Genre: Fighting
Year: 1999
Developed by: HAL Laboratory
Published by: Nintendo
Platforms: N64
#102
Feeling Like: Happy Together
As soon as I saw the commercial, I wanted it. Granted, that’s how commercials are supposed to work, but I really couldn’t have had any idea at the time of what that 30 second clip would mean to my friends and I. There’s no chance Nintendo thought players would flock to the game the way they did. We’d seen crossovers in video games before, but nothing like this. Mario and Link in the same game? Samus and Pikachu? Kirby and that kid from Earthbound? How could this possibly work?
The N64 was a curious system, historically. It failed when going up against the PlayStation in the end, and the rise of Sony is an entirely different matter for an entirely different blog. But I know a ton of friends who went the Nintendo route and thus all we needed was the four controller symbol on a box to sell us. Not every example was a winner, but a select few absolutely dominated our time from 1996 to 2002. When you’re 13, all of a sudden you can stay up late. You don’t have a designated bedtime, not when three of your friends were over. You had your parent’s basements as your lair. Food was provided, sodas were consumed. Maybe we’d break up the session with a movie, then go back for more. There weren’t any stats, there weren’t any achievements, no online play, the framerate dipped, the controller joysticks were worn out and our TVs were the furthest thing from High Definition. As you can guess, these hangouts were terrific. You don’t get to nearly crack the Top 100 by just being an outdated fighting game, an experiment that ran amok and grew to be one of Nintendo’s most successful franchises and arguably the best party/fighting series to date.
The core premise is genius, so much so that the fundamentals remained in the four sequels. Instead of a life meter, fighters have a percent meter. Everybody starts at 0%. Every hit, be it a slap, punch, stomp or kick, adds the according amount of damage to the percentage meter. The higher the meter, the further you fly when you get hit. If you fly or fall far enough off the screen, in any direction, you’ll die and either lose a life, or get a -1 depending on the mode.
Stages have varying platforms and sizes, along with environmental dangers like tornados, bumpers, Pokémon or rising lava. Half the fun is avoiding these obstacles while trying to knock your distracted opponents into them. In addition there are dozens of items available, both offensive and defensive, that appear randomly on the map. This results in a mad scramble for them, or avoiding them if somebody gets to the hammer first. There are also twelve characters to choose from, all from their own respective Nintendo franchises. Add in four players to the mix and you have a perfect proprietary blend of greatness.
I was Kirby. I’ve always been Kirby. I was Kirby when I read the roster list, even if Donkey Kong was stronger, or Fox was more sleek, or Captain Falcon was cooler. Kirby was my boy, as I’m sure you’ve gathered by now. Kirby’s Dream Land was the first game I obsessed over, Kirby’s Adventure was the little puffball’s coming out party, but Super Smash Bros. was the moment he became irreplaceable to me. He was my buddy, overly cutesy, too pink, too silly to be taken seriously in a fighting game. Well, in a non-Smash fighting game anywhere. Here, he’s one of the most annoying characters to face in a four player brawl. One on one he’s too slow, and that goes for future Smash games too. If you ever look at a tier-list, Kirby is generally nowhere near the top. But when others are distracted and skill goes by the wayside, that’s where I really excel. Fly, fly, fly…just get underneath the ruckus and DOWN+B! Kirby turns into a stone, plummets to the earth and hopefully I connect with at least one of my targets. Rinse and repeat, with some variations in there. I wish I could say I had an arsenal of combos and variations, but there wasn’t much more to it than that.
Well, OK. A few more tricks. The fact that Kirby is ridiculously difficult to kill added to my love for him. He can fly a mile, whereas most players can do two jumps and their UP+B move for one last lurch at life, Kirby can “jump” (it’s more of a puff of air) five times, and then his own UP+B move. This was good for my playstyle, which was hardly defensive and not at all sensible. Bon!
His down spike kick was ruthlessly effective, and since I could hop off the side and risk a devastating killing blow and land safely was borderline unfair. Well, at least it would be in the hands of a skilled player.
The most humiliating move I could pull off once in a blue moon was using Kirby’s B move, which normally sucks up opponents and enables Kirby to copy their move. I almost never used it, it was too slow and risky. Besides, the abilities Kirby got was hardly worth the effort. Now, if I’m dangling mid-air with no jumps left and I’m going to plummet to my death and there are vultures at the sides (this is a Smash mainstay, you go to the edge of the cliff and ensure your hapless foe has zero chance at getting back on), I could try and suck them in and take them with me to my death. It barely ever happened but when it did, it was monumentally frustrating for my opponent. If I go down, I’m taking you with me!
There was a single player option, but I only played that when I was immensely bored. It was good practice and attempting to get a high score erased the monotony, but beyond that it wasn’t much of a pull. Super Smash Bros. only works if you have other Smash Bros. (or Sisters!) to play with.
The amount of hours I played Super Smash Bros. is countless. Memories start to overlap with each other. There was the overnight charity session at GNS, where I butted digital heads with kids from every grade in the French Room. Duncan, Pike and a few others in a grade above me even invited me to a few sessions. I tell you, I never felt cooler in my life as a Grade 11 student when I got invited over to play some Smash at a Grade 12 party.
And then there were my buds. Eric was Link, Dave V. was Yoshi, Kasim was Samus, Aslam was Fox and Dobbo was Pikachu. Always, no deviations. It’s funny considering how small the roster was how it worked out that we picked entirely different characters. Did we do that on purpose?
You could even play against computer controlled opponents, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Every character has the same moveset, but they all play so differently that you can’t just master a character right away. The items are a blast (literally) and will always throw a wrench into the gears. I rarely felt like I played the exact same match, even though we played literally thousands of them by the time Super Smash Bros. Melee rolled around. The controls are so familiar, you can instantly play any of the five Smash Bros games with very little need to catch up.
Kasim was getting married in July of 2016. We had a small bachelor party, just Eric and Kaz and myself (Aslam was ill and couldn’t make it). We rented an Air BnB by Cowichan Lake. It had an N64. For the occasion, Kaz made us custom t-shirts based on the Smash character we favored. It’s still one of my favorites. Forgive the hair, we stayed up until 5am playing Goldeneye 007 and, naturally, Super Smash Bros. One last session for Eric to stand triumphant as he bombed the crap out of us, this time with a whiskey in hand and more laughs than ever.
What a game.
The 500 