- NA release: 25th November 1996
- PAL release: 4th July 1997
- JP release: N/A
- Developer: Rare
- Publisher: Nintendo
- N64 Magazine Score: 62%
As I mentioned in the Mortal Kombat Trilogy review, fighting games aren’t my kind of thing, so these 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 has 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.
Fine
The initially complex combo linking system starts to wear thin after several weeks of constant hammering.
Marcus Hawkins, N64 Magazine #3
Remake or Remaster?
Its inclusion on Rare Replay is good enough – although it would be nice to have that package ported to more systems.
Official ways to get the game.
This is available via Rare Replay on Xbox One/Series.
Re-releases
2015: Rare Replay
Europe
Japan
North America
N64 Games by Date
1997: Jan, Feb, Mar, Apr, May, Jun, Jul, Aug, Sep, Oct, Nov, Dec
1998: Jan, Feb, Mar, Apr, May, Jun, Jul, Aug, Sep, Oct, Nov, Dec
1999: Jan, Feb, Mar, Apr, May, Jun, Jul, Aug, Sep, Oct, Nov, Dec
2000: Jan, Feb, Mar, Apr, May, Jun, Jul, Aug, Sep, Oct, Nov, Dec
Kind of ironic that you say that this is more of a home console fighting game than MKT; despite the fact that MKT never actually released in arcades, while KI Gold is actually a port/remake of KI2.
The reviews from back in the day were super harsh on KI Gold, and while the game itself isn’t to blame, it does still kind of deserve it because of the marketing surrounding it. The original KI was always hyped up as being made on “Nintendo Ultra 64” hardware and that it was always due to get a perfect home conversion… which of course famously didn’t happen. So it’s not hard to see why people were left disappointed by KI Gold, since it’s a completely different beast compared it its KI2 counterpart.
But considering that they were bringing a hard drive powered arcade game to a 12MB N64 cartridge? There was no way that the arcade visuals could be brought over as-is. The decision to recreate the pre-rendered backgrounds with 3D polygons was an inspired one though and really? They did a great job of capturing KI2’s look and feel, especially when running on original hardware on a CRT. But there’s just no getting around the fact that the flashy OTT presentation of KI2 and it’s FMV powered pre-rendered visuals just couldn’t be done justice on a cartridge, and KI Gold does feel rather cheap in comparison to KI2 as a result.
Also, I believe this is the first ever fighting game to have a practice mode that shows your inputs and has a training mode that actually teaches you the various special moves available. That would’ve been a huge deal back in the day!
I feel that Rare made the best of a bad situation really. But it is a bit annoying to think that if this game came out a little later, they could’ve used a larger cartridge to capture much more of KI2’s original presentation (maybe even being able to keep some of the FMVs intact), but then again, it probably would’ve come out too late to really capitalise on the arcade game’s popularity. Rock and a hard place really.