[General Discussion] Street Fighter vs Mortal Kombat

I don't like Mortal Kombat very much. The characters are often cool, the backdrops are interesting, and the voice samples are excellent. The overal style is excellent. The gimicks - and they are gimicks, nothing more - are entertaining at least. Fatalities, and various other -alities are fun, but they don't contribute much the gameplay.

Then there's the balance. Or rather... there the balance is NOT. You all know what I'm talking 'bout. It's not that the character's movesets aren't intersting, it's that there's not enough thought given to the tactical side of the game. As was said already in this thread, there's just not enough variation, and not enough depth.

Street Fighter is a very complex game. You can win with any character against a player or against the computer, if you have the skills. No character has an outrageous advantage, most of the time. Obviously that's the ideal, but not all the games in the series have been perfect.

What differentates the two? In SFII and sucessors, pretty much every move you can make has a countermove. Given sufficient skill, and an infinite timelimit, two players could potentially fight for hours. That rarely happens of course, because one player will have a flash of brilliance that the other didn't anticipate, and break through his defences before long.

I'm not a great player of either franchise. I'm just average, or even below. I felt I should state that before anyone gets the idea that I'm any kind of a master of the genre. I've seen them play, and I've been schooled by them a time or two, but I'm no master myself.

Jam it back in, in the dark.