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Monday 29 Sep 2008
Super Smash Bros Melee was the highest selling game worldwide on the GameCube, a bright success on a console that didn’t produce that many top sellers. Not only was it a top seller, it was a fantastic game and even spawned a vibrant tournament scene. So when Nintendo announced Brawl it was met with shouts of joy from many fans of Melee. Having played it now for over 20 hours, and just starting to scratch the surface, I can say with much glee that this is a game that never seems to stop giving.
It’s hard to say what is endlessly fascinating about Nintendo’s only fighter series. On the surface Brawl is a fairly basic 2-D brawler, using only two buttons for attacks (one normal and special), plus a shield and grab button – a far cry from the six button arcade fighters with their five button combos and quarter circles. But pit two people of differing experience with the game against each other and it will reveal its depth quickly – you would think button mashing would work, but it really doesn’t. An example of the depth of the game is found in the way repeated moves decrease in effectiveness, preventing annoying “spamming” of a single move and encouraging variety. What the evidently small move-list does is make the game accessible to more people, as is always Nintendo’s motto. The special fighting mechanic also helps with this – as you do damage to your opponent their health doesn’t decrease, instead their damage increases interminably. The object is not to KO your opponent, but to smash them off the screen, and the higher their damage the further they go flying when you hit them. When a fight starts you’ll usually spend the first while trying to ramp up their damage, and then you’ll start trying to perform smash moves (involving a flick of the stick, a press of the A button, and a holding of both to charge it up) to get them to go flying as far as possible.
With four players on screen this can get crazy quickly (really as soon as the round starts), but that is only where the insanity starts. The characters you play with are more varied than any other fighting game I’ve played, with the likes of Mario, Zelda, Mr Game & Watch and Captain Olimar all joining in the fight, each with distinct special moves. It might be worth mentioning that Smash Bros is essentially fan-service for Nintendo fans. You get to play with your favourite characters from Nintendo universes (and for the first time with some characters from other places), and collect trophies and stickers from just about every Nintendo game. The stages you play on are also themed and most are interactive, such as a Mario Kart stage where karts come by every so often and knock you flying, or the very odd Hanenbow stage which is inspired by Elektroplankton and in which your movements affect the music being played on the Hanenbow. Add to this items that appear around the stages, some which heal you, some which blow up and blast you off the screen, some of which are weapons like swords or a Donkey Kong hammer, and some of which are Poke balls that contain a random Pokémon that attack your enemies. With alternate game mode switches as well (like hyper-damage, tiny characters or huge characters), it’s immediately apparent that the variety in straight multiplayer brawling is astounding.
But multiplayer brawling, although it might be the most thoroughly entertaining part of the game, is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of content. And the single player iceberg is truly massive. Classic mode is back, where you play through 12 stages one after the other, each made up of a fight or a break-the-targets platforming bonus round until you get to fight Master Hand. Beating Master Hands earns you the trophy for the character you played with. Melee’s Adventure mode has been expanded on, or rather, a whole new game has been made from it in the form of the Subspace Emissary, a solid 10 hour adventure. This plot based story attempts to tie all the characters in to a world-saving plot in a fight against some purple goo that comes from Subspace, but it was strangely enough the least interesting bit of the single player game for me.
Ordinarily I’m not an achievement or trophy driven gamer, but Smash Bros somehow makes the rewards so much more worth the effort, so single player for me is mostly a quest to unlock characters, stages and music, and to enlarge my trophy collection. To do this takes a bit of this and a bit of that rather than one long adventure, so I found it preferable. It must be said that the boss fights in the Subspace Emissary were great though, and it is worth playing through it to unlock almost all the playable characters without jumping through too many hoops, as well as the new-to-Smash-Bros Boss Battle Mode, which is simply a sequence of fights against all the bosses in the game. Also in single player are (all holdovers from Melee, although tweaked a bit here and there) Events, which are staged fights, sometimes with unique victory conditions, Break the Targets, which are platforming stages that require you to break the targets, Home Run Contest, wherein you must damage the punch-bag as much as possible and smash as far as you can in the time allowed, and Multi-Man Melee, which pits your character against a bunch of odd-looking enemies in large numbers. Finally, All-Star Mode is back too! Even if trophies are not your thing, just unlocking all the modes is going to take you a long while.
Over and above single player, a lot of the modes can be played co-operatively. In fact, the entire Subspace Emissary can be played in co-op mode. There is a whole set of events set up for co-operative play, and modes like Home Run Contest allow to join up with a friend too. Its mind-boggling how much stuff there is to do here, and how well entertained I’m kept while I’m doing it all. After collecting all but about 7 or 8 of Melee’s 280-odd trophies, I am now well on my way to trophy-hoarding greatness, and savouring every one I collect. With more than double Melee’s count, it’s going to be a while.
I haven’t touched on online play as the connections in South Africa simply do not seem to be lag-free enough to even try it. Smash Bros is a game of fast reflexes and quick, decisive action, so I was always a little skeptical about its suitability for online play, and I’m not sure it has been pulled off as well as many gamers hoped. Having said that, I don’t really care. Smash is so much better played in a room full of people laughing at the crazy things going on on-screen. I’d guess that about sums up the spirit of the game – laughs and random mayhem. But under it all is an incredibly sophisticated fighting system that keeps the game interesting after many, many hours. If ever a game offered value for money, Super Smash Bros Brawl is it.
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Peter |
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