super smash bros. brawl (**)
a review of
super smash bros. brawl (dairantou smash brothers x)
a videogame by hal laboratory
published by nintendo
for the nintendo wii
text by tim rogers
score: 
(out of four)
So this is it. This is the big Nintendo Wii game. What’s even coming out for the Nintendo Wii after this? A quick visit to Nintendo.co.jp (which we’ll use because on Nintendo.com it’s impossible for anyone who’s not a robot-scientist to tell the difference between an in-site link and a McDonald’s advertisement) shows us that, of the 19 games on the “upcoming” list, 18 of them have already been released, the only one that hasn’t been already released is just a refitting of Common Sense Training for the Nintendo DS (now with the words “For Everyone” and “In Front of Your TV” shoehorned into the title to admirably allow maximum accessibility and minimum shame for the people the game seeks to fix), one of them is that terrifying Donkey Kong Jet Race game where you have to shake the controller and the nunchuk belligerently just to move, precisely three of them are games that haven’t precisely existed in another form on another platform (and one of those three is packed in when you buy a spare controller), and five of them feature Super Mario as a playable character. We’ve got Mario flying through space, Mario foot-racing against Sonic the Hedgehog, Mario playing soccer (not too much of a stretch given that some (many (most)) European soccer players have even uglier facial hair), Mario as a sheet of paper in a fairyland world where you have to open a god damned menu to “equip” the ability to jump (exagerration (critics loved it, anyway, citing the brilliance of the insipid gameplay mechanic wherein you press a button to rotate the screen into THREE-DEE MODE every time you arrive at an obstacle or puzzle whose solution isn’t immediately, painfully obvious)). It goes without saying that, of all these games in which Mario dons different hats while still donning his signature hat (I am a wordplay master) , the one most looked-forward-to by game-lovers the world over is the one in which Mario is permitted, both by the rules of the game and by simple operation of a game controller, to punch his younger brother (named “Luigi”) in the face. This is also something you can do in real life, unless you don’t have a younger brother (in the interest of the Nintendo fans in the audience, reading this review because this game stars Link from the Zelda series, I’ll explain that the reasons you might not have a younger brother are: you have only older brothers, older sisters, younger sisters, some combination of those three, you are an only child, or your younger brother has died, either by walking in front of a bus or jerking off too much, et cetera), though if, like me, your younger brother’s part time job involves accidentally keeping stampeding antelopes out of Wal-Mart at two in the morning, there’s a danger of your fist being consumed like by acid (or literally by teeth).
The only game on the list of Wii games on the Nintendo.co.jp website that I can actually applaud is Wii Fit, which doesn’t make sense because I like Wii Fit in concept alone; the execution is half-baked, and when you get down to brass tacks, it’s really hardly as much fun as “Billy’s Boot Camp”, which at least features appearances by gyrating, punching, kicking, furiously toned, tight, white-hot black women.
At any rate, here’s Super Smash Bros. Brawl, the biggest little dollop of gruel yet slopped on the lunch tray of gamerkind. The Japanese title is “Smash Brothers X“, which sounds so much cleaner. “Clean” is the biggest compliment-word this game should ever be awarded, and I don’t precisely mean that as an insult: it is undistilled, pure, gelatinous videogame essence, sat on a table to wobble until eternity. It’s the third game in a series that, in the interest of politeness, we’ll say “has two other games”. Both of those games were popular; this game (sequel #2) takes the “more of the same” model plopped out by the last game (sequel #1) to a new extreme, stuffing it full of more playable characters, more collectible items, more gameplay modes, and more Kingdom Hearts-influenced scenario (which in the previous games was set at zero).
Nintendo masterminded a breathtaking PR plan: literally, they managed to halt the mouth-breaths of mouth-breathing near-thirtysomethings the world over at least once a week in the half-year-long run up to the game’s release, all by regularly updating a simple, clean website. Some players — old enough to have fathered children and not noticed — kept steely resolve, vowing to avoid spoilers and not look at the website until after the game was released.
That is to say, it’s Memorial Day, we’re going to go see Mel Gibson in “The Patriot”, wherein any of the main characters could die at any time, and Nintendo has managed to get all of the kids into the minivan with just one no-popcorn warning.
In the end, what’s there to spoil? I’m sure someone could send me a long, psychotic email peppered with subtle allusions to child abuse, and by the end of that email, I’d know one person’s opinion, though I sure as hell wouldn’t understand it. What we have here is a videogame with a time- and sales-proven conceptual play hook, populated by characters that the player has already seen, or else he just plain isn’t interested. If the player has already seen all the characters, what’s to spoil? Well, for one thing, the way these characters, from classic 2D games, are represented in brilliant 3D, and the reason they appear in the “story”.
The “story” mode begins with Mario fighting Kirby in a giant arena that’s floating in space. The player chooses to play as either Mario or Kirby. If you choose Mario, when you win, you’ll see a cut-scene in which Mario punches Kirby so hard he turns into . . . an action figure of Kirby. Mario then walks up and touches the Kirby action figure, which turns back into Kirby. Mario pats Kirby on the back, and the two salute the wildly cheering crowds.
Then sinister stuff starts happening. A giant airship (owned by MetaKnight from the Kirby series, of course) shows up, et cetera et cetera, eventually we’ve got a running adventure in which Nintendo characters interact with one another with no dialogue (spoken or text), fighting for the vaguely defined “good guys” against hordes of “bad guys”; whenever a bad guy (Wario, Bowser, Ganondorf) shows up in a cut-scene, they’re equipped with a big sci-fi gun which, when fired, turns any Nintendo character into an action figure. Someone is trying to collect all of the Nintendo action figures! Who the flaming fuck is it? If you want to know the answer, turn to the last page, and then buy the game.
Three, four, five, six times in the game, there’s a scene where a Big Bad Guy fires a gun at a Helpless Nintendo Character, and a Big Strong Nintendo Character jumps in the way of the beam, is turned into a toy, and is carted off. In all of those occasions, the Helpless Nintendo Character is, less than two seconds later, greeted by a Big-Brother-Like character. Fox McCloud comes down to help Diddy Kong after Donkey Kong is carted off by Wario, for example. (If you consider this a spoiler and are actually angry right now, please don’t visit this website anymore.)
The reason the characters are turning into action figures is simple: because the theme of the first Smash Bros. game was that all of the characters were action figures, and the player was just a kid playing with these action figures. Only the Kingdom Hearts II scenario-writer could say, “What if the action figures in Super Smash Bros. were real?” and then answer the follow-up question (“. . . you’re not fucking serious, are you?”) with “. . . Why wouldn’t I be serious?”
Yes. This is how game scenarios go when you’ve hired the guy who wrote Kingdom Hearts II.
As I slogged through the single-player experience, I looked on the bright side of things more than several times, going so far as to hope that the person collecting all the Nintendo action figures was a fifty-foot tall pimple-faced mama’s boy. Eventually, as story point after story point cascaded down the pipe, as I started to get tired of control quirks (like how hard your character snap-grabs a ledge over and over again when you’re trying to drop down), my optimism and patience wore to nanomachine thinness.
To be fair, Super Smash Bros. isn’t a platform game; it’s a fighting game that is occasionally a hit at parties. Still, that the team felt it crucial to include a twelve-hour-long mode consisting of side-scrolling stages interrupted by the only computer-animated cut-scenes in the game is proof that a lot of work went into this. Which is a shame, because all this mode really does is highlight just how dull the game’s core engine is. Why can’t it control just like Super Mario Bros. 3? Some of these level designs are okay, I guess, though when they start breaking out the Super Princess Peach-like “puzzles” (giving you a key literally two feet in front of a door), the air all around you may or may not become polluted with groans.
Some of the battles are satisfying, I suppose; the little animation when you kill an opponent in the deathmatch mode is fine-tuned to be satisfying, to be your motivation to kill more opponents — as used in single-player mode every time you kill anything, it provides a weird crunchy pace that is, at the very least, a lot better than Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles The Arcade Game or its sequels. Back in the heyday of the multi-player money-sucking beat-em-up, games like The Simpsons or X-men The Arcade Game were brainless, ultimately metaphysically unsatisfying exercises that ended when the pizza arrived at the table. Those games just bled perfectly into the pizza-eating experience. Now, with Smash Bros. X, we have a game where the most satisfying elements feel like breaking the world brick-shitting land-speed record. I’m not even messing with you here: about an hour into the “story” mode, (the timing of the previous night’s dinner might have had something to do with this), I nonchalantly paused the game, went to the toilet, and shat so hard I must have seen a ghost. Just as the eternally iron-pumping black man I sometimes call my “inner monologue” shouted “Hell Yeah Mother Fucker!” Smash Bros. X was beyond the point of making perfect sense.
It was from that point on that I avoided playing the story mode with a second player; with such a random slog, when something satisfying somehow juts in, it becomes hard for either one of you to take credit. Credit — knowing who killed who — is everything in Smash Bros. X, and somehow having two players in the single-player mode somehow makes staying alive feel as cheap and dirty as dying repeatedly and credit-feeding Golden Axe. That shit just isn’t funny.
Well, at least it isn’t “Tekken Force” mode from Tekken 3.
Eventually, the game got pretentious, portentous, and actually kind of rude. There are moments in the run up to the last stage (a hilariously giant Castlevania-like “exploration” maze) where the cut-scenes stop being funny and start feeling vaguely like what pornography must look like in the ecology-drenched world inhabited by the “Captain Planet” kids.
There’s a moment close to the very, very end that turns this game with sudden fierceness into The Anti-Literature. A tear literally escaped my body at the point, though it actually came out my nose, and not my eye (had a car accident as a kid), so I’m still not gay. Faced with a terrifyingly bland, Final Fantasy-like final boss, the Single Greatest and Worst Moment in Videogame History happens. If you’re like me and you always play videogames with one of those sofa-side TV trays hovering over your lap, for God’s sake, if you don’t want tomato soup on the ceiling, exercise caution when approaching the final boss of this game.
I’m actually kind of serious when I say that, if the clusterfucking nonsense of the story mode — headgear-wearing retard cutscenes, twelve hours of sloggy gameplay and all — existed only to increase the hideous size of that exclamation point right before the final boss, then I take back everything I said, and champion this game as worthy of Andy Warhol.
I’m more or less positive, however, that it was all just an accident.
And then, it’s over. The game doesn’t need to put an ending in after what just happened; all we get is a wide-angle shot of all of the playable characters standing on a cliff, facing an orange sunset, the camera zooming back, as an orchestra, live via a cellular phone with really clear reception, belts out a terrifically banal, Final Fantasy-like “credits theme”. There’s a choir, singing in German, or Latin, or one of those languages spoken only by people no one likes, and every once in a while, the screen fades to black to show us title cards informing us of the deep and invigorating (warning: exact opposites used for hyperbole effect) meaning of the words being sung: “He was my friend! He helped me out when I needed help! He was great! He was my hero! And then we stood there, together!”
Remember that scene in Final Fantasy VIII, where the main characters went up into space and were suddenly like “LOL, we’re in space”? And though the game graphics were still jaggy polygons, and though the dialog still existed in boxes, suddenly a real song started playing, with the fruitiest lyrics, and being sung by a girl? Most human beings, if they were living in a college dormitory the first and last time they played that game, got up and did the “rape-prevention” deadbolt. With the ending of Smash Bros. X, a deadbolt doesn’t feel like enough. The feeling that your mother walked into your room (impossibly, because you are now an adult who has his own house and your mother is dead) to find you masturbating with an exuberant grin while staring at a tray of paperclips will not slide off your epidermis until you’ve taken at least six showers.
Of course, this music was composed by Nobuo Uematsu, no doubt submitted to Nintendo in the form of bleeping, blooping humming during a wicked Skype-powered conference call. The secretary took dictation, drawing a doodle of Hello Kitty with a tear on her cheek and a battle-axe on her shoulder, and twenty-five minutes later, we had us a videogame.
I don’t want to be rude — okay, maybe I do, just a little bit. Though yeah, some of this music is pretty bad. A lot of composers just fetishistically recreate the tracks with as much deadly realism as possible: The usually quite gifted (Wild Arms composer) Michiko Naruke turns in a shrill, ear-grating, fanboy-stroking, Nintendo-64-quality medley of the tinny and obnoxious little ocarina songs from The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, set to gurgling little clumps of boring percussion. There’s not a single smile-cracker in the game aside from, bizarrely, (Lunar, Grandia, Radiata Stories composer) Noriyuki Iwadare and (Dawn of Mana, Romancing SaGa: Minstrel Song composer) Kenji Ito’s exceptional, chunky-bass Fire Emblem tracks. I guess that’s because no single piece of Fire Emblem music is as iconic as, say, the Super Mario Bros. theme. Mr. Ito, who is the official torch-bearer for videogame composers as far as Action Button Dot Net is concerned, otherwise flails and cowers behind the sofa in fear of the slaps of gamers with tracks like “Space Armada” from Star Fox. Most of the time, everything is so by-the-book that the only way to even pretend to like this shit is to already love it.
(Mr. Masafumi Takada (Godhand, No More Heroes, killer7) is disqualified from these discussions, for blatantly breaking Nintendo’s “whatever you do, don’t make something awesome” rule.)
Why would you call in a super-team of composers if you don’t want them to make music that reflects their personal style? It’s a little bit puzzling. Seeing as this game makes even Yuzo “Jesus” Koshiro sound like vanilla ice cream at best and potato chips at worst, I’m going to have to stand firm in my belief that all of the composers involved were doing their best to approximate what every other composer was going to sound like, and not succeeding. At worst, the music sounds like the background for a never-ending reel of eight-millimeter footage of ritualistically defecating Teletubbies; at best, the music sounds like something far too good for the ugly, noisy cacophony of cackles, heckles, squeals, screams, bonks, donks, honks, splatters, laser blasts, snuggles, snuffles, smacks, whacks, thwacks, snorks, and hee-hees of the on-screen cartoon orgy. Just as the sound of a circus strongman with a handlebar mustache tearing a wet cabbage in half with his bare hands punctuates a lovingly crafted piece of electronic music, a gong sounds, somewhere high in the sky: here we are, and we are finally old enough to have something worth being ashamed of.
Also, if this game’s Metal Gear Solid stage is any indication, the “Love Theme From Metal Gear Solid 4″ is an almost direct rip-off of the “Pirates of the Caribbean” theme, which, as a person who once touched a violin on accident, is a downright awful piece of classical music.
In the end, Smash Bros. X is what it is. It’s a random, carnival-like brawling “experience” that is probably going to be pretty fun at parties if everyone has played and attained a fair degree of skill at various old 2D side-scrolling action games. It’s just — nope! — not quite enough for me. (Disclaimer: “Me” is a person who enjoys videogames and other forms of entertainment.)
For years, I’ve been telling people I wanted a big-scale “fighting” game that played exactly like the Castlevania games on the Gameboy Advance (or DS, I guess): I wanted snappy controls, I wanted quick fighting, I wanted real, human opponents. More than a dozen times, some jackass snapped his fingers and then pointed directly at my nose and declared “Smash Bros., dude!” I wish I remembered all of those guys’ names because I would tell each and every one of them, personally, to fuck themselves. Instead, I’m going to use this paragraph to voice my concern about the game’s control scheme. Namely, the only way you’re going to be able to use a D-pad to move your character is if you play the game with just the Wiimote, which means that you have to press the A button with the side of your thumb and the hook-like pseudo-trigger B button with your middle finger to do a hard attack. Not too keen on that, thanks! I would rather use the Classic Controller’s brilliant D-pad (which I believe is the best D-pad of all time (I’ve verified this by playing through Landstalker with it)) to control my character. You can’t do this, however; though the game’s official website is smug enough to brag about the various controller-configuring menus, saying “We’ve thought of everything!” they actually haven’t thought of everything, because everything would mean I could use the D-pad to move.
Some people might say that the game doesn’t let you control movement with the D-pad because the analog stick is an integral part of the game design: you have to tap the analog stick hard in a specific direction as you press an attack button. I say that Virtua Fighter does a damn good job of having “short tap” and “long tap” special moves with just a digital joystick, and the execution time of said moves never feels longer than instantaneous. I want to double-tap that delicious, apple-pie-like, deep d-pad to run; I want to long-tap and short-tap to do smash attacks. My friends in the “Videogame Industry” tell me this is impossible in a game like Smash Bros. X, which is already taking huge risks and breaking tons of Nintendo’s internal rules (one of those rules being that a Nintendo-made game should neither have nor need a controller-input option menu), and that we should be glad we got as much as we did get, and that we should be doubly glad that this was all done in the interest of inviting The Casual Gamer to participate in the heated, old-school brawling action. Whatever. The default setting of the Classic Controller’s D-pad is left and right for “horizontal taunt”, up for “upward taunt”, and down for “downward taunt”. If Nintendo’s idea of inviting casual gamers into a hardcore game involves letting them do something useless in multiple directions, then I’d hate to see how they’re going to get hardcore gamers playing casual games, when that time comes. Are they going to invent overly complicated, customizable control schemes for a VCR-programming mini-game in Animal Crossing, where the A button operates the right index finger? On the other hand, a videogame that lets me customize my controls (thankfully, yes, I could make jumping button-activated and cancel the “up = jump” input) obviously assumes I know a thing or two about games, so why the shit does it constantly put a little indicator over the character I’m controlling, even in the single-player mode — and only if I’m using a customized control scheme? I mean, why not put a “1P” indicator above someone who’s too dumb to make their own custom control scheme? It’s weird, and thinking about it actually kind of makes me lonely, like that screen on MySpace.com that keeps telling me “You must be someone’s friend to make comments about them”. Oh.
Seriously, not a single person whose hands I’ve plopped a Classic Controller into has not, immediately at the start of a match, pressed the D-pad to try to move, and instead initiated one taunt after another, after another, after another. I don’t know, though; maybe they were just really cocky professional players.
Also, for the record, I’ve never completed an actual match of Smash Bros. X online. Most of my opponents either drop out during the 60-second waiting period before matches start. Sometimes matches do indeed start, during which there’s no chat, of course, under the Friend Code Regime, so all players can do to communicate their sexual preferences or racial hate to opponents is name themselves CAUCASIAN PENIS and then stand there and not attack, demonstrating that their username is what they want to take; and the preset chat messages are ham-handed Japanese Uncle Jokes like “I think I dropped Ten Yen” (yeah, I’ll drop ten yen . . . in your ass (high five!)). During these matches, usually, people drop out due to lag, which is so bad that actually fighting is like trying to recommend a very long novel to a person in a train speeding outside and far beneath your bedroom window.
After attempting to play Super Mario Bros. 3 using the Classic Controller’s left analog stick instead of the glorious D-pad, I was absolutely shocked at how deliciously sensitive it is for 2D games. Going back to play Smash Bros. was kind of exasperating and floaty after that. All of the little weird things started popping out — like, the core mechanic of the game is that every time you hit someone their meter goes up, right? If it’s higher than 100%, then they’ll fly off the edge of the stage when hit with a strong attack. As they’re flying off, they can use a lovingly fetishistic mid-air jump plus a crispily implemented upward-thrusting special attack to grab on to the edge of the stage and get back in the game. This works really well, on the stages comprised of floating islands. The game goes ahead and vomits on its own gimmick’s shoes, though, with the multiple stages wherein the “edge” is just an edge of the screen. All it takes to die on these stages is to be knocked off, and out of sight. All of the friends I’ve played this game with have just shrugged and said “That’s how it was in some of the stages of Super Smash Bros. Melee, dude!” Oh? I suppose, in Nintendo’s case, that makes it alright to just do over and over again. Oh, well. Sometimes, though, you’ll be playing the game, and I swear that your damage meter will be at less than 80%, and some bastard like Ice Climber Kid will come up and whomp you with a hammer and you’ll just fly out into the background and “die”. What the hell is up with that? After a certain amount of single-player practice, I was getting to like the regular rules — try to get someone to fall off the edge, line up a brilliant smash attack to hit them just after they do their save move and before they touch the ground (so as to leave them helplessly flying, since they can only do the save once per flight). And then I start playing against people, and I’m on an FPS-worthy Killing Spree, and I’m barely getting touched, and then the game just throws me off into the distance after a random hit. What the hell is up with that? It’s like the inverse of Mario Party, where any player without any stars at the end of the game gets a star for achieving the worthwhile task of not getting any stars. It’s tacky and weird, and in a “hardcore” action game like this, it feels vaguely like Snickers suddenly announcing that their wrappers have always been edible — and delicious!
The high point of this game for me was, of course, being able to play as Sonic the Hedgehog, who I loved for his sharpness as a child and hated for his looseness as a man-child. In an age where every new game from Sonic Team controls like a stick of butter held vertical on a hot frying pan, Smash Bros. X emerges by default as the Best Game Starring Sonic the Hedgehog Since the Mega Drive Days. When I play as him, I’m so used to seeing him slide around helplessly in some of the most poorly-designed videogame stages of all time that I forget all my complaints about the controls and game design and allow myself to enjoy Sonic the Hedgehog not sucking.
I guess, by then, the game has its claws deep into my muscle fibers; I’m fantasizing, occasionally, about crafting custom stages for Sonic to play around in, and then sharing them with my friends. All the while, I wish that I could make my own characters, too. The recent-Smash Bros.-like Jump Superstars proved that Jump manga characters actually are cooler-looking than Nintendo characters. It’s enough to make you wonder.
It’s said that Katamari Damacy was originally plotted out with just spheres and cubes — roll this sphere around, sticking cubes and spheres to it, and it gets bigger. The personality of the game came afterward, and it kind of shows. I don’t even mean any offense by that: Katamari Damacy is a game of spectacularly skillful design. It’s fun, it’s amazingly well-conceived and executed, and the graphic design choices go above and beyond the call of duty to actually wedge some catharsis into the whole ordeal. The thing is, I’ve jerked myself into such a tizzy over Sonic the Hedgehog that it’s now very difficult for me to separate the concept of Smash Bros. from the execution. Did Hal Laboratory get an idea for an inverse fighting game (small characters and big stages instead of big characters and small stages) with a clever little play hook (knock the players off the edge, keep them from getting back up), or did Nintendo ask them to make a party-action game starring Nintendo characters, and this was the first thing they came up with? (*1)
Would this game be worth any time at all with characters I didn’t recognize? Is this game just another Mario Golf, pulling Mario-addicted gamers to a completely different genre? From a Mario Golf perspective, it’s a hell of a success, though as the videogame for the Nintendo Wii that’s sold a million copies in the shortest amount of time — and, fatalistically, without even using any of the Wii’s selling points — it’s kind of embarrassing. Where the previous game let you discover figurines of characters during solo play, this game’s “big innovation” as regards the “collection” gimmick is to let the player also discover stickers, which they can then freely — and in 3D! — place on the figures they’ve collected via the museum mode. That Super Smash Bros. Brawl inspires people to do this sort of thing is a resounding testament to the fact that it might, perhaps, not be a terrible videogame. On paper, however, these things look scary, as though “videogames made me do it” is becoming as equally viable a defense for kleptomania as for multiple homicide. I mean, it’s got a Nintendogs . . . thing in it, wherein a polygonal puppy bounds up and paws at the screen. The thing is, the puppies in Nintendogs are crude computer-animated compromises for actual puppies; they’re not “Nintendo characters” per se. Putting them on a more mechanically capable machine than the Nintendo DS doesn’t make you exclaim, “Yay! A Puppy!” so much as it makes you scratch your head, identify subliminally that it’s a reference to Nintendogs, which is, yes, a videogame compromise for people who want a puppy and are just too lazy to get a puppy, and wonder why they didn’t just film an actual puppy, and then realize that if they did film an actual puppy, it would basically shatter the game’s vibe.
Or would it? The question you have to ask, at the end, is one of integrity: is there anything that can shatter this game’s vibe? Really? It might just be crafted from the ground up in the interest of all-encompassing immunity. We’ve already got a realistic human Solid Snake brandishing a realistic rocket launcher or sniper rifle against ultra-unrealistic humans like Ness from Mother 2, armed with a baseball bat, and a cartoon dinosaur named Yoshi, on a stage based on the Nintendo DS Picto-Chat application, where an unseen hand draws scratchy, sketchy lines that function as platforms. As a person who recently finished watching the entire series of “The Sopranos” and was amazed by the craft and sheer artistry of the finale, I feel vaguely insulted even thinking about how, in a world where BioShock (a game I, for the record, don’t even really like) exists, this tittering sack of fetish fragments called Super Smash Bros. Brawl is the game that just about everyone else who tangentially shares this hobby is looking forward to above anything else. God help us all when the walls start caving in.
(**Note: The score of this game, which is “two stars (out of four)” has been decided with much scientific thought. The rampant and somewhat embarrassing Nintendo fetishism discussed at forensic lengths in this review is responsible for the game being docked six stars, bringing it to a negative two stars (out of four) on our scale; the fact that I have played this game for several hours every day since its release with a gaggle of dudes who just don’t give a fuck about Luigi’s canonical significance, and I have not yet gotten bored of it, adds four stars to the score, bringing it up to a positive two stars (out of four). So there you have it.)
*1) My good friend Theodore Troops has pointed me to this article, which answers the chicken-egg question of Smash Bros.’ origin. It seems like they did have a concept before they shoehorned in the Nintendo characters. Not wholly unbelievable at all!
*2) Also, if you’re going to comment saying that I should try playing this game “as a fighting game” — well, I really don’t know why I didn’t mention that aspect! I guess it slipped my mind. I’ve been playing it with my “co-workers” in the Action Button Dot Net Laboratories for about an hour a day for three weeks now, and the fact that I haven’t quit playing it yet is the whole reason the game gets two stars. I swear, with a control scheme tailor-made to my needs (basically, I need it to feel just like Super Mario Bros. 3), this game would literally be a fourteen out of ten on the Action Button Dot Net zero- to four-star scale. Fetishism and all. Make of that what you will.
(*readers with a keen eye will notice that our rating system, which judges games on a scale of zero stars to four, with half-stars in between, can actually be interpreted to mean we’re rating games on a scale of one to nine. we leave the “ten” off so that only games branded “game of the year” will be regarded as “tens”. also, we leave the ten off so that two stars (5 out of 9) is the dead center of our scale, with as many ranking notches above it as below it. just to kind of stupidify what i just said (and to partly deflect hate mail), i’m going to paste this review into another review in about five minutes, and give it a four-star rating, add a different final sentence, and maybe cut a couple parts out or change a couple phrasings. make of that what you will. don’t worry, though: this is the real review.)
February 20th, 2008 at 1142
As a review of Brawl’s ideology, this write-up is a great success. I am forewarned about the Subspace Emissary game mode (but don’t worry, my deadbolt is already fastened from when I played through Super Mario Galaxy). But as a review of Brawl, the fighting game, well, you haven’t played that game yet. Try giving it a shot sometime. The computer will put up a decent fight at the highest difficulties.
“Is there anything that can shatter this game’s vibe?” Perhaps the vibe isn’t as much about the Nintendo fetishism as it is pastiche. The healing items are photos of fruit, drawings of cake, and even 3D modeled peanuts.
February 20th, 2008 at 1251
i think the updated version of the angel island theme is pretty sharp.
it’s just sad that this game will overshadow the REAL franchise character party game….sega superstars tennis.
beat (from jet set radio) playing ulala (from space channel 5) on the outrun court……hmmm.
February 20th, 2008 at 1434
magnificent review.
minor detail: don’t see a need to alter the control scheme in SSBB. if you like the game, you will adapt fast to the scheme, unless you are slow or senile.
I didn’t have the opportunity/need to develop the rape-prevencion-deadbolt, but in highschool I developed a powerful “geekness-self-brainwashing-tsunami”, an useful move to get some life.
one thing that always have fascinated me, is how Nintendo stubbornly continues to curse his games with one of the most repulsive, ugly, annoying, and anticool party of characters ever created. sadly they didn’t had a good character designer back in the super Mario bros days, and miyamoto, a gameplay expert, but very bad designer, cursed the videogame world for ever, with his hideous cast of toons.
Nintendo games will be miles better, if they had better characters.
in specific:
Mario: the fauna of the toad kingdom, is ok inside his kingdom. please don’t bring these animals for others things. make some miracle happens, that transform the toads people into more natural people. is time to replace Mario with Mario jr, the son of Mario. edgier and cooler, fan of punk and skate. also make the girls sexy, or you will end up planting some massive sexual disorder associated with toons, into humanity.
Zelda cast, and fire emblem cast: what hideous clothes. please be creative. antique style clothing can be made cool.
starfox cast: my god, remove from the world this disaster.
donkey kong cast: cant stand these grotesque creatures. they almos make me cry when they appear in games.
back to ssbb, don’t like this game. the gameplay has too much fat. i would instead play http://www.soldat.pl.
February 20th, 2008 at 1624
God help us all when a wii game can earn more than two and a half stars out of tim, that shit will be balls to the wall crazy
February 20th, 2008 at 1726
As usual, pretty good review.
February 20th, 2008 at 1924
dmauro: i’m glad you brought that up in the first comment, and before i could receive more than a dozen hateful emails telling me that i wouldn’t be giving this game two stars if i’d “ever played it the way it’s meant to be played, moron!”
i have added an addendum to the text, which consists of me somewhat hilariously realizing that i didn’t mention the game as a fighting game even once throughout the text.
in short, what i said was that i’ve been playing the game with friends basically an hour or two a day, sometimes against my own will, and the simple fact that i haven’t started telling them to fuck themselves is the chief reason that i gave this game two stars instead of a half a star. it’s got a lot of sweet chunkiness to it!
i just can’t get over my hangups about the control scheme and the thick and frothy ridiculous nintendo pastiche. hence it being the focus of the review.
also, if you played through super mario galaxy, i hope your deadbolt is still done, that you have plenty of food in there, that your front door has a mail slot just big enough for an envelope containing a DVD, and that amazon gave you free same-day shipping on super smash bros., because there’s probably a whole crowd of mouth-breathing, butcher-knife-wielding psychos out there.
iwontusemyname:
uhh, sega superstars tennis actually doesn’t do much for me. sega already has a gloriously nice real tennis game — virtua tennis — which i’m both surprised and not surprised at all to see gaining steadily in popularity in arcades around here. i’m kind of glad that, at last, tennis games can be worthy of tournament play in an arcade. virtua tennis has always kinda been fine-tuned enough that it can be appreciated by these virtua fighter fanatics; it’s nice to see said fanatics finally jumping on the chance. maybe wii fit has something to do with it . . . ????????
walkskull: yeah. nintendo characters . . . really aren’t very good cartoon characters. i wrote up a kind of shameful PhD thesis-esque ramble once about how mickey mouse, in being hideous, cursed the would-be “artists” of the world with a sense of self-pity and irony that they never recovered from. look at all the goofy shit that was born in the name of “art” after the advent of mickey mouse. people throwing buckets of paints at walls, putting a brush in an elephant’s snout. john cage’s “4:33″, et cetera. no offense to all that stuff, because i find it groovy sometimes, though really. i’d like to think that mickey mouse is indirectly very responsible for noise-rock, too, though that’d be a tough one to prove. i’m sure i could make shit up.
one thing i’ve always loved about sonic the hedgehog is his absolute perfect oneness with the world he occupies. if mario’s a first-wave cartoon character in the mickey mouse tradition, sonic’s a felix-the-cat-styled second-wave cartoon character. he’s an animal with an attitude, and above all that, he’s just sparkling graphic design. putting him and mario in a duel to the death in smash bros., there’s only one side the aesthetes in the audience can root for.
StompStomp:
i gave resident evil 4: wii edition three stars, though!
InterestingJesus:
hello! i almost deleted your comment as “spam” because spams are, you know, getting really clever these days. they say things like “nice blog! i’m going to keep reading!” and sometimes they even say “moron!” i wonder what the world is, really, coming to when spam comments on blogs start flaming, because it makes them look more like the work of real people than plain old compliments.
i didn’t delete your comment because, if it were a spam, the username would very likely be something along the lines of “cheap meds inexpensive antibiotics” and the subject line would very likely be something along the lines of “cheap meds inexpensive antibiotics” and your comment would most likely be followed by something along the lines of “cheap meds inexpensive antibiotics”.
February 20th, 2008 at 1950
I kind of wish you’d gone on longer about the state of the Wii, but there’s not very much worth saying, is there.
February 20th, 2008 at 1959
lol
February 20th, 2008 at 2001
wrong, some thomas guy gave REmake 3 stars
you gave Biohazard wii edition 2 and a half
http://www.actionbutton.net/?p=196
February 20th, 2008 at 2037
this is the first review that made me laugh. out loud. at work.
thanks.
sadly, the novelty of smash bros. melee wore off in college the precise moment that we sobered up.
my wii and ps3 are hardly justified in their existence.
I did download N+ this morning on XBLA, and do, at least initially, enjoy its brutal, unforgiving nature.
Lost Odyssey is a time capsule.
You’ll never catch me admit to Professor Layton. ever.
anyway, thanks for the laugh. and the warning.
February 20th, 2008 at 2042
Even with some of my otherwise very aesthetically sensible friends, everyone’s taste seems largely dominated by fetish. Some of my friends don’t get how I can dislike 28 Weeks Later or Pirates of the Caribbean when, come on, they have zombies and pirates in them! Or how I can actually not be looking forward to whatever bullshit they put Sam Jackson in this week or why I don’t want to see every single movie that has ugly Brits in upturned collars.
I’ll admit that I’ve got a thing for beatemup games and even enjoy the lesser games in the genre, but it’s more because of their tendency to make really strange design choices, like the last boss in Crime Fighters who just lays on the ground begging for mercy while you and three other players curb stomp him, or the pure, Darwinian nihilism of the last boss fight in the arcade version of Double Dragon.
February 20th, 2008 at 2050
Also, that’s hilarious, blaming Mickey Mouse for the strangeness of 20th Century western art. You may be right. Kind of a mirror image to Tezuka’s influence in Japan.
February 20th, 2008 at 2122
StompStomp:
look at you, with your encyclopedic knowledge of my website!
thanks for being such a devoted fan! ;-D
February 20th, 2008 at 2221
melee wasn’t and isn’t about “novelty” for me. that had already worn off after i’d digested smash 64, the purchase of which was brought on by my being glued to a screen in the video game section of a store showing footage of donkey kong and fox and mario and link running alongside one another. melee was about its staggering amount of variables and the community i and my friends built up when playing together. i’ve never played another multiplayer game that gave me as much as ssbm did.
i will probably enjoy the hell out of brawl. i am anticipating a more stuffed melee, and – yes.
was unaware of that kingdom hearts 2 thing, though. yeesh.
February 20th, 2008 at 2256
yeah — as stated above, i subtract six stars from this game for the fetishism and the story; i add two stars for the overall snap and crunch of playing it against dudes who just don’t give a fuck about what characters are what.
it’s a heck of a little game!
i’m getting more hate mail than even i expected. i really want people to know that, two stars though it may be, this is a game i’ve been playing literally every day with friend-dudes for almost a month and i’m still not bored!
February 20th, 2008 at 2335
i actually really enjoy virtua tennis. extremely addictive. although i’m not REALLY excited about the idea of them turning the game into a franchise orgy because it sells…it’s still good to hear that jet set radio is still getting some action. (on another note…a jet set radio movie done right would be a warriors-style favorite for years and years…)
i was having a conversation with someone about why nintendo hasn’t created a nintendo-themed amusement park ala legoland. maybe it’s because the characters are so hideous and bland? mid 90′s fanboys be dammned, but nintendo could benefit from purchasing sega and all of it’s “cool” character designs. at least the next barrel of party/sports/whatever games would be a little more interesting.
February 20th, 2008 at 2339
oh man. in my post above, i meant to conjecture that wii sports has something to do with the virtua tennis popularity.
also, i once wrote the first twenty-two pages of a JET SET RADIO movie script (the main character was a girl named “BLUE”); it was hilariously terrible. i was planning to leak it on insertcredit and pretend it was real, though i never got around to it.
the movie would have been, like, tokyo-porn.
February 21st, 2008 at 113
was there a spray can painting sex scene set to cibo matto?
February 21st, 2008 at 144
oh, god, if i hadn’t been so bored with it from the very beginning i would have probably put something like that in there.
the pages i wrote were so intentionally terrible, so perfectly horrible that i realized any gamer reading them would probably have approved of the whole thing, and called it the best videogame movie of all time. in other words, it didn’t have the right amount of hate-inspiring verbose bullshit in it, so it just wasn’t fit for the internet, as far as i was concerned.
February 21st, 2008 at 236
i know i probably would’ve. i think i would’ve just been so happy to see some humanistic puppet (probably that nerdy guy tagging along with bruce willis in die hard 4) putting on the beat costume and skating around tokyo-to (or la-las angeles or whatever would’ve been approved by the studio.)
i read about the american movie that’s being based on the dragonball series…and even though i’m horrified by the idea of it, i’m still going to see it. and thousands and thousands of others are in the same place i’m at. we want to pay money to see how our childhood memories are going to be fucked up. that’s what game-to-movie expectations are like now. which is kind of a shame, considering there are lots of games just begging for a movie. i even have a top ten. (but that’s being saved for when i get my own snobbish hipster video game website…).
although to be fair…the super mario bros movie is epic on so many different levels.
i just found out today that they are planning a monopoly movie. what the shit?
February 21st, 2008 at 1133
“i have added an addendum to the text, which consists of me somewhat hilariously realizing that i didn’t mention the game as a fighting game even once throughout the text.”
That actually makes sense, because the Smash Brothers games aren’t fighting games.
February 21st, 2008 at 1235
The statement that smash isn’t a fighting game series is retarded. Even gg isuka gets lumped into fighting games and that thing is a piece of shit.
Tim to get that info I clicked on the review archive, it has both the title and the review score, further showing my encyclopedic knowledge of actionbutton.net
The writing here is really good and refreshing because I’m past the point of needing reviews to tell me what I want to play and find enjoyable. The problem with all the articles are the arbitrary ratings stuck on, most of the writing on this site isn’t even a review so much as it is game themed editorials, which I would rather read than any review on the internet.
February 21st, 2008 at 1301
Make yourself a favor and play the game using the GameCube controller. Oh, and try to contact Kai and play some matches with him and his friends and tell me later that this game isn’t fast:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dHNEZnX-6M8
I’m not a native speaker so please don’t complain about my grammar; you’re not Shakespeare or De Quincey after all…
February 21st, 2008 at 1505
pretty sure the games are, indeed, fighters, mashuren!
i guess the percentages and pits are too radical of a concept beyond the realm of life bars?
February 21st, 2008 at 1852
i’ve received about 90 hate mails on this article since going to sleep last night. man, people are weird! i replied to one at random, and i figure that’s good enough. it comes from a boy whose email address is “iamthesamster@mac.com” — “i am the samster”. and guess what his first name is — sam! oh man! what a coincidence.
his mail:
“On Feb 22, 2008, at 2:16 AM, Sam Schultz wrote:
You are just completely awful. Your article on Smash Bros. is also completely awful. I’m not saying I disagree with what you said. I didn’t understand your aggressively retarded rambling enough to discern much of your opinion besides, “I’d let Mario 3 fuck me in the asshole.” I guess what I mean to say is: learn to fucking write reviews. I’d give your review just 2 out of 4 stars, but my vegan burrito is calling me from the microwave so I don’t have time. See what I did there! Haw Haw! Now go suck Mario’s dick while Castlevania lubes up for some extreme Tim butt-fucking.”
And my reply:
“Wow! You’re not very smart!
Congratulations on that!
Also, vegan burritos are delicious! Don’t blame me because you’ve never eaten one!
You should try reading my Tekken 6 review — I mention paprika and okra in that one, precisely for people like you.
Don’t worry, someday, someone with absolutely no place to turn is going to look past your scarred face, look past the fact that your solution for acne involves scraping pimples off en masse with a disposable razor, and they’re going to marry you, and then eventually file for divorce when you’re thrown in prison for animal cruelty! It’s going to suck to be that dog you hang up on a tree in the back yard and throw beer bottles at, and it’s gonna suck to be that suicidal woman who settles for you, though someone — most likely you — is going to have about eleven seconds of enjoyment!
In closing, thanks for reading–
–and remember, You Are The Samster!”
Man, I wish I could think of something especially hilarious to say.
StompStomp:
There’s a search feature!?!?!?!?!
!!!!!
lol
Also, if I took off the scores, then I wouldn’t get so many hate mails anymore. What fun would that be?
I mean, I’m not going to lie — I write most of what I write on the internet because sometimes people’s emails are hilarious; I haven’t actually laughed at one in, like, three years, now, though I’m not going to stop believing.
Actually, there was that mail I got in 2006 that started with a guy saying “You are an embarrassment to every white person living in Japan. I’ve been living here for ten years, and I can’t make heads or tails of the languages. It’s time to face the facts: you don’t speak Japanese, and you never will.” Me and my friend were quoting that for months, though I ultimately detected that the guy wasn’t joking.
February 21st, 2008 at 1932
wait…tim….
you’re white?
NO WAI
February 21st, 2008 at 1939
maybe
maybe not
February 21st, 2008 at 1940
but seriously though, i’m hard pressed to call this a fighting game.
it’s more like…cartoon battle royale wrestling.
are wrestling games considered fighting games? or are they sports games? does it matter?
i think you underestimated putting your tekken review right next to the your review where you chastise the most hyped and “untouchable” video entertainment software release of the year starring characters that are so famous, they are tattooed on the skin of thousands…if not more.
February 21st, 2008 at 1951
well if anything, nintendo is forgiven for fetishizing ugly characters that some people actually like.
who on this disgusting earth has a tattoo of king from tekken? seriously?
February 21st, 2008 at 1954
the same people who bought the ps2 version of soul calibur 2 specifically for heihachi.
or possibly people who really love pandas and kangaroos.
February 21st, 2008 at 2112
This is the most fatuous thing I’ve ever read.
February 21st, 2008 at 2125
jagermonster: you know, when i look over the list of comments from first-time commenters, it doesn’t tell me which post the comments are for.
i was really hoping your comment concerned my tekken 6 review, because that is the most fatuous thing i’ve ever read
also, my hypno-therapist has trained me to consider any word that begins in “fat” to be a compliment steeped in humble jealousy, so if that’s not the effect you were going for — sucks to be you!
February 21st, 2008 at 2330
Great review!
Yeah, I never how Nintendo always forces you to use certain control scheme. I hated SSBM with its analog pad or Zelda with the touch screen. To choose different control schemes isn’t that hard to implement, or is it?
The problem with the analog pad for me was always when to press the action button (like right and A at the same time): do I press it when my stick is all the way to the end or half-way through? Or maybe when it’s at 3/4 of the way? If I need to learn that, then I rather not bother with the game…
February 22nd, 2008 at 044
Yeah. As I think I say in the review, Virtua Fighter 5 handles directional “pressure” without analog control — just tap and press a button simultaneously, or tap-hold and press the button without letting go of the stick. They even have moves where you press a direction, let go of the joystick, and then press the attack button.
These moves never take longer than “instantaneous”!
February 22nd, 2008 at 1050
I thought I was the only one who felt really embarrassed whenever I saw a “Smash Bros Brawl Spoilers!!!!!” thread on a forum; imagining the sort of people posting to have kotaku accounts and khaki shorts.
February 22nd, 2008 at 1237
What you’re wrong about, Tim, is that the game should control exactly like Mario 3. In fact, it should control like Super Metroid. Maybe this is because I worship Gumpei Yokoi, but man, I try to play Samus and it’s like all the characters have magnets on their feet and every surface in the game is oiled. I guess that’s sort of actually appropriate for somebody wearing power armor but that doesn’t make it a joy to play.
What I’m really trying to say is that control in Smash Brothers games never made any sense to me. Perhaps I am a terrible person, but I have the highest score in Maryland for Through the Fire and the Flames in Audiosurf so I doubt it.
February 22nd, 2008 at 1250
honestly?…you call this a review? i doubt you even played the game. this is more of an opinion. i didn’t even seemed like you played the fighting portion of the game. as for the SSE portion. bullshit. this is singlehandedly going to be one of the best games ever. you are obviously biased towards nintendo. so grow up…
February 22nd, 2008 at 1325
lolwut.
EPIC FAILURE REVIEW.
February 22nd, 2008 at 1404
Someone sicced the wolves on you:
http://smashboards.com/showthread.php?t=146424
They wouldn’t have even bothered with the review without the star rating since you don’t even talk about the fighting game aspect of it until your footnote, but the quantitative review has doomed you.
“his review will never stand a chance against the big dogs like IGN, Gamespot, Kotaku, etc.”
lol 2 tru. But the winning quote is this one:
“also, what the hell kinda scale is out of 4 stars??? thats stupid and you can never accurately rate a game on a scale like that, you really need 5 or something at the very least.”
Since he says “accurately” instead of “precisely” I can only imagine that he thinks Brawl should be two stars out of five.
108, you are much better at commenting on your reviews than actually writing the reviews. You should just put up the however many stars review with no text, wait for some comments, and then go from there. Don’t post your email address, that way all hate mail will have to go in the comments and be public.
February 22nd, 2008 at 1455
[...] (permalink) of 70 I found a rather amusing review. press the ACTION BUTTON!! He makes a few good points. Good for a laugh. Take a look. =) You just got a gator to the [...]
February 22nd, 2008 at 1458
The reason you can’t use the Dpad is because the moves you perform are based on the pressure you apply to the analog. For example, press A while only slightly holding it forward and you’ll do a different move. Stuff like that.
Mildly interesting review, may have to read the rest of your content.
February 22nd, 2008 at 1504
The reason you can’t use the Dpad is because the moves you perform are directly dependant on the pressure on hte analog. For example, if you press A while slightly holding the stick forwards you get a different attack than what you would have gotten had you done a smash. Stuff like that, and walking requires an analog.
Great review. Am considering reading the rest of your content.
February 22nd, 2008 at 1509
Thanks for these excellent reviews. Maybe I´m one of the few that share the point of view that this game not a fighting game, but a flawed Mario 3-like platformer (and every platform game after Mario 3 is flawed). In fact, all the appeal it may have comes from this fact: reminding us the unfullfilled promise of a Mario Bros. 3 sequel, and I consider very clever that you have noticed it. Smash Bros. is only a platform game with “enhanced” enemies (sometimes humans): very much like the experience of being a Goomba or Bowser or whatever. That´s all: a fucking costume-whacking party game. Didn´t people noticed that from the first game and it´s commercial? The fetishism does explain itself from these premises: this game is the experience of pretending you´re a fetish (that´s the meaning of the whole “alive trophies” thing). Pretty disgusting to me. I personally hate all these Nintendo games which give you the feeling that their mission was to please the fanboys, not the gamers (which in fact are now all of them). Some guy wrote you were not Thomas de Quincey, but in fact, your digressions kind of remind me of his writing (the Tekken review has more of this), I mean, trying to describe all the experiences that surround the matter instead of being the average moron who think it´s clever “going straight to the point”… I must say this is the only website so far where I have read something actually intelligent about videogames. Fuck IGN, Kotaku or Gamespot, fuck “objectivity”, which is for me blatant cynism and lack of taste, only insane fanboys who actually “collect” reviews or brainless zombies read those things. By the way, I also like the 4-star rating system, since at least it is not tautological like the one-to-ten star system (In this system when you see something rated between 7 or 9, as it usually happens, it´s pointless to read any further) and it actually forces the reviewer to explain himself each time.
February 22nd, 2008 at 1521
[...] (permalink) of 71 I found a rather amusing review. press the ACTION BUTTON!! He makes a few good points. Good for a laugh. Take a look. =) You just got a gator to the [...]
February 22nd, 2008 at 1824
Hey Tim,
I have been an avid reader of your column in Games™ Magazine for some time now.
However, I did not know that you also wrote on a games review website. It was only when browsing the Smashboards forum that I discovered your site via a link (you know the one, from the comment above).
Though I am a big fan of the Smash Bros. series and personally disagree with many of the statements made in your review of Brawl, I do however understand where you are coming from and respect your difference of opinion.
But I must say, I would have to personally give you half a star for this site of yours purely for the white text on black background.
It makes my eyes sick.
I have no alternative but to invert my display settings, which I really shouldn’t have to do.
I know this may sound like a Fan Boy attack but actually I have enjoyed reading the review and have every intention of frequenting this place more often, starting with the review of Portal.
February 22nd, 2008 at 1852
Haha, an interactive comments thread review could be really interesting.
February 22nd, 2008 at 2132
“his review will never stand a chance against the big dogs like IGN, Gamespot, Kotaku, etc.”
This is choice. Stand a chance? At what? Is there a BEST REVIEW contest I don’t know about? Will there be an epic battle between the Forces of Those Who Love SSBM and the Forces of Those Who Don’t? It’s like he imagines that something that some dude writes on IGN will totally come over to ActionButton’s house and beat up what some other dude wrote.
February 22nd, 2008 at 2138
Man — I went to sleep at night, and I woke up to find 14 comments from new commenters.
Guy above — who says my review isn’t even a review, that it’s “more of an opinion”: shine the fuck on, man. You will feel “it” some day.
I’m glad to see that we gained some new rock hard followers, though, at least. I actually got a lot of nice emails.
Erostratus, leeray666, Libomasu — stick around. We’re having a Revolution later!
ALSO: IF YOU LIKE SUPER SMASH BROS. BRAWL, YOU CAN READ THIS REVIEW INSTEAD
February 22nd, 2008 at 2140
This is almost making me sick.
“this “writer” is not a staff writer for any publication therefore his authority to rate video games is one that i or any of you would have”
Even more hilarious is that he is actually wrong!
Also, about six people have said that a four star rating system is stupid and that you need at least five stars – even XPlay has five stars. As though like, not even the number of stars a game gets, but the number of potential stars objectively determines the quality of a review system. It’s completely bizarre. I guess this is an extension of Gamerscore culture, where your opinion on the worthiness of a game is substantially based on how many achievement points you can squeeze out of it.
I don’t know why I’m acting surprised. This post isn’t even interesting, because it’s so obvious. I’m just so flabbergasted that I have to say something.
February 22nd, 2008 at 2144
“his favorite game was superman for the n64. or if not he is a gay xbox360/ps3 fanboy who hates nintendo. his thoughts was not scientific at all.”
No. They was not.
I’m going to stop now, seriously.
February 22nd, 2008 at 2144
I am so much better than a “staff writer” at a gaming magazine: that is to say, I am not a staff writer at a videogame magazine!
. . . or am I!?
February 22nd, 2008 at 2148
oh, cubalibre, if you could, go ahead and keep giving me a digest account of that smash bros. boards thread.
i mean, it sounds so hilarious that i don’t even want to look at it!
February 22nd, 2008 at 2156
Dude I’m done with it, I just can’t any more.
While you’re here though you might want to clean up all these duplicate comments. All these kids coming here from SMASH DOT JP will think your site is unprofessional, or something.
February 22nd, 2008 at 2205
No no, I have to do this one.
Sky_Maro
[insert picture of terrible fanservice CG neo-Samus here]
Location: 1337 Nerd Smasher Ave.
“I want to place my hands around his throat tightly and shake vigorously.”
Yes. Yes.
February 22nd, 2008 at 2211
LOL helloworld 4chan FTW!! anonymous does not forgive!!
LOL!!
February 22nd, 2008 at 2218
FROM THE SMASH BOARDS FORUMS:
“Err… so, you guys know he basically says at the end that he really likes it, right? Check the second footnote: he’s been playing it every day for the last three weeks, and if the controls worked the way he wanted them to he’d have given it fourteen out of ten. It’s just his style to pretend to be pissy, and I thought it was a hilarious article that made some very good points about how SSE is a terrible game mode (it is; I played through all of it two weeks ago, co-op) and how the controls are a bit… um… I can’t sum it up in a word, but I know what he means when he says that if it controlled like a platformer, it would feel better.”
Dubyah8hr writes, “Will some one please tell me that guy was joking… if not I have lost all faith in humanity…”
PrettyGoodYear writes, “He probably did it to attract traffic. I didn’t even check the site.
Honestly, tell me why this guys matters? Huh? Huh?
…
That’s what I thought. Ring me up when you have a review that matters (good luck finding one)” – Keep it in mind!
Hokkaido brings up, “Much too long for me to complete, but of the sections that I did read out, his observations really didn’t have a lot of credibility. Saying something like “MGS4 Love Theme sounds too much like Pirates of the Carribean Theme and that sucks” wouldn’t qualify one as a good reviewer >___>.”
“who visits this looser site lol that guy thinks he works for a good company and needs to be shot for complete stupidity.”
“I HONESTLY don’t think that guy even played the game. He just likes being a biased-dickhead and making stuff up for “controversy”…Guess why none of the comments disagree with him…go on now, guess. BECAUSE THEY ARE ALL IDIOTS (OR) HE DELETES THE ONES LIKE THAT…both of those options are sad, but true, don’t give this guy the time of day…or hack his site and put gay porn or s/t on it. Because when you can give OBVIOUSLY GREAT games terrible scores, you must not be a video game fan…I wouldn’t trust Jack Thompson to write a review for any game…just like I wouldn’t trust this guy to be able to pull a blue marble out of a bag of blue marbles…he would somehow find a way to pull a red one because he hates blue.
(/end fence of text)”
February 22nd, 2008 at 2236
tim rogers is the lester bangs of videogames in reverse.
February 22nd, 2008 at 2247
if you’re insinuating that lester bangs wasn’t trying to be funny, then you might be on to something!
February 22nd, 2008 at 2341
Man, Tim, I just wanted to post real quick to say I’ve never played a Smash Bros. game in my life though I read this entire review to completion and loved every second of it. Very entertaining! The Tekken 6 review was good too, however I laughed out loud more while reading this one. Please don’t ever change and be sure to keep posting your hilarious responses to hate mail.
February 23rd, 2008 at 044
Tim, please keep us posted if you get any more awesome hate mail like that ‘quotable’ one you mentioned above.
God, I feel so much more secure in my life knowing that those people are out there, doing their job.
February 23rd, 2008 at 045
i don’t have any problems with melee’s control. nor do my friends. we’re super-special people. but, uh – i find it kind of impossible to go back to the original, which, comparatively, feels like slow motion, no matter who you are.
tim, how do you feel about mr. game and watch?
February 23rd, 2008 at 456
haha. people are silly.
February 23rd, 2008 at 722
“like I wouldn’t trust this guy to be able to pull a blue marble out of a bag of blue marbles”
Is this from something? It’s kind of poetic. Maybe I can improve it.
Like, I wouldn’t trust this guy to be able to pull a blue marble out of a bag of marbles…he would somehow find a way to pull a red one because he hates blue.
“to pull a red one”
Sorry, I’m in my own little world. This review has inspired me to not play the game and to spoil the last boss for myself immediately. Wish me luck!
February 23rd, 2008 at 832
i never thought bangs was supposed to be funny. i wasn’t trying to be funny with the comment, either.
February 23rd, 2008 at 835
well, that clears everything up then!
. . .
. . . . . .
. . . . . . . . .
:-/
February 23rd, 2008 at 927
Man, I was actually looking forward to the Subspace Emmissary (sp).
Then again, I heard from everywhere else that it was from the scenario writer of Final Fantasy VII… and didn’t make the connection that he was also responsible for Kingdom Hearts (II). VERY CUNNING.
I was also looking forward to the controls somehow being different from Melee, but it looks like that isn’t the case either.
At least there’s no wave-dashing anymore…
As far as its merits as a fighting game go…
there
are
three
Fox clones
now…
[...]
And I’ll still buy it, AND LIKE IT, because I own a Wii.
February 23rd, 2008 at 1019
well, bangs less the drugs and alcohol…which means you might just live long enough to “make it.” unless you already have and this pseudonym of yours is just smoke and mirrors.
really, i meant it as a compliment. the “in reverse” refers to the fact that bangs decided he had had enough of writing reviews and decided to start writing about his life and longform fiction. you did the same thing, just vice versa.
February 23rd, 2008 at 1046
C’on Erostratus: Think about Borges. It’s true that going straight to the point is foolish, but you have to do it well. If not you end up with some fucking surrealism garbage. It’s OK that games are now popular culture, but that doesn’t mean that you have to use damn Mel Gibson in a metaphor or analogy.
About the game being a flawed platformer… well you are confusing a format with a genre. The format of the one player campaign is bad, everybody knows that; the format of the multiplayer (non cop-op) and of the classic one player campaign is good, so good in fact, that the reviewer spent several hours playing it. So good that you have to be good at the game to enjoy it, so fucking good that there’s a World Championship where pros can finish you off in a mater of seconds even if you have less than 20% of damage. It’s like Starcraft: in this site they complain about that you have to micro-management everything instead of focus on more important task: well dudes, there’s some people who can. That’s the point of the game, if you suck at it, there’s no more to do for you but to keep playing Street Fighter: big guys & small stages.
I’m tired of that all that fetishism thing. Games are fucking games, no people for you to analyse as if you where Freud. What are the implications of Super Mario Bros? What is the meaning of the cryptic “Your princess is in another castle”? I don’t fucking know, I just want to play the game: that’s what Gears of War is so great. If you start complaining about cannibalism in Super Mario Brothers games we’re all fucked up. There’s room for clever observations, just don’t threat games like people: that’s freak me out.
Oh, and about the controller… I already told you to use the gamecube’s. Look at the things that people can do with that purple thing in YouTube and be ashamed. You only complain about one controller configuration, try all and then come and give us your opinion.
“In the end, Smash Bros. X is what it is. It’s a random, carnival-like brawling “experience” that is probably going to be pretty fun at parties if everyone has played and attained a fair degree of skill at various old 2D side-scrolling action games. It’s just — nope! — not quite enough for me. (Disclaimer: “Me” is a person who enjoys videogames and other forms of entertainment.)”
Ha! I’ll change it for you to have sense: “In the end, Smash Bros. X is what it is. It’s a brawling experience that you can’t enjoy unless you’re good at the game, there’ll be tournaments and people making money with his playing skills and at the same time millions of people will enjoy it. I suck at this game, maybe is because I failed to see it like what it is: a fighting game with some game modes presented in a bad format. (Disclaimer: “I” is a person who enjoys playing the worst part of a game and complaining it about later so I’ll get thousands of hate mails: that’s the kind of entertainment I like
)
I like your style, but please be more like De Quincey and less like a fusion of Mel Gibson (when it’s bender) and Captain Planet (when sucks at videogames).
February 23rd, 2008 at 1436
speaking as someone who enjoys accomplishing fuck all in giant / coin mode with very high pokeball rates on big blue, i’m sure non-Pro people can have a smashing good time (lol!!!) with melee and, in due time, brawl, provided they’re not so hooked up to, or concerned with working their way towards, the Serious Business of tournament behavior. really, the chaos, the causes and effects of dozens of things going on at once, the futility of certain actions at certain times, all the ironic deaths – that’s pretty great! i have the most fun in melee when i and my friends are not trying. we’re dicking around and being stupid and losing miserably and it’s lovely.
February 23rd, 2008 at 1622
tim why wont you post my godhand review.
February 23rd, 2008 at 1626
NO, THIS.
I’m of the opinion that this game kind of sucks, and I’m glad lots of people will read Tim’s reviews and think he sucks instead.
February 23rd, 2008 at 1628
Also, many of these comments read like seriously great comment spam.
February 23rd, 2008 at 1633
Also, the score is incorrect.
Tim, you claim that you reduced the score by six stars, resulting in a score of negative two, which was ameliorated to a positive two thanks to a four star boost due to the joy of multiplayer or something.
HOWEVER, the policy of actionbutton.net is to give a game a default score not of FOUR stars, but of ONE star (“If your game impresses us enough to receive a score higher than one star, congratulations.”); therefore, the proper score would be one star minus six stars plus four stars, or NEGATIVE ONE STAR.
February 23rd, 2008 at 1823
Hey! I haven’t read all these comments, because, seriously.
Anyway, regarding the control scheme: I think I have a way to make the d-pad usable, make it more Mario 3, AND avoid the potential delay associated with double-tapping arrows.
Have a ‘run’ button. If you hold it, well… you’ll run, but also anything you do is like a smash attack. If you don’t, it’s a soft attack. If you let ‘b’ be run, then ‘a’ can be jump, ‘y’ can be standard attack, ‘x’ can be special attack? I dunno. It might be awkward, but no more so than Super Metroid’s default scheme… which people bitch about also, but who cares. That game rules.
February 23rd, 2008 at 1843
Alright, I guess i’m the center of the road on this review. Because I do hate the fact that this review is totally stupid, not because of the rating, but because of the attitude given in the review, but I do love the fact that at some points, you are indeed right, and you are allowed to give your own opinion. A review is a review, nothing more…(especially on a site that probably only gets hits because of the low review scores) Everyone has their own personal taste… And many people here are idiotic fanboys who will only be pleased if ‘(Insert fanboy’s favorite company product here) is the best’ is in the review. So to those i say ‘Start seeing the other side of the road (and i should stop comparing things to roads) because, shit man, you need an opinion not a biased one. All in all, this review has great writing, keep it up. fanboys should also keep down their complaining.
My personal favorite part is the fact that this is probably Sonic’s best game.
February 23rd, 2008 at 1848
I write this as a reply to snider. Let´s cut with the misquoted and ridiculous literary allusions (although I explained what I meaned with them and you only quoted random writers to talk about “style” or something like that). The fact is simple: the game has something that sucks, and this review explains it pretty well, showing us how Nintendo has fallen in all this Kingdom Hearts-like bullshit while not delivering enough of what a really new and cool gaming experience needs. Period. Fetish or not (and I strongly believe it is), that´s it. I mean, those people who think the more trademark characters and stages and musical remixes (hate the word and the thing itself) you put in a game the closer it comes to perfection are, for me at least, pure fetishists, and we don´t need any over-interpretation to realize this. Overrating what´s not essential: that´s for me fetishism. Think of Final Fantasy. Call it superstition, if you like (after all, originally the word was used to talk about some african idols) It´s like those guys saying: “go with the real review experts to know the unbiased truth”. The game didn´t suck completely, but it kinda sucks, and I´m glad someone tried to explain this. That´s why I consider the score and the review fair. This being told, do not take too seriously this stuff, people, I mean, just because this is truth it don´t means you are not allowed to ignore it and read the other review instead, which is more neutral and is responsible enough to acknowledge Smash Bros. Brawl as the best game ever made.
February 23rd, 2008 at 2311
Its more interesting to offer perspectives, ask questions and inspire deeper thought than it is to read the generic Gamespot review many here for some retarded reason crave.
To be honest all this Nintendo fetishism is really starting to grate like hell, its a horrible collision of memories reformed and fused, the past will always inform the future. In the case of Nintendo that kinda sucks because I cant stand the sight of that stupid fucking plummer any longer.
The aesthetic of Gotham city looks the way it does because Tim Burton was inspired by a film called Metropolis made in the twenties by Germans, which intern had its roots in German expressionism and the darkness of world war one, amongst other memories. The memories of film seem so much more profound, its not the game play thats the problem but the aesthetic. The aesthetic of the video game, and that stupid fucking plummer.
In many ways i resent the fact nintendo did well with the Wii and DS, that stupid fucking plummer is basking in his renaissance just as it was starting to look like the end for that fucker at last. Those amazing gaming experiences made possible with the wii-mote will never materialize with nintendo at the helm because the aesthetic will always be his. Nintendo will ensure only first and second party games can take full advantage of the hardware. With the wii at least.
Its my opinion that any game featuring ‘that’ aesthetic deserves no more than two stars. The Nintendo Toons of 2008 are like polished turds. And you guys just love it.
btw these criticisms of nintendo aesthetics don’t apply to that cat that walks about on the loading screen in some of the wii menus, there should be more of him and less of that Mario
February 23rd, 2008 at 2317
Oh, dear Erostratus. You notice my random quotes, but you failed to view them as what they are: ironic references to the random and vague style of the reviewer. You’re trying, also, to amplify the limits of my affirmation. Let’s just stipulate the exact status controversiae: Smash Bros.
Anyway. You moan about Nintendo not giving us a really new and cool gaming experience… that’s an state of fallacia non causae ut causae. That a game not deliver “new” (gross word, like modernity) gaming experience doesn’t mean that it sucks in any of it’s parts or as a whole. It’s like saying that Superman 64 is a great game because delivers the brand-new experience of Superman flying like a bender. “Period” is a word frequently used to create the illusion of undeniable affirmation, I don’t like it, period. About the gaming experience, well… we’re going to wait the game and play it. My only concern is this all fetishism thing, but Borges said that we have to be aware of the new mythologies so be it. If this site has something is bad motherfuckers reviewers saying how the games they dislike sucks. They do it almost all the time in a good way and I like it.
February 23rd, 2008 at 2318
note: replace “Mario” with “fucking fat fucker”.
…..
February 23rd, 2008 at 2329
“They do it almost all the time in a good way and I like it.”
Tim is a wise and rambling one.
February 24th, 2008 at 117
i can’t believe this has 80 comments.
or…81.
that just means that this original review went up 1 star.
February 24th, 2008 at 532
Man sometimes I guess it must be fun to just absolutely rip the complete shit out of the horrible bags of masturbatory cancer that make our “chosen” “hobby” so fucking stupid.
I’ll still play this game with friends though.
But, I mean, like, why?
February 24th, 2008 at 953
haiku:
hey look new readers
i bet they’ll love the archives
right on panther dude
February 24th, 2008 at 1320
My friends and I sometimes hold an event called “Gay-it-up Sundays”, where we all play Smash Brothers Melee using as many ridiculous rule-sets and pairings as we can think of (even canonizing them sometimes–for fun), and after reading this article, I can think of no better word for it than fetishism.
But really, pitting game franchise against game franchise, and pretending like it’s something important… that’s kind of the core of the game isn’t it? And the single player campaign in Brawl–as awful as it is–seems to complement that idea totally. Believing that the action figures are REAL is what we always did when we were kids anyway…
I propose Smash Brothers Brawl is the precise reason kids still play with G.I. Joes.
February 24th, 2008 at 1328
if the nintendo NES was the death kneel to playing with action figures, then it’s only fitting that a game about pitting popular nintendo characters against each other action figure style is a fitting death kneel to imagination in general.
February 24th, 2008 at 1339
I too have “inner monologue” when I shit, but it plays out more like an episode of Star Trek, with James Doohan screaming into the intercom, alarms blaring…”I’m givin’ ‘er all I’ve got, Captain!”
This was enlightening, though, and containing so much self-referencing and italics that even J.D. Salinger is put to shame.
February 25th, 2008 at 1053
At this point I dread the quality and quantity of fanfiction that will be spawned just by Subspace Emissary.
The whole Smash Bros. phenomenon is as curious as the games themselves. Here we have a metric ton of Nintendo fanservice, and there are people who are more serious about spoilers than they have been for just about every game in the last five years. There has to be a decent explanation about this.
Right?
February 26th, 2008 at 655
Not a bad review for someone who thinks D-Pads are remotely suitable for fighting games. Without sounding like a snobbish cunt (though that seems to be the order of the day here), several of years of martial arts have taught me that all fighting games are complete bullshit.
I love Smash because it tells all the other fighters, which are essentially consecutive ripoffs of eachother since SFII came out, to get off their high horse. So yeah, it doesn’t use a D-Pad because it’s apparantly the first fighting game ever to make the concept of space so important. The health and knockout system isn’t a gimmick, it’s the perfect metaphor. When you knock someone to the ground it should be harder for them to get back up and keep fighting. You can’t ever finish off an opponent with a pissweak single button attack unless you’ve been pounding them for six hours already.
I thought you would’ve picked up on the fact that the game stars Pokémon, balloons and gay racers from the future as further testament to it’s piss-take of the rest of the genre rather than be so cynical over how it’s a different kind of fighting game with Nintendo characters.
February 26th, 2008 at 710
kinto just got my vote!
February 26th, 2008 at 1004
Wow, kinto’s comment is super full of shit. I could see if he was coming from the guitar hero angle against video games where playing a real guitar vs simulating on a plastic one is kind of superior, very few successful games in the fighting genre are simulations.
Capcom isn’t known for it’s great fighting simulators.
Also fighting games are meant to be played on sticks, not dpads, but hey you know those are only for hardcore simulations like Marvel vs Capcom 2 a deadly serious contest of martial arts between men in capes and assholes who shoot fire from their hands.
Spacing in fighting games has been in since karate champ, the footsie meta game is very real and important.
February 26th, 2008 at 1132
After I started Karate, it uh, didn’t affect my opinion of fighting games at all. Maybe I was just too grounded in reality from the start to expect real Karate to be exactly like Street Fighter II. Likewise, I don’t think DOOM makes me a badass.
February 26th, 2008 at 1137
However, Ape Escape? That is EXACTLY like catching monkeys.
But seriously, Chris Crawford’s book “On Game Design” explains this perfectly. Games are not supposed to be simulations, they are supposed to capture the universal, EMOTIONAL truths of life rather than the mathematical, factoid truths. Street Fighter isn’t fighting or a fighting simulator, but it captures the emotional truth of fighting. The feelings involved in kumite are all on display in SFII, and that’s what makes it a good game (which is generally the exact opposite of a good simulation). Ape Escape is probably pretty spot on for replicating the feelings of trying to capture monkeys: It’s funny, difficult and really fucking annoying.
February 26th, 2008 at 1228
If I had read this review not having played Brawl and only having played plenty of Melee, I probably would have made a comment like “I’ll probably only play this at parties with friends, but I don’t even know why when I’ve already played it to death” or “does Nintendo think they make a great new game just by throwing more fanboy fodder into the mix, it’s still the same, okay game.”
Luckily I’ve had the pleasure of playing this game (this one, the new one that just came out, not Melee) for probably something like 30 hours+ at this point, so I get to leave that to everyone else.
Instead I can only hope that none of you have the displeasure of finding that underneath the fanservice exterior, you find a really great fighting game that you enjoy.
February 26th, 2008 at 1249
A pure fanservice exterior plays to some people like if all the characters were sentient globs of shit and puke. This review and the Tekken 6 one both focus fairly little on gameplay and more on the fact that it’s hard to enjoy something you find aesthetically repulsive.
February 26th, 2008 at 1427
That wasn’t a critique of the review, only the comments.
February 26th, 2008 at 1433
Hey, my mother once walked in on me when I wasn’t expecting her. And rather than masturbating, I was sitting in the dark playing through that exact section of FFVIII. I was ashamed… felt like I should give some excuse.
…but there was nothing.
February 26th, 2008 at 1517
GilbertSmith-
I agree with Chris Crawford. Surely that’s obvious considering my previous statements yet how much further Smash is from reality than Street Fighter? Smash’s knockout system is a complete metaphor, there’s no simulation of reality there. Yet it far more accurately captures the emotional truth of knocking someone for six than a life bar.
For the record I don’t want a simulator, I’ve never enjoyed tham and 100% agree with the notion that games don’t have to be remotely like real life. I just want a genre where most of the mechanics aren’t derived from a 20 year old glitch (combos); where attack buttons don’t outnumber block buttons 8-1 (kung fu doesn’t even make a distinction!); where I don’t have to literally study a move list to do play with any competency. Smash had the balls to be immediate and the intelligence to retain a significant amount of depth in the face of 20 years of stagnation. I wish Tim picked up on that rather than concentrating on Mario being in different games. The character was created to be Miyamoto’s star for ever game for Christ’s sake, it’s not even a legitimate complaint.
February 26th, 2008 at 2149
Right, genres do tend to grow beyond the original concept, mistaking weird, arbitrary placeholders for the real thing. Things that were once unfortunate but necessary become permanent replacements for what the original artists wanted to do, and take the place of that thing in the minds of designers more familiar with video games than with everyday life. This can be smart satire, like with how the Spaghetti Westerns were movies about westerns instead of about the old west (and traditional westerns were about tall tales, anyways, not the old west itself), or with some of the surreal moments in the Metal Gear series, but I kind of doubt that’s what the makers of like, Marvel Vs. Capcom 2 had in mind.
February 27th, 2008 at 1231
comment.
February 28th, 2008 at 1106
“x” is just a really xtreme letter
February 28th, 2008 at 225
comment #100
February 28th, 2008 at 231
wow all of a sudden I really regret not making a real comment there
I will say that today I was working in a [sort of] office and our fearless leader was reading your review and laughing mightily and heartily. Also, I can’t get past the ‘X’, of this game’s title. It’s obviously not a roman numeral ’10′, so I can only assume it stands for the mathematical unknown.
As in, the people who made/put out this game don’t really know what the fuck it is, in comparison with the two other games??
February 28th, 2008 at 1329
Digi, it probably has something to do with the fact that Melee was called Smash Bros. Deluxe or DX for short.
February 28th, 2008 at 1626
Hmm… Yeah, X-Men, American History X, X Factor.. None of those have anything to do with the Roman numeral.
Besides, what does it matter? They could call it ‘Super Smash Bros. Goes Bananas’ if they wanted to and not have to justify it.
February 29th, 2008 at 903
More like Super Smash Bros. Lawl amirite.
March 3rd, 2008 at 2213
Why hasn’t anyone mentioned yet that the controls in this game are fully customizable, NOT FIXED as so many people here seem to think?
Screenshots of the options menu showing customizable control schemes:
http://www.smashbros.com/en_us/gamemode/various/images/various14/various14_071126c-l.jpg
http://www.smashbros.com/en_us/gamemode/various/images/various14/various14_071126d-l.jpg
http://www.smashbros.com/en_us/gamemode/various/images/various14/various14_071126e-l.jpg
http://www.smashbros.com/en_us/gamemode/various/images/various14/various14_071126f-l.jpg
March 3rd, 2008 at 2355
Dear Crushed,
Thanks for taking the time to comment!
However, as a person who owns this game and has been playing it for a month, I must say! Those images you link are nice and all, though you, a person who does not own the game and has not been playing it for a month, do not realize that, as much as the controls can be customized, the fact that the Classic Controller’s D-pad can not ever be used for movement remains, uhh, a fact.
That is, in fact, what I was taking issue with in my review. Just do a search on this page for the words “we’ve thought of everything”.
March 4th, 2008 at 155
108th post
March 4th, 2008 at 320
i’ve already forgotten what smash bros brawl is. is that like some kind of tv show?
March 9th, 2008 at 324
I have been reading your site for quite a while. And despite the fact that I often disagree or see the matter slightly, I simply love your reviews. Great ranting and good points made.
It’s always challenging to read and accept something with which you disagree. Thanks to these reviews, that business has become fucking entertaining.
March 9th, 2008 at 2219
i’m sorry, tim. i know we’ve had our laughs and all, but SSBB is simply amazing. the 12 straight hours me and 20 good people wasted playing multiplayer can attest to that.
although i have yet to try the subspace single player. so we’ll see…
March 10th, 2008 at 2334
so…yeah. the subspace is more than SUBPAR. amirite?
but seriously, it’s awful and boring.
but i stand by my multiplayer sentiments, claiming it one of the best 5+ pass the controller while yelling videogames ever.
March 15th, 2008 at 1416
Tim have you felt the d-pad on the Japanese Sega Saturn controller? It’s true that the D-pad on the Classic controller is a scrumptious apple pie, but the Saturn’s D-pad is a mouth-watering fettuccine in creamy alfredo sauce, mixed with parmesan cheese and cracked black pepper.
March 16th, 2008 at 2022
[...] interesting (indeed, even culturally significant) title as a result, though. Tim Rogers has also an excellent review of it up on Action Button, one iteration of which is similarly backhanded in its [...]
March 16th, 2008 at 2108
alfredo sauce literally makes my stomach crack in half
March 17th, 2008 at 1320
Hi Tim,
Felix the Cat was created about a decade before Mickey Mouse. I still get the point you were trying to make, but those cool, wacky, “trippy” cartoons actually came before the family friendly talking animal funny pictures.
March 19th, 2008 at 1715
Hey, Tim Rogers, HAL Laboratories produced this game, not Nintendo. Why are you bashing them in the first 2 paragraphs (which might as well sum up to 2 pages worth of content because of its length) rather than talking about the game as a whole? Not a very professional way to introduce a 274 page review.
March 19th, 2008 at 2257
Oh man! How could I have overlooked the fact that Nintendo had absolutely nothing to do with this game?!
In closing, fuck you! You’re probably never going to have a girlfriend that you don’t feel psychologically compelled to hit at least twice a day! Maybe you should just try jacking off before getting out of bed, save everyone some damage!
Or:
Not a very professional way to post a 19-page comment on some blog on the internet!
March 20th, 2008 at 1407
I would like to know if you ever did get any explanation as to the big deal about “spoilers” because I sure as hell would love to know what people were thinking.
I find the strangest thing about Smash Brothers games is that they are so damned worthless playing them by yourself (even moreso than bare-bones fighting game arcade ports with only “arcade” and “practice” modes), but way too much fun playing with people who don’t know two things about fighting games. And generally more fun if they don’t.
And the music is a fucking shame!
May 13th, 2008 at 854
I guess I forgot to come back to say that after playing through the SSE, I really enjoyed the cutscenes. Not at all deadbolt worthy. I would invite friends to come laugh with me. I played with a friend who possibly enjoyed the cutscenes even more than I did (he does not own any video games).
May 13th, 2008 at 855
Also, the end of the SSE sucked precisely because the constant feed of cutscenes shut down and was replaced with just the limp game mode uninterrupted.
May 19th, 2008 at 1817
I was ALMOST considered spam. That’s as big an injustice as this game is to Nintendo’s already tattered legacy. And yet I keep on playing it. How dare they package such an addicting multi-player with the most atrocious and laughable single-player ever devised. It’s a two pronged attack, getting kicked in the back of the head while being punched in the face.