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Jan 26th, 2008 at 22:00:19 - Super Smash Brothers (N64) |
Summary
Super Smash Brothers is a 1-4 player fighting game that offers story mode and multiplayer where you get to choose from 12 of your favorite Nintendo characters to duke it out. With a character list of Luigi, Mario, Donkey Kong, Link, Samus, Captain Falcon, Nes, Kirby, Pikachu, Yoshi, Jiggypuff, and Fox how can this game not be great. Each player has a percentage meter, which is your health, and the higher the percentage your player is, the faster and farther they fly off the map. The goal of Smash is to conflict enough damage to get to your opponent’s percent high enough to knock them off the map. This game is my favorite 64 game of all time, it is so much fun.
Gameplay
Playing this game multiplayer with friends is so much fun. Even though this game came out several years ago I still find myself playing it today. The battles are very competitive, and with 4 players of equivalent skill level it’s a blast. And even if you only have 3 players, the 4th can be a computer player. They are always intense fast paced non-stop battles. Being able to send your opponent flying off the screen after beating him senseless is awesome. You have the option of either playing with Time or Stock and have it be either a team or free for all battle. If you decide to go by Time, the goal is to kill as many opponents as possible while staying alive as long as possible, within the time limit of the round. If you kill an opponent your score goes up by one, but if you die, your score goes down by 1, the winner is based on who has the highest score at the end of the round. If you go with Stock, you have a certain amount of lives and the goal is to be the last man alive.
The more I played multiplayer with friends the more I started to realize that characters where actually unbalanced. There seemed to some things that give certain characters some big advantages, for example, I noticed that Pikachu and Nes have some advantages that other characters don’t. There also seemed to be characters that where at a disadvantages, like Link and Jigglypuff.
Some of Pikachu’s forward attacks have the ability to hit an opponent behind him and is the only character that has a full swing with an item like the plasma sword, star wand, and home-run bat, he can bash opponents both in front and behind him. This makes it a lot easier to inflict damage during a chaotic 4 person brawl. Plus Pikachu is the only character with a move a double dash move, which gives his character a much easier time to run-away, recover from a big hit, get to items quickly, and avoid an attack.
If a player knows the right combo of moves to inflict on his opponent, Nes is able to deliver a series of attacks that leave his opponent stunned and helpless as long as Nes continues to deliver the combo. If done properly, Nes can easily get his opponents percentage high enough to finish them off with one strike while his opponent can only watch and wait for him to stop the combo.
Link is not the slowest character in the game but his up B move, which is vital in Smash to be able to recover from a devastating hit, is the worst in the game. This makes Links character easy to hit and even easier to kill. The reason Jigglypuff is a bad character to play as is because both of his special B moves leave him helpless for a good 3 seconds at least and one of those B moves is his most devastating attack. So even if you do pull of your big hit as Jigglypuff and nail one opponent, while your helpless, another has more than enough time to send you flying across the map.
Although there are some characters that are better than others, that has little effect of how much fun this game is. Multiplayer Smash can be enjoy by all kinds of players with different skill ranges. My friends and I can play this game for hours on end.
Gameplay 2
The single player story mode in Smash is fun, but it has some setbacks. You get to choose your difficulty setting and number of stock (lives) to go through 14 levels. At the end of each level you get a list of bonus achievements that either add to your score or take points away. Although the goal of the story mode is to beat all the levels, the score and bonus achievements just add more things to try and achieve and a competitive element to the single player game play.
Overall the single player Smash experience is great. There are just a few things that they could improve on, which for the most part developers did in Melee. But on the 64,
• Every level is the same for each character except for 2 levels; break the targets and board the platforms. And those have nothing to do with combat, they are more of obstacles.
• The AI isn’t that good. For the more experienced player, the computer opponent isn’t that hard to defeat, even on the hardest setting.
• With just 14 levels, the game is beat rather quickly. Its too short, beating the game with every character doesn’t take that long.
In terms of the actual storyline in Smash, there isn’t much of one. The only storyline that I can come up with based on the introduction and boss battle is the each character is actually a toy. And since the final boss is a giant hand, I assume that is the hand of the person who owns all of these toys. So you are a toy, who defeats its owner… I think.
Another thing that is cool about Smash, are the 4 hidden characters you unlock by playing the game. When you play Smash for the first time, at the character menu screen there are 4 blurry boxes where the 4 hidden characters should be. The fact that at first you don’t know who those characters are will keep a playing the game until they unlock those characters because they want to find out who they are.
Design
The fighting style in this game was very innovative for its release date and is still unique amongst fighting games today. The percentage health system allows players to viciously exchange hit after hit until a player percentage is so high that a hit will send them off the map. Every character has the ability to freely roam throughout the map as they please. Each character can double jump, so mid air brawls become a big part of the game.
What really makes Smash such a great game has to be the character list. Who wouldn’t want to see all of their favorite Nintendo characters duking it out in the same game? Each character has their own special abilities, Mario with the fire balls, Pikachu with the electricity, Link with his sword, etc. There had been no game like this when it was released, this one the first time that so many characters from so many different games came together on one game.
The levels in this game all have different themes. Each level follows a characters theme; Link with Hyrule Castle, Pikachu with Safari City, Fox with his starship, etc. On top of level themes, each level has a unique feature that effects combat, which adds another element to fighting strategies. For example, on Hyrule Castle tornados appear that if your caught in them, they will throw you up in the air and inflict damage. On Fox’s Starship fighters fly by and shoot, and if your caught by a fighters laser your going flying.
Another great thing about Smash is that it is a fighting game that incorporates items. Most of the items you will recognize from the previous games of characters, like the classic hammer in the original Donkey Kong. There are also items like the plasma sword that you can strike people with of throw at them. Item control is a key element winning a game of Smash.
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Jan 25th, 2008 at 23:49:06 - Super Smash Brothers (N64) |
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