When the original Super Smash Bros. was released for the N64 I dismissed it as simply Nintendo's attempt to cash in on the fighting game craze that was sweeping the video game community at the time. The television commercials, in which individuals wearing oversized costumes of Nintendo's iconic characters pounded the ever-loving crap out of each other to The Turtles' "Happy Together", didn't exactly scream "classy". When I eventually played it, I enjoyed the Nintendo series crossover aspect and simple fighting mechanics for what they were worth, then quickly let the game slip from my mind like a spouse's birthday. Years later when I learned Super Smash Bros. Melee was in development I wasn't particularly interested. That is, until I saw it. Then I was very, very interested.

   You see, Nintendo had discovered the true potential of the Smash Bros. series. Smash Bros. Melee was essentially a love letter to Nintendo fans who had been with the company since the early days of the NES, and it was absolutely packed with Nintendo fanservice. The roster had exploded from a lean twelve to a beefy twenty six, and the newcomers ranged from classics like Mario's arch-nemesis Bowser, to the utterly obscure, like Mr. Game & Watch, the previously unnamed protagonist of many of the games for Nintendo's ancient, LCD-game/clock combination devices, the (you guessed it!) Game & Watches. Along with the standard arcade-style mode and versus mode, Melee also featured an Adventure mode, where players traversed several side-scrolling levels which harkened back to classic Nintendo scenarios, such as a mazelike temple from The Legend of Zelda, and a timed escape from an exploding planet just like at the end of almost every Metroid game. But the juiciest bit of fanservice was the inclusion of trophies. Each of the trophies featured a character or item from Nintendo history. They could be collected in a variety of ways and then viewed in a gallery where players could read brief summaries of their histories. There were hundreds of them, and much like Pokemon, you had to catch them all. For Nintendo fans who had stuck with the company through all its ups and downs, the trophies were like a magical trip back through childhood.

   As Super Smash Bros. Melee was the best selling Gamecube game by a wide margin, Nintendo knew what it needed to do with a sequel...

Balls to the wall Brawl!

   Anyone who has played either of the two previous Smash Bros. will be immediately comfortable with the basic gameplay in Brawl. Up to four characters are dropped into an arena modeled after a particular Nintendo location, at which point they all begin wailing on each other in an attempt to knock one another off the sides, top, or bottom of the screen. As a character is struck his or her percentage counter, located at the bottom of the screen, begins to accumulate. The higher the percentage the more easily that character is knocked around. At 15% a character will hold his ground like a hardened warrior, but at say, 150%, even the lightest of taps will send him flying across the screen.

   Brawl also retains the series' standard two-button fighting scheme, with one button for standard melee attacks, and the other for special attacks. Depending on the direction the analog stick is aimed when either of those buttons is pressed, a character will perform a variety of different moves. It's a wonderfully flexible little system that's very approachable for newcomers, but deep enough that veterans will always find room to hone their techniques. And any of you who were worried about how the series' control would transfer to the unique Wii setup should be stripped naked and brutally paddled for your lack of faith in Nintendo (although I suppose after Phantom Hourglass you could be forgiven). Players can use the lone Wiimote, the Wiimote with nunchuk attachment, a classic controller, or a Gamecube controller. On top of that, the buttons on all of these can be mapped however you like, so I really can't imagine everyone not finding some controller setup that is very comfortable.

   As with the two previous iterations of the series, there are the same types of infinitely customizable 'versus' matches, but this time they can also be played online. Translation: you now no longer have to endure the stink of your friends' unwashed bodies that accompanies gaming in the same room with them! Huzzah! Of course there's no voice chat, and Nintendo still insists on the use of friend codes, so if you're looking for a game where you can be assailed with racial slurs and homophobic remarks by lonely fifteen-year-olds, you'll have to look elsewhere.

Nintendo-style justice

Nintendo knows what you did last summer. And probably the twenty summers before that.

   But, as I've said already, as enjoyable as Brawl is simply as a fighting game, the true joy of it comes from the fanservice. And what fanservice there is! For one, the roster has again been expanded to include long-time holdouts like Wario and King Dedede, as well as a number of older faces from the Nintendo character stable, like Pitt, hero of the old NES Metroid sibling, Kid Icarus, or the bizarre Gyromite peripheral, R.O.B. the robot. If you've never ever heard of some these games and characters, don't feel bad because 1) almost no one else has heard of them either and 2) of those who have, most have long gone senile. Much more exciting, then, is the fact that for the first time non-Nintendo characters that you've actually heard of have been included. As I'm sure you know by now, both Konami's Solid Snake, and one time Nintendo archrival Sonic the Hedgehog are both playable in Brawl. This opens up some very interesting possibilities that I'll get into later, but suffice to say both characters have appropriate fighting styles and fit in well with the rest of the cast.

   While the number of playable characters hasn't increased by as much as it did in Melee, Nintendo has tried to throw fans of obscure characters a bit of a bone in the form of Assist Trophies. Assist Trophies are items that drop randomly throughout matches and, much like Pokeballs, can be broken open to release a character that will usually aid his liberator. However, unlike Pokeballs, Assist Trophies summon a random character from the entire Nintendo universe. These include Punch-Out protagonist Little Mac, Sin & Punishment hero Saki, Star Fox villain Andross, as well as walking joke Waluigi. My guess is that this is serving as a sort of a testing ground for characters that may or may not be featured in future Smash Bros. games depending on fan reactions. Regardless, seeing Little Mac uppercut Pikachu off the screen is pretty sweet.

R.O.B.'s of mass destruction

   The other big thing Nintendo has been pushing with Brawl is the new adventure mode, called Subspace Emissary. In Emissary, Smash Bros. has been given a story for the first time. Apparently a strange army of shadowy creatures and R.O.B. robots, led by the Nintendo villains and a mysterious robed figure, have highjacked Metaknight's ship and begun detonating large bombs across the lands of the Nintendo characters. The player controls the Nintendo heroes as they adventure across a series of simple platformer levels attempting to repel the invaders and discover the reason they are being attacked, all the while joining forces with or battling against the other playable characters. Despite the fact that the game isn't quite designed to be played as a platformer, overall it's a fun little romp, and there are some distinctly hilarious moments when various Nintendo characters from drastically disparate series meet. Seeing Samus and Pikachu charging down a corridor blasting the crap out of everything in site, and watching Capt. Falcon defend a quivering Capt. Olimar from a giant R.O.B. are two memories I will treasure forever. Of course, once I found out the story was written by Final Fantasy VII scenario writer, Mr. Kazushige "I Write About Whiney Pretty Boys" Nojima, I began to wonder if I was actually supposed to have been taking the whole thing seriously. Boy, I sure hope not.

Super Smash Bros.: helpfully reminding you that your interests haven't changed since you were six

   And of course no Smash Bros. fanservice feast would be complete without the beloved trophies. Once again there are several hundred to collect either via meeting specific conditions, picking them up in Subspace Emissary, or using your accumulated coins to shoot them in a weird little Missile Command-esque shooting game. I was a little disappointed, though, to find that most of the trophies seem aimed at drumming up interest for current Nintendo titles or Specific Virtual console releases. What made this particularly apparent was the inclusion of stickers. Stickers are little slips of paper accumulated in much the same manner as trophies, and they feature various images of pretty much every character ever featured in a Nintendo game. Looking over the stickers makes one acutely aware of just how little of their massive catalog Nintendo is really drawing from for these Smash Bros. games. Unfortunately, stickers don't come with any kind of historical descriptors. You just get an image and a name, which is kind of lame. But in the long run it's a minor quibble. The other neat thing about stickers is that they actually have a practical use. You can attach them to the bases of your character trophies in Subspace Emissary to grant your team additional abilities and boost their stats. Or you can copy them down onto brightly colored pieces of construction paper, cut them out, and glue them onto your forehead with crazy glue to let your mother know that you are busy playing video games and will be skipping dinner. Either way.

   Perhaps the most exciting piece of fanservice, though, is the soundtrack. Brawl's soundtrack is a monster, with well over two hundred tracks taken from dozens of different Nintendo titles. Many of them have been remixed or given an orchestral twist by famous game music composers, and it's a real treat to hear them blaring out in the heat of battle. It's especially exciting to hear the upgrades of tunes from lesser-known series, like Kid Icarus or Mother/Earthbound, which haven't gotten the remix/orchestral treatment as often as some of Nintendo's more prominent series. However, at the start of the game you don't have access to the entire soundtrack, and in order to accumulate more tunes you have to pick up dropped CDs in essentially the same manner as trophies and stickers. Trust me, it's worth it.

A future full of possibilities

   Even with all that said, the best thing about Super Smash Bros. Brawl may be the exciting possibilities it hints at. With two third-party characters on the roster the door is now open for Super Smash Bros. to become a much more inclusive series. Considering that the Nintendo Wii and the DS are currently the hottest console and handheld respectively, a lot more companies are going to want to get buddy-buddy with Nintendo. And what better way is there to make friends then by lending Nintendo some of your more popular characters? I would be willing to bet that the next Smash Bros. will have even more non-Nintendo faces, and it's not hard to imagine that down the line the series will go from being a retrospective of Nintendo to a retrospective of all video gaming. Picture a game where the likes of Mario, Pac-Man, Sonic, Simon Belmont, Ryu Hayabusa, Sephiroth, Mega Man, and Bonk all duke it out against dynamic backdrops pulled from The Legend of Zelda, Castlevania, Final Fantasy, Ninja Gaiden, and more. Now that's something to get excited about. Hey! Both hands on the keyboard!

       ... Mike Zeller