obviously many users here are too young to have played snes... they definitely missed a lot! there was much less hate...

Street Fighter II.

The other Street Fighter titles felt as though they lost something more than they gained something. Though I do like the speed of SF2: Turbo.

Killer Instinct is easily second on this list. That game was doing stuff many people didn't even know the SNES could do.

Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story wasn't too bad. I liked it better than most of the Mortal Kombat games.

what especially did killer instinct on snes do especially? animate pre-rendered sprites?

Killer Instinct easily over Street fighter in every way.

Well, Rare had already proven they could do that a year prior with DCK but the high quality soundtrack, mulit-sample voice work, inclusion of Mode 7 effects and parallax scrolling plus other effects all running at a good frame rate and with a very complex gameplay structure (remember the SNES CPU was actually very slow) just took the package as a whole (not so much the individual parts) to a level the SNES wasn't expected to be able to achieve.

1. Street Fighter 2 Turbo
2. Mortal Kombat 2

Honorable mentions:

TMNT Tournament Fighters
Clayfighters TE
Art of Fighting
Fatal Fury
Samuari Shodown

Killer Instinct was really Underrated IMO. I played mostly on N64 and was the most fighter i played on the system (after SSB of course) so i played the original also. Its good especially music was freaking awesome. I loved (i dont remember names) the werewolf guy and "wolverine guy". LOL

this was not meant as an offense - i didn't know it was on snes and watched a youtube-movie which left me quite unimpressed. the sprites didn't have smooth animations -they went from standing to kicking in one frame so it seemed. parallax-scrolling was also present in sf2. perhaps the video was just bad ;) perhaps i am no longer used to snes-graphics-level after all these years.  but thanks for the explanation!

Yeah, you can't really look back on something (especially given the compression that YouTube puts on videos) and analyze with the same perspective as what one would have seen at the time.

Killer Instinct back at the time was very ground breaking, and made Street Fighter games seem very outdated. During that time period, Rare just seemed so ahead of its time. Rare effectively created a 24-bit generation without leaving 16-bit hardware. It's the only time this sort of thing really happened in videogame history.