all games are not created equal

MK3 was more fun to play for me.  You were able to juggle opponents in the air a little bit and there was a simple combo system.   It took what was good in MK2 and expanded upon it.   It also made the game a little more fast paced for me, which made it a lot more fun.

MK2 was a simple fighting game.  There were a couple moves for each character and that simplicity made it pretty fun.  That simplicity is still there in MK3, but along with some nice tweaks for the game.

MK2 is a fun game to pick up for a couple minutes and say stuff like "ah yea, i remember uppercutting them into the acid" or "ooo, blood".  But today, you and a friend can pick up SF2 and actually enjoy it as a game and not as a gimmick. 

I remember when people were waiting for SF2 to come to XBox Live, must have been a couple years ago.  Were there a bunch of people waiting for MK2 to come to XBox Live?

Nope.

Quite frankly, I've never been a big fan of the Mortal Kombat series in general.  It never felt like the games really had depth, and instead relied solely on gimicks.  The first game only succeeded due to the shock value, the second one was better but mainly just added characters, and the third one started adding stupid things like babalities, friendships, animalities, and robots. 
However, In the first few games, all the characters' moves were exactly the same except for the specials.  When the game went 3D and with Deadly Alliance they finally tried to be original with different fighting styles that actually made the characters feel a bit unique, until MK Armageddon which was a huge crapfest with it's "LOOK ALL CHARACTERS!" that shared the same moves all over the place.  Bleck.  And NOW it's "Whoa look DC Characters!".  Puh-leeze!

Street Fighter easily wins cause it's simple but not too simple, the characters are all fun and unique, and most importantly it doesn't rely solely on gimicks.

(The irony of this comparison here is that I wrote this right after playing MK vs DC for about 2 hours.  It was a X-Mas present after all)

I really hate to betray MK like this, but I had to go with Street Fighter. The first few Mortal Kombat games didn't need 'depth' per se , it was meant just to be a fighting game, so all it really needed was arcade mode. Don't get me wrong I really do love story lines and story modes, I tend to get involved with the characters, its how I work, but at that time I really felt like MK didn't need one.

Street Fighter was a great game, it posessed SOME SORT of story mode, even though really it was just characters talking their way into a fight... but that doesn't matter.

The greater difference is it wasn't EASY..in the first few MK games all you really had to do was click 1 button and the other person wouldn't get a chance! Though the fatalities were EXTREMELY hard to figure out on your own, I suppose that was the attempted balance.

WIth Street Fighter however, you really did require more than a little luck, it required a general since of skill, I mean...you could still haduken your way to victory, but the other person still had a chance.