Instinct, a western fighting game developed by Rare, which featured rendered graphics, videos, rotating stages, zooming and many other graphical tricks that made the rest of the games look completely obsolete. Killer Instinct It was so gross in this aspect that it was the first arcade game to have an extra hard drive.

Playably Killer Instinct It focused on combos (which were already common at that time but had not yet fully caught on). Of It would be of little use to you to know how to do a character's special attacks if you were not able to learn a combo to damage the rival for longer. The inclusion of a combo system could have posed a problem in combat (one player hitting non-stop under the watchful eye of the other) and to avoid that it was thought to include Combo Breakers (specific combinations that could break a combo if executed at the right time). The Combo Breakers they made the game rock and at the same time they caused players not to take too many risks when making long combos (since it would be easier to break them).

The combos were executed in a simple way: first you execute an initial hit (usually a special attack) and after that more hits are added by pressing the other hit buttons. Other special attacks can be added to the combo to make it longer, in fact there are some special attacks that can only be done within a combo (for example, Spinal can become his rival in the middle of a combo and Jago has a variant of his “shoryuken” with his sword drawn).

When choosing the character, the game showed its Western origin in all its splendor, here There were no characters with manga designs, no teenage boys, no schoolgirls.. Instead we had a boxer, a spy, a ninja, an Indian chief, a dinosaur, an alien, a fire guy, a robot, a werewolf and a skeleton. As the final boss we would have a 2-headed monster armed with a club. All the characters had a fairly varied and numerous number of special attacks and no two characters were similar (no clones).

The incredible soundtrack seasoned the final result and attracted arcade players, so that the game quickly gained a foothold in the United States, where it was inevitably compared to Mortal Kombat because the game included blood and final movements to finish off the rival.

Today, Killer Instinct It remains very fresh, its combos and its technical section do not surprise as before, but they are still very interesting.

Killer Instinct was going to be one of the Ultra 64 launch titles (you know, the Nintendo 64 before they changed the name). But due to the constant delays of the console, it was decided to bring the game to Super Nintendo, a much more limited hardware than the original Arcade or the future 64-bit console.

For a few months it was said that the Killer Instinct SNES was going to suffer cuts (characters, settings...) but when the black cartridge went on sale, nothing of the sort happened. All characters were available and had been preserved even the hidden stages (the dungeon and Sky Stage). Technically the game lost a lot, the characters were smaller, the settings were duller, the in-game videos became static images and details such as Cinder's fiery glow, the frozen air around Glacius or the bats hovering over Sabrewulf disappeared.

Still, the game was technically notable on the SNES and because the gameplay had been maintained, it became considered one of the best fighting games on the console. Como regalo, el juego de SNES traía un CD con unos remixes de la banda sonora del juego.

Si la versión de SNES sufrió recortes técnicos con respecto a la original, imaginaos lo que tuvieron que hacer los trabajadores de Rare para poder trasladar el juego a Game Boy, una consola de 8 bits de 1989.

Debido al bajón técnico de esta versión, los gráficos pasan a un segundo plano y es la jugabilidad la que se lleva el aplauso, pues el juego se mantiene divertido pese a la reducción de botones (de 3 de patada y 3 de puñetazo a solo 1 de cada). La plantilla también sufrió bajas, pues desaparecen Cinder y Riptor. El juego era compatible con el Super Game Boy, ganando así colores y la posibilidad de jugar usando el mando de SNES. Esta versión también tuvo regalo, en este caso una chapa militar con el logo del juego.

Killer Instinct fue el principio de una saga que se cortó abruptamente tras su segunda parte y que regresó recientemente para Xbox One, aunque eso es otra historia.