It’s after school on Friday. Classes are done and you and your buddies are trying to figure out what you’re going to do this weekend. But deep down inside you already know.
Your buddy: Hey. Want to come to my place and play some Smash?
You: Hell yeah. Let’s see if [insert other buddies] are going to come.
You’ve both been practicing all week, in between the monotony of school and chores you play and train and play some more, readying yourself for the weekend to face off in a battle royale for honor and glory. And so you can enjoy some all-around all-out fun.
If you’re from the 90’s like me, then you’ll be familiar with the original Super Smash Bros., a now ancient game circa 1999. You could only play a few characters and there weren’t too many bells and whistles (no online support or single player campaign modes, obviously). Yet the genius of taking all of Nintendo’s favorite characters and putting them in one place for players to do battle using their favorite caught on like wild fire.
I remember spending hours and hours huddled around the screen playing that game with my brothers, each of us vying for victory in the merciless whirlwind of precisely timed attacks and careful positioning. I played Link in the original game, and it must be said that I was quite bad in general both with that character and at the game as a whole.
Then came Super Smash Bros Melee for the Gamecube. The hype around the game was ENORMOUS. People were going crazy in the wait for it to come out, as it had significant improvements over the original. Most importantly, the graphics benefited from the move to the Gamecube, and there was a wider library of characters and levels to choose from. I may have sucked at the original game, but I was quite good at Melee.
At the later end of high school and just after friends and I would get together to talk noise and bust each other’s heads (virtually) for bragging rights. A little later in college, my dorm room used to be the place to go to hone your skills, and the competition between us all was fierce (to say the least).
Team battles were especially fun, because it allowed you to make a team based on each other’s strengths and/or weaknesses (or even engineer your team to take the out your opponents favorite champs).
Yes, Melee was king for quite some time, seven years. It’s like an old friend that I can contact at any time to reminisce about the good old days. But those days can’t last forever, and as the sun began to set on them it rose on Super Smash Bros Brawl.
Brawl is a monster of a game. It has an enormous single player campaign mode, plenty of challenges and side quest-like features, and an absolutely explosive character selection, including characters you wouldn’t expect to see in a Nintendo game like Sonic the Hedgehog and Snake from Metal Gear. I can’t really say, on the whole, that it’s as startling or shocking a leap as Melee was from the original, but the improvements made still make it more than worthwhile game.
When it comes down to it…. Which game would win in this fight? Well, I might be biased, but I’d give the gold to Melee by a hair. It might be the nostalgia factor, or it might be that Brawl wasn’t better by enough considering how long it had been since Melee.
The truth is, it doesn’t matter which Super Smash you prefer. Heck, it doesn’t even matter if you’re good at the game. What really matters are the hours of good memories and fierce competition and entertainment that the games have delivered time after time. And that is what makes these games some of the best ever made.
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