Killer Instinct

Review

by Anthony Baize

Killer Instinct was the last great hurrah for the Super Nintendo. It was probably the last blockbuster game released before Nintendo began channeling all of its resources to the Nintendo 64. Still, if Killer Instinct is your last big bang, then you must be doing something right, because it is a really great game.

Killer Instinct is like a lot of other fighting games. Diverse characters come together to fight one another in order to achieve some goal. In some games the goal is to simply be the best fighter. In others, fighters fight to defeat a common enemy. In Killer Instinct, the fighters are basically experiments gone bad and they want to take it out on the corporation that made them that way.

The graphics are step down in the SNES version. Still, cramming the entire game into a 16-bit system is fairly amazing. plus, because of the way the SNES control pad is set up, combos are actually easier at home than they are in the arcade. If you have a turbo- enabled controller, some combos (like Cinder's) require nothing more than holding the directional pad left or right and pressing a punch button.

Killer Instinct is not an easy game. Even if you purchase this cartridge for your home SNES system, it will typically take many hours before you can run through the game and defeat Eyedol. This is assuming, of course, that you leave the level set on medium difficulty. The easy setting is almost too easy, and the hard setting, well, it can be very frustrating.

Killer Instinct is a fun game to play. It made combos the "next big thing" in fighting games and made the twilight of the Super Nintendo easier to take. The version of Killer Instinct called Killer Instinct Gold on Nintendo 64 is not too much better than the SNES version. That is saying a lot, especially when you consider that the Nintendo 64 is four times more powerful than the SNES.