Yeah in today's gaming world, the stories for games that are over 10 years old really shouldn't be that important anymore, while the gameplay still evolves here and there to this day, some things change, some things don't, but storyline per game, never changes. Graphics never change. Sounds never change. They are always going to be the same everytime you play someone. Looking at games based completely on the "book by its cover" concept is quite linear. You can only talk about how cool Reptile's head eat fatality is so much before it's devalued to the point of not doing it anymore because it's tattooed into your brain. You can hum the theme musics like I do all the time and amuse yourself. When I think of the word "game" friendly/competitive engagement comes to mind.
Quite simply, people who look at MK as a movie represented by the games will like MK1 and MK2 better for reasons that can easily be debated even by people who like MK3 and UMK3 for the same reasons they like MK2. However, when it comes to gameplay, MK1 and MK2 are prehistoric compared to UMK3, and that cannot be argued. No one plays Street Fighter games because of the sprite quality, backgrounds, or music. They play to win because the game was always about playing it, not looking at it or listening to it. People who play MK games to look at it and listen to it, generally play it by themselves, and get frustrated at the AI. For years I have collected data (in my head) from threads about this stuff, and at arcades, and I shit you not, most people who stand around and watch people play, will never play it themselves. The like MK, but they only like to watch, or play against the CPU.
The real question is, why do people like MK because of artificial reasons over the game itself? Because it in itself was different than anything else of the time. That's what it started out as, it attracted a certain kind of fan, and when they decided to make a game with good gameplay, those fans left, and the fans who never liked MK and MKII because they sucked generally did not give MK3, and much less UMK3 a chance because they expected more of the same. 99% of UMK3 players today played MK and MKII and then gave a shot MK3 because they wanted something better in terms of gameplay. For those who expected and wanted more of the same, they were disappointed because they got more of the same, with different, corny, cartoonish, laughing at themselves while programming it blood and gore.
So you have two types of fans of the same game, there are less who like the game for one reason than the other, and that is the most broken down way of explaining why MKII was more popular.
Matt
