I wish I knew this myself... not only this, but the bios only used the characters' winning poses as well. Even Genesis used the original photos, and Genesis had inferior graphics! I don't get it either.

Probably because Acclaim didn't give as much care to the SNES verison of Mortal Kombat since Nintendo forced them to take all the blood out.

Stop complaining, they switched roles with MK2... SNES had pics, and Genesis didn't... I don't think it eve had BIOS! Just ending words scrolling upwards.

MKII on Genesis is a disgrace. It's one of the worst ports ever, of anything, in the history of video games.

The reason why Genesis could do things like put pics in, and in UMK3 put more stages in was brought to my attention by DreemerNJ, it's because of the way it stores graphics, and the lower quality itself. SNES could have tried downgrading graphics but that would have been silly since MK1 looks so freakin good on SNES to begin with.

Matt

I guess that's the best reason then... with the first game it was such a toss-up, but when II came out, Snes was the clear winner between the two.

I thought SNES was the clear winner as far as graphics with MK1 as well. Genesis had some horrificly hacked up backgrounds. They completely redrew Goro's level with smaller crappier looking bricks, I assume to create a simpler sprite that could be repeated to increase the amount of space left over for other stuff.

If I had to guess they probably realized they'd have to redo all the graphics to fit them into 16 color sprites and decided to go the distance to create reuseable background elements that SNES didn't bother with. (For instance, on SNES Goro's layer was not comprised of a few simple sprites repeated, it was actually the larger, more arcade-like graphics)