The game that started it all, unfortunatley didn't live up to its potential.
The graphics weren't the best. It looked kind of blurry and the backgrounds were even blurrier. The screams, yells, grunts, moans, and other noises are very repetitive and get annoying after awhile. The background music pretty good. The character selection is very limited. The difficulty could have been done better. The easiest difficulty can still be a little hard for people that aren't good at fighting games. The AI can also be a little cheap sometimes. The controls aren't the best either and something the game won't be able to detect a combo you put in.
The thing that presented the biggest problem for me was the fighting. It just didn't feel right. It didn't really flow. The punching was very weird and looked just as weird. Sometimes it didn't even look like the punches actually were connecting. It looked more like the guys was punching the air and then the other guy was flinging his head back for no reason. As mentioned before, the AI can be cheap at times. The punches can be done non-stop for about a good 5 seconds and during that time you can't do anything to defend yourself. The blocking sometimes works, but othertimes doesn't, so you'll sustain quite a bit of damage when this happens. The AI also tends to back you into the corner and do the non-stop punch thing and trip you like crazy. A non-stop tripping thing can also be done. Luckily you can do this to the computer as well.
Overall it is a good fighter, but it could have been better as it spawned a whole series. There are better fighters out there and better Mortal Kombats, so unless you want to collect the whole series, there really isn't a point in getting this.