User:Power Slave/Brawl


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Super Smash Bros. Brawl is a video game. But you knew that before you came here, right? More specifically, "Brawl" is about Nintendo's all-stars (and none-stars) coming together to knock eachother out. Pandemonium could only ensue.

It is the third in the Super Smash Bros. series which began on the Nintendo 64, continued on the GameCube and has arrived on the Wii. Just so no one is alienated, the game can use four different controllers: the GameCube controller, the Classic controller, the Wiimote and Nunchuck, or the Wiimote alone turned sideways. Damn, I wonder if the DK Bongos work too.

Brawl was first announced in May of 2006 in the form of a teaser trailer. All fell silent until a new trailer popped up six months later. Then in May of 2007, nearly an entire year after the first announcement, the official site started posting updates every weekday. Since then, a lot has been revealed.

The game was originally meant to be a launch title (yeah... so much for that). When that didn't work, they opted for a December 3, 2007 release. Ah! The sixth anniversary of its predecessor, Melee. But no, since it's in Nintendo's blood to delay all their best games, Brawl was pushed back to February 10, 2008. But when that approached, it was delayed yet again, just like everyone knew it would be. The game was finally released on March 9, 2008.

Single Player
Smash Bros. is best when you have a 'migo to play against, but the game can be a blast and a half even with one lonesome player. Why could this be?

The Subspace Emissary
Sakurai had always wanted to have a solid single-player mode in Smash Bros, but Shiggymoto insisted he devote all his resources to multiplayer mode instead. Now, with Brawl's surplus of development time, Sakurai has had more than enough time to make his dream a reality.

The Subspace Emissary is like Melee ' s Adventure Mode on steroids and crack. It's a side-scrolling action adventure where you and a co-operative buddy (optional) can smash your way through enemies and obstacles. A lot of familiar faces appear, and those characters can join your team. Before each stage, you select the difficulty (ranging from "Easy" to "Intense"). Both players have a limited stock, but Player 1 is the only one that matters. If Player 1 loses all of his or her stock, it's over. Player 2 is just there to be there. By the way, when you die and respawn, you'll be in control of a different character from your team.

The story is that the Ancient Minister, from a land called Subspace, comes to conquer the world of Smash Bros. He does this by turning everyone into trophies (a metaphor for death ) and planting Subspace Bombs, which detonate and send a chunk of the world back to Subspace to build his world. The Nintendo gang decide to band together to stop the Ancient Minister's plans, but they realize there's an even bigger man upstairs pulling the strings.

The story moves along in the form of short cinematics between levels which show the characters forming bonds. These cut-scenes lack dialogue; everything is told through gestures and actions.

Classic Mode
The Classic Mode doesn't need much of an introduction. It's been in the original game and Melee, after all. Things are just a little less interesting this time around, though. Each stage is based on a particular universe. For example, stage 1 is always Zelda-themed, stage 3 is always Pokémon, and stage 5 is always Kirby. Things like Team Brawl, Multi-Man Brawl, Giant Brawl and Metal Brawl are applied randomly, so you still get all that good stuff. At the end of the lengthy journey is a battle against the giant hand himself.

All-Star Mode
This is a mode where you tackle the entire Brawl crew in succession. They appear in chronological order of their series' creation, meaning Mr. Game & Watch comes first and Olimar comes last. Between each battle, you are presented with a limited supply of hearts to replenish your health. You don't recover automatically from round to round, so use those hearts sparingly. Finishing this mode awards you the trophy of your character's Final Smash. It only becomes available once all the characters have been unlocked.

Event Match
Event Matches, as the game's terminology states, are like missions, or objectives, to complete like a checklist. They always involve you taking the helm of a character and defeating another, or some variation thereof. Every Event comes in either Easy, Normal or Hard difficulties, and have a high score for each difficulty individually. Good, right? Brawl boasts 41 single-player events and 21 co-operative events, which require a buddy to take up a second controller.

Target Smash!
This mini-game is a clever distraction from the main game. Brawl ' s development budget was probably running dry, because there are now only five target tests, which can be accessed by any character. It's like a bad Sonic game.

Home-Run Contest
You find your character on a podium with the sandbag and a baseball bat. What do you do? Well, you have only a few seconds to beat the beans out of Sandbag, and them swat him away with the Home-Run Bat. There's a forcefield around the main platform through which only fast things can break, so you don't have to worry about losing Sandbag prematurely.

Two players can join in simultaneously. Either two of you can tear up Sandbag together, or you can go one after the other to see who is the better hitter. And that other person might be sitting next to you, or on the other side of the world, thanks to Wi-Fi connectivity.

Multi-Man Brawl
Here is where players can take on hordes of "pawn" enemies. In Melee, they were Wire Frames. This time around, they're called the Fighting Alloy Team. They come in four varieties - red, modeled after Captain Falcon; blue, with moves and mannerisms of Zelda; yellow, which is a horned robot designed to look like the Meteos mascot (which Sakurai also developed); and green, which looks just like a robo Kirby.

10-Man Brawl and 100-Man Brawl force the player to fight 10 and 100 Alloys, respectively; 3-Minute Brawl and 15-Minute Brawl require you to endure 3-minute and grueling 15-minute matches, respectively; Endless Brawl where your opponents never cease; and Cruel Brawl where the Alloys are nearly indestructable and don't give you a break.

All battles here are fought on the Battlefield stage due to its totally fair design.

Boss Battles
This mode works just like All-Star, except you take on the game's ten bosses instead of other playable characters. Master Hand and Tabuu are here along with their minions. It's hard. You can unlock this by clearing The Subspace Emissary.

Training
If you need to hone your Smash skills, let this be the place. There are no consequences for losing. In fact, it's almost impossible to lose, especially since you can set the behavior of your enemy. Make them a non-moving punching bag if you must. Of course, the true appeal of Training Mode is the ability to spawn whatever item you want, whenever. If only you could do that in other modes.

Multiplayer
What would a good party game be without multiplayer? A bad party game. That's why Brawl is placing an even bigger emphasis on multiplayer than before, which is weird because the single-player campaign is supposed to be the one that's all beefed up, according to Sakurai. In the game's opening menu, "Group" as it's called is listed before "Solo," which is the opposite of how it's been done for years.

Brawl
The fun multiplayer battles that gives this installment of Smash Bros. its namesake. Two to four combatants can go wild and battle eachother. Any of them can be either human-controlled or computer-controlled. So if you want to pit you and your friends against tough CPU foes, or if you just want to kick back and watch four computer opponents go at it, more power to you. Matches can be timed (for example, 2 minutes sound good?) or everyone can have a set number of lives, known better as stock in Smash Bros. terminology. If you get a wild hair, try a coin match, where the goal is to pick up more coins than your foes.

Special Brawl
If you've ever wanted a battle where everyone is metal, giant, or invisible, then this is the mode to look into. Before a match, you can mix and match all these status effects in the same battle. If you feel so inclined, now you can have a Stamina Mega Flower Curry Heavy Slow Angled Brawl. When you apply more status effects, the name gets rediculously long. You can adjust stamina, size, status (curry is my favorite), the camera angle, etc. Things can get loopy.

Tourney
If you have 31 Smash-savvy friends, invite them all over and fire up a tournament. There are several types of eliminations available. If you're familiar with the Tournament Mode in Melee then there isn't much else to know about the Tourney. By the way, don't you love how they made it more kid-friendly by shortening "tournament" to "tourney"? I don't.

Wi-Fi Battles
Yes, the long-awaited feature. Online battling is exactly what every Smash fan wanted, and now its time to shine has come. You can play against friends whose Wii code you have registered, or you can play against anonymous opponents from anywhere in the world. There is no ranking system, so no one will know if you always lose, and no one will care if you always win. There is no "top players" board or anything.

Other
Even more things to keep you distracted from beating the Subspace Emissary in one sitting! (Which I did today, by the way.)

Trophies
The trophies are back and better than ever. There are five hundred forty-four trophies to get your hands on, which is an 87% increase over Melee ' s trophy count. If you're the type who likes to play with things just to play with things, you can pick an environment and place trophies around it, creating a cutesy scene. The gold stands disappear when you place a trophy, so they don't ruin the effect.

Stickers
Brawl introduces Stickers. You see, Stickers are actually old promotional artwork from Nintendo games, which you can keep in a virtual album. Sticker sheets randomly appear during battles, and you can pick them up to unlock more Stickers. They serve the same purpose as the Trophies, except they're 2-dimensional and not as cool. However, they can also be used in The Subspace Emissary to power up characters with specific attributes. You do this by fitting a bunch of stickers onto the circular base of a character's trophy. There are seven hundred stickers, so get busy.

Stage Builder
It might be one of the more eagerly-awaited features of Brawl. You can make your own stages. Cool, huh? When starting out, you can choose the size of your battlefield (small 10x8, medium 14x11, or huge 18x14), the theme (mountain, ruins or futuristic), and the song that plays. After this, the builder itself shows up. It's like a blank area with a grid. You can select bits and pieces of floors, structures, obstacles, etc and paste them wherever you want. You can even flip them horizontally if you need to. Everything is aligned to that grid, so you'll never get any layout glitches due to awkwardly-placed parts.

Another cool feature of this is that you can submit your created stage to Nintendo, and they'll randomly send it to someone else. And you will get someone else's stage, but only for 24 hours. That basically means you get a new stage everyday, and you never know what you'll get. I wish they had thought of this sooner.

Snapshots & Replays
Whenever you pause the game, you can take snapshots, save them, and send them to friends. You can also submit them to Nintendo. Brawl ' s official site has already posted a few galleries of snapshots. I should also mention that you can do "instant replays" and save up to 3 minutes of video of your battles. You can send these to friends too, but not to Nintendo. I don't think they care about your brawls.

My Music
When you find CD's in the heat of a battle, you're unlocking more music tracks. In the "My Music" menu, you can change how likely a certain song is to play in a certain stage. By adjusting a slider left or right for each song, you can make some songs more likely to play than others, or you can disable a song you don't like. This menu also serves as a Sound Test since you can listen to all the tunes from here. There are 314 songs in total, which I think may be a world record.

Names
Since you can use four different controllers, how will the game know which one you want to use? And since you can, that's right, customize what each and every button does, how does it know what you want to do when you press a certain button? The answer is Names. In Melee, you could enter names in VS Mode which were really superficial and had no purpose. This time however, their purpose is a matter of life and death. For each name you make, you can customize the control scheme assigned to that name, so the game always knows your preferences. That's neat skeet.

Spectator
As Sakurai puts it, if you aren't good at video games, you can watch Wi-Fi battles between anonymous players and even bet virtual coins on them... Then again, if you really suck bad enough at games that you can only watch others play, you've just wasted your $300 to get a Wii and a copy of Brawl. Well done.

Reception
People liked this game.