(AfroGamers.com) One of my earliest memories of Killer Instinct during my childhood years was seeing my older brother heavily playing the game on The Super Nintendo home console and hearing the word “cccccccombo breaker” really shocked me because I didn’t know that you could actually break multiple combos in a match. My older brother would often play as TJ Combo, a fictional character from the game who was heavily based on real life motion capturer John Parrish.
When it comes asking gamers especially old school gamers like myself what are our favorite fighting video games that we’ve ever played & many of the responses are Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, King Of Fighters, Soul Calibur, Dead Or Alive, Tekken, or Super Smash Brothers, but the sad thing about the favorite fighting video game question is that many gamers almost never mention Killer Instinct in the same breath as the other fighting video games that I previously mentioned which comes to show how severely underappreciated Killer Instinct is.
Other ways in which Killer Instinct The SNES Version is heavily underappreciated by the gaming community because in all my appearances at the local comic conventions over the past few years is when they’re playing old school video games, they often play Mario, Sonic, Zelda, Mortal Kombat, Street Fighter and never even playing the SNES version of Killer Instinct. I even remembered when they did the remake many years ago for XBox One, the game was moderately received by gamers and gaming media, but was unfortunately overshadowed by later fighting video games such as Street Fighter V & Mortal Kombat X which both got way more critical acclaim and attention than The 2013 Killer Instinct remake for Xbox One did.
The SNES version of Killer Instinct was pretty groundbreaking at the time where the fighting video game genre had been dominated by mainly Capcom’s Street Fighter II & Midway’s Mortal Kombat because Killer Instinct had things in it that weren’t in previous fighting video games like Street Fighter II and Mortal Kombat like having two life bars per player, auto-doubles in which players pressed certain buttons to make characters automatically do nearly unbreakable combos, and being the first fighting game to not only the most diverse character roster, but introduced a new mechanic called “combo breakers” which are special defensive moves that can interrupt seemingly unstoppable combos.
To me personally, the SNES version of the Killer Instinct fighting video game is without question one of the greatest fighting video games to have ever been made, but sadly this game doesn’t get the flowers that it deserves from the gaming developers who made the game and from the video gaming community itself which is downright a travesty within itself.
The Conclusion – When it comes to fighting video games, the SNES version of Killer Instinct deserves to be in the conversation amongst the best fighting video games ever.
Staff Writer; Kwame Shakir (aka Joe D.)