Super Smash Brothers Brawl

This is the game I stayed up until midnight for. So far I’ve got to believe it was worth it.

To begin with I’ve been playing these games from back in the days of tri-pronged controllers. Man, I miss N64. Super Smash Brothers has always been a game franchise that was interesting to me. As an adolescent it was all that I could hope for. Pikachu electrocuting Samus. Mario throwing fireballs in 64 bit glory at Nintendo characters he would otherwise never encounter, it’s a beautiful thing.

The next installment, Super Smash Brothers Melee, diversified the number of situations that could be created. Now Donkey Kong could through Gannon around like a rag doll. The graphics also increased spectacularly over the old choppy N64 graphics. Melee culminated into one of, if not the, best games for Gamecube. This isn’t saying a whole lot, as anyone who own a Gamecube can attest to, but I’ve got to believe that this game would have thrived no matter the console it was placed on.

So, now we reach spectacle, the main event, the show stopper, the purpose of this article: Super Smash Brothers Brawl. While many of the characters remain unchanged I find this game to be up to the standards of its predecessors and some of the new features actually add a greater degree of strategy. The most prominent addition to previous installments is online play. While I’ve actually yet to engage in this myself, I’ve heard that it works with relative ease and precision. Some of the more complex features, like the ability to face random opponents, aren’t functioning at optimum capacity yet, the ability to “Brawl” friends is up and running, which is more important to me. The next thing that I found to be new, aside from characters, was the brokenness that is the final smash. While that last statement makes me feel substantially more dorky I it’s incredibly true. Connecting with these uber attacks pretty much ensures a KO.

Now, here comes my one gripe with the series. The stupidity that is clone characters. As of the release of Super Smash Brothers Brawl, there are now three characters that play the same, with only minimal changes. These characters are Fox, Falco, and Wolf. I would like to pretend that this is the only time it occurs but sadly it isn’t. Gannon and Captain have the exact same move set with the only difference being that Gannon is slower but stronger. Way too often this happens. I’m glad that most of the new characters don’t fall into this category, but even the few that do stick in my teeth and prevent this game from attaining the glory its capable of.

To conclude I should say that Super Smash Brothers Brawl is easily the best fighting game on the Wii console. It is easy to pick up and like any good game it takes seconds to learn but much longer to master. Even with the new control scheme SSBB plays excellently.

P.S. - On an unrelated side note, smacking your knee on a safe absolutely sucks, absolutely.