As I mentioned in the Mortal Kombat Trilogy review, fighting games aren’t my kind of thing, so this will be opinions from someone who has no idea about balance or techniques. That said, Killer Instinct Gold feel much more like a home console game than the Mortal Kombat Trilogy, due to a few extra features.

The game has a nice look about it, with detailed sprites (based on really well made 3D models, like Donkey Kong Country) mixed with 3D arenas. It definitely feels like an N64 game and the sprites somehow don’t look too out of place in the maps. I found the gameplay to be fun, even though I’m absolutely useless at it, this feels slightly friendlier to newcomers.

One welcome feature is the practice mode, which lets you browse through all the special moves and select one to pin to the screen. The bottom of the screen shows all your inputs to help remind you which button “FK” is. There are also training modes to go through specific abilities, including a “focused training” mode which adds a timer. It’s something that will likely be good for people who have the capabilities of having skill with these games.

Killer Instinct Gold still have a few oddities. There’s no mode in singleplayer where you can select a specific opponent, and map selection is done via cheat codes. Still, this seems to offer a lot more than Mortal Kombat Trilogy.

When this game came out, I was both very pleased with it, while at the same time being a bit disappointed in it. On the plus side of things, Rare managed to port an (for its time) EXTREMELY advanced arcade fighter, onto home hardware. It wasn't arcade perfect, they had to take out the animated endings and victory screens, had to cut frames of animation from the characters, etc. But it was much closer to the real deal than the (still impressive for the hardware) KI1 port on SNES was. It retained most of what made the arcade KI2 great, and it was still very fun to try to play and master it at home. It's worth noting that the game has some of the highest quality sound/music on the system.

On the negative side of things, in the lead up to this game's release, it was directly implied, practically even stated by Rare, that this game would feature AT LEAST one new character, or perhaps one (or more) returning character from KI1. They had removed Cinder, Riptor, Chief Thunder, and Eyedol from the first game for its sequel, and I know I wasn't alone in being excited by the prospect of the home version including some of those characters again. Unfortunately, upon release, there was ZERO no characters, or really any new content whatsoever, even though it has definitely been talked about by Rare themselves. The only "new", were the 3D polygonal backgrounds, which they tried to play off as somehow being an "improvement" over the arcade, but not only was that BS, the truth was that they HAD to make 3D backgrounds, because the N64 (nor any of its contemporaries at the time) simply couldn't handle the high-level graphics of the arcade backgrounds. They were basically rendered FMV, which is why they looked so amazing. Rare's choices were either to do what they did with KI1 on SNES, and have mostly static renditions of the stages, or do what they did, which was go with ultimately fugly looking polygon stages instead. Personally, I think I would have preferred the SNES approach. It still could have looked good, they could have done DKC style multi-plane effects and things. It's also worth mentioning that this was a VERY early N64 effort by Rare, and I think if they had perhaps put in a bit more time on it, it likely could have turned out even better than it did.

Overall, this IS a pretty good port of KI2, and should be recognized as such. I'd argue its the best fighter on the console, and it's still a ton of fun to play. It's a bit of a mixed bag, but I think ultimately there's more good than bad.

As a personal aside, speaking of Rare letting me down, I was very much hoping they'd make a Killer Instinct 3 in the same style as the first two arcade hits. What they could have accomplished with that same advanced pre-rendered style, just looking even better? It could have been amazing. And, let's say, a Gamecube port probably could have handled it all much better. Alas.

The original/first Killer Instinct is one of my favorite fighting games of all time in its arcade form and I thought the SNES port was fantastic as well. So naturally, my first reaction was that KI Gold could only be the better game being the sequel and given the fact that the game was ported to a more powerful console.

For whatever reason, KI Gold never made an impact on me even though the game shared a lot of similarities with the previous game (such as finishing moves, elaborate combos, etc). I guess this game did not have all the bright new shine that KI had for its time and Gold ended up being more of the same but without the wow factor.

The cast of characters was not as memorable as the original cast and I was also hoping for a better port: it felt like the N64 had more power to provide a closer experience to the arcade machines but for whatever reason it fell short.

Killer Instinct es uno de los mejores juegos de peleas de su generación, su mecánica de combos incita a un gameplay rápido y agresivo que se torna extremadamente competitivo en un abrir y cerrar de ojos. Killer Instinct Gold es un port de la segunda parte de la saga, cuyo origen es el arcade, que salió exclusivamente para la N64 y logró trasladar todas las características de su contraparte original a un cartucho de 64bits, agregando un modo de entrenamiento y alguna que otra mejora audiovisual. Es un complejo juego de peleas que premia la práctica, la habilidad y que requiere de tiempo para poder disfrutarlo como se debe.