That's actually very helpful, thank you. I like fighting games, but I generally suck at them, so I won't be doing anything competitive. I guess I'm going for MK.

I'd also recommend investing in a fight stick, especially if you end up going for Street Fighter. If you really want to look into it, head over to the SRK forums (forums.shoryuken.com). There are threads for just about every fighting game. You'll be able to find links to videos and a lot of great information regarding characters, strategies, combos, anything. And people there are really helpful- just don't post fighting game questions in the General Discussion forum, lol.

Awesome! I'll look into it.

Just a heads up if you end up visiting SRK. The Mortal Kombat thread may be hidden at first. If it is, you'll have to scroll down to the bottom of the page and click on "all categories" and it will then appear as a subcategory in the Fighting Games forum. There's also a MK centric website at testyourmight.com

Thanks for the heads up.

Yeah man, no problem. Another thing to consider is if you are going to want to play online a lot, or for a long time after you buy the game. As mentioned above by another poster, the netcode for MKX is pretty bad. This won't be an issue if you're just getting it for casual play offline. But if you want to play online you will likely run into frame rate issues and bad lag. Because MKX is such an aggressive game with long combo strings, this will inevitably cause some frustration when you drop combos due to bad netcode. This will not effect your play if you're playing local multiplayer though. NRS has somewhat of a reputation for not supporting their games very long, and the online community becomes thin after a year or two. Capcom, on the other hand, will support their games throughout their entire lifespan and beyond. Seven years later and SFIV is still a very active community online. I think this is largely due to the fact that many of the top fighting game competitors live in Japan, where western developers aren't as popular. The fighting game community generally follows the competition and, if the games are staying relevant, they garner more support from the developers. People bitch about all the iterations of Street Fighter, but each new version has rebalance and introduces new mechanics, and keeps it fresh. Yes, it sucks having to pay for DLC, but it's not really that expensive compared to other DLC for the content you get (*cough, cough Destiny), and it keeps the game relevant from a competition standpoint. That all said, it does look like MKX is doing better than MK9, which was abandoned after a year. It really depends on what you are looking for. If you like fighting games and think you might want to get into them even a small bit more than just casually, you'll want to go with Street Fighter for sure. If you're just looking for some offline fun and want to rip heads off, MK is probably your game.

Well, I'm really getting a fighting game for when friends come over, as shooters are not really the best for that, and I'm not a fan of sports games. It still sucks to hear that about the net code, but hopefully they someday decide to fix it.

The best fighting game for when friends come over is, and forever will be, Smash Bros. :D