One of the creative game modes that was introduced was Chess Kombat, in which the player would select a character to occupy the Leader, Champion, Sorcerer, Shifter, and Grunt roles. MKD featured unique fighting styles for each character. Some of these weapons were really useful (like Scorpion’s sword or Sub-Zero’s kori blade made of ice) and some were just plain cool (Cyrax’s lightsaber, or “pulse blade” as they called it to evade a lawsuit). As an additional wrinkle, each character’s third fighting style would incorporate a weapon. Not being a martial artist myself, I’m not sure how accurately these styles represented the real-world styles they simulated, but to my untrained eye they looked real. The styles are based on different martial arts styles, and have different strengths and weaknesses, making the games much more cerebral than the button-mashing that earlier games in the series could slip into. Characters each have three fighting styles that the player can switch between. MKD continues an innovation first introduced in the previous game, Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance. The fighting engine is intricate and well thought out, there is a good variety of creative game modes compared to past games, and the Konquest story mode is the best of any game that includes one. But I instead settled on Deception, released in 2004 and represents what I feel like is the smoothest and most polished of all the pre-2011 era games. I could’ve gone totally modern and picked the series’ 2011 soft reboot that I recently finished. I could’ve gone in a purely classic direction and picked Mortal Kombat II (1993), the first in the series I ever played.

Picking a favorite to include on this list was actually very difficult, given that there wasn’t room for two.

Its ahead-of-its-time fighting game engine combined with an engaging mythology and storyline have made the games consistently enjoyable for me. Much to my parents’ dismay over the years, I’ve been a big fan of the Mortal Kombat series pretty much ever since it started in 1992.

Mortal kombat chess combat