No doubt about it, the biggest game on the Antstream service right now is Mortal Kombat.

There’s a lot of games on Antstream, but Mortal Kombat Arcade is the one that’ll get most of the headlines. Rightfully so, especially with the franchise in the midst of a major comeback in a few short weeks.

And while that game is called Mortal Kombat One, serving as something as a reboot, there’s no beating the original really. Is there?

Our weekly Antstream column continues, where we select a retro game of the week from Antstream Arcade and take a closer look at it. Played on an Xbox Series X.

What is this and when did it release?

Come on, do you really need to ask? Arguably second to only Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat is one of the biggest fighters in the world. Only this one comes with blood, guts and gore. This is the arcade original, with the classic characters – Liu Kang, Raiden, Johnny Cage – and pits you against Mirror Matches, Endurance, and the mighty Goro.

Releasing in 1992, it changed the face of fighting forever, leaning harder into the violence and setting a lot of tongues wagging. In fact, it was, in part, responsible for the formation of the ESRB. Can you imagine an industry without them now?

The game put Midway, Tobias and Boon on the map, and is still a fantastic game today as it was back then.

Why this game?

It’s consistently been in the Top 10 games on the service since it launched on Xbox. There’s continuously tournaments and challenges up so it’s a great way for you to look at the wider features of Antstream and it just so happens to be the beta weekend for the brand new Mortal Kombat One this weekend. Seems pretty timely to me?

So tell me about it.

It plays mostly smoothly on Antstream, though there are occasional judders here and there and the graphics look a little washed out. It’s a little worrying that the game does have blips here and there on the service but you can have a great time with the best version of the game.

Mortal Kombat lets you try various different fighters, each with unique styles and difficulty, with Liu Kang’s main moveset literally as easy to pull off as a flick or two of a button.

You compete in a best of 3 rounds but unlike Streetfighter where you just need to drain a health bar to win, in Mortal Kombat once you’ve done that you get the infamous ‘Finish Them’ screen. This is where you can pull off a fatality, which could be as simple as uppercutting an enemy so hard they fall sail into a pit of spikes or rip out someone’s heart as Kano.

Look, it’s Mortal Kombat. If you’ve never played the original, you absolutely must. If you’ve never heard of it, then, well, I really don’t know what you’re doing here.

Each week we spotlight a game on Antstream Arcade, new, old, and everything else in-between.