bradchoate.com

The Nintendo 64 is not the platform you think of when it comes to fighting games. There are a few, but nothing noteworthy. Nintendo’s Super Smash Brothers is here to change all that.

SSB is not a traditional fighting game. Don’t even try comparing it to Tekken or Mortal Kombat. SSB doesn’t require you to remember strings of buttons to perform complicated combos. Nor does it have all the blood and violence of the traditional fighter. Instead of a fight-to-the-death kind of game, you have more of a sports-fighting game or a king-of-the-hill kind of game.

The players square off in a fighting arena. The graphics are 3-D, but the gameplay is 2-D. There is one view and the camera will zoom in, out and pan to keep all the players in view at once. When fighting, attacks inflict damage which registers on their damage meter. The more damage a player takes, the farther they can be thrown when attacked. When a player’s damage is more than 100%, they really start flying. The goal is to knock the other player(s) until they are thrown clear or fall off of the arena. It sounds easy, but with the mid-air acrobatics each player can use to recover from a fall, it takes some effort to knock them off entirely.

So without all the blood and gore of a tradional fighter, what is it about this game that makes it so appealing? Plenty. You could start off with the cast. Several of your favorite Nintendo brand characters are here including Mario, Link, Samus, Kirby, Donkey Kong, Yoshi, Pikachu and Fox McCloud. Each character comes with their own fighting arena. There are four other hidden characters and one additional arena as well, and these are unlocked in the single player part of the game. Each character has three special fighting moves that come from their background. For example, Link has a swirling sword-slash attack, Mario can throw fireballs, Yoshi throws eggs and so on. There are also special items that will appear randomly such as swords, bombs, fire-flowers, Pokémon balls, a ray gun, a baseball bat and my favorite — the arcade-Donkey Kong-hammer which comes complete with the original music when you’re holding it.

Where this game really shines is in versus play. You can have up to four simultaneous players and that is a sight to see. You can set up any combination of 2-4 players. Each player can be assigned any character. You can even have four Marios going at it, but each will have a different color to help you keep track of who is who. You can choose to play in teams or in a free-for-all. A player can be computer-controlled too, so you can have a 4-player fight even if you don’t have that many people. You can even make all the players computer-controlled and just watch them fight. Gameplay can either be time limited where the winner is chosen based on points, or you can play where the winner is the last one standing.

As with most fighters, playing by yourself gets old quick. There is a single-player mode in the game, but it is the same every time you play it. There are three “bonus” non-fighting levels where you have to destroy targets and such within a time limit, but these are more annoying and inconsistent with the rest of the game. They were probably thrown in to try to extend the single-player mode a little bit, but I wasn’t impressed.

The single-player battle sequence includes a few additional fighting arenas that aren’t based on games, but they are pretty plain in design. There are three levels with special characters. One has Metal Mario from Mario 64 who is hard to throw very far due to his weight. Another features a team of 30 “polygon characters” who are basically shaped like the regular characters but are painted in purple instead of using graphical textures. Another level of note has you fighting against a really large version of Donkey Kong.

I was very disappointed with the single-player mode “boss”: a giant white glove. No, it’s not the glove from Glover, but the “Master Hand” which is featured in the game’s intro animation. I would have expected one of the villains from Nintendo’s games. If you played with Link, the boss would be Ganon, Bowser for Mario and so forth. I suppose the single boss was chosen due to time constraints, but having real bosses to fight would have made the single-player mode much more appealing. Those villains could have also been additional playable characters in the versus mode.

The sprite and texture graphics are a little blocky up close (hit the start button during game play to examine), but you rarely notice it due to the pace of the game. The low-res graphics and low-polygon count for the models allows for more fluid gameplay. The game does tend to slow down from time to time when you have four players going at once but not so much that it ruins it.

SSB may look like a silly game, but it really rocks. Get two or more people playing in a free-for-all and have at it. Punching other people and watching them fly— smoke trail and all— 50 yards or so is surprisingly entertaining and rewarding. This game is definitely one to try out at the rental store. But, if you do play multiplayer very often you’ll want a copy of your own.

(From April ‘99)