Check out what happens when a few dozen NWR readers get together for a twelve-hour Smash Bros. Brawl marathon. Read extended multiplayer impressions, watch real gamers play the game, and hear their reactions!
At 2 p.m. on the nose, the first guests arrived, a pair of blokes with beers in tow and a hankerin' to jump right into it. I obliged, and we started playing the game with little introduction. Not long after that more people came in. Soon my living room was packed with gamers, hovering around the 36" TV set in the corner of the room, both watching and playing. People didn't mind waiting their turn, apparently mesmerized by the overwhelming awesomeness that was Brawl's enormous character roster and stage list. It looked pretty good in motion, too, so there was a lot of oohing and aahing toward the detailed environments. Even before they played, people were getting blown away by the game.
The first three hours of the evening were dedicated to getting people acclimated to the nuances of the Brawl engine. It really didn't take long for people to pick it up and play it, since just about everyone in attendance had logged some serious time with Melee. This was obvious with the preferred controller of evening, the Wavebird. Three were plugged in to the top of my Japanese Wii, with the other socket being filled by a standard GameCube controller. I asked a few times if people were willing to try out the other schemes, but I didn't hear any takers.
With so many people in the crowd being veterans of the last SSB game, I started asking around. Is Brawl faster, or slower? Some people's first reactions upon seeing the calamity with the smash balls and Dragoon pieces and the more dynamic levels was that it sure looked faster than Melee. One person labeled it as "more chaotic," which I feel is the most accurate description of the game.
However, after a few hours of playing, one or two people casually mentioned to me how the game was slower than Melee. As I mentioned in my initial Brawl impressions, this seemingly impossible situation of "faster and slower" has reasoning behind it. The overall action looks fast and chaotic—because it is—but upon holding a controller and seeing how much more deliberate you need to be with attacks, it actually does feel somewhat slower.
This could be your house filled with your friends when Super Smash Bros. Brawl is released.
It also makes it pretty easy to pick up and play, as I discovered through my brother, Dan. He and I played the original N64 game religiously, and we enjoyed the GameCube game together for a few months after it came out, but after he moved out of the house, he never played the game again. I invited him over in part to relive the good old days of Smash, but also as an experiment. How quickly would it take someone to get back into the rhythm of smashing when you haven't played the game in several years?
Not very long, apparently. After only three matches he was back to the form I remember him playing at way back when. (Really good, but never good enough to beat his brother.) And he was playing as Captain Falcon, too, who is one of the speediest characters there is. If someone can shake off five years of rust in not even ten minutes of time with a brand-new game, then I'd wager it's going to be easy for anyone to pick it up and start playing competitively.
Even though most of the roster in Brawl are returning characters from Melee, they have slight differences. Mario's stationary tornado, down+B, has been replaced with FLUDD, the annoying water backpack from Super Mario Sunshine. It is particularly useless, especially considering what it replaced. (Luigi still has this move intact, and Mario can still perform a tornado with an airborne down+A attack.) It seemed to come out accidentally a lot. Or maybe, that was just the excuse people used to hide the fact they abused the tornado in the last game.
On the other hand, Sheik looked to have improved quite a bit from her Melee outing. Instead of being a secondary move set to Zelda, who was the preferred choice for many people using the double-character, the two are now on equal footing. Though the chain doesn't have any noticeable improvements, Sheik is just faster and slightly more powerful in general. Initially, at least, she was one of the more popular character choices.
The all-Pokémon battle on Final Destination, and two pink Kirbys appear on DK Rumble Falls.
As for the newcomers, Pit and Metaknight were solid choices in the opening rounds. Their lightness and quickness make them more agile, but the trade-off is they have weak attacks. Metaknight makes up for that by slicing up damage with his lightning quick sword attacks and multi-hit special attacks. Pit's standard attacks have more meat to them, but he still lacks a proper finishing blow. To that end, he can use his shield to reflect back just about everything, or fly around to avoid damage and wait to pick-off a high damage character.
Snake and Sonic, the third-party guest characters, were also popular selections. Sonic's moveset hearkens back to the Sega Genesis days, with very basic attacks and no-frills special moves. His diving kick is great, but the fun thing to do is to charge up his down+B spin dash and plow through anyone in your way. At first, Snake's moves seemed counter-intuitive, but after a lot of playtime with him, it turns out the winning strategy is to be sneaky. He's best at planting land mines, staying back to fire and steer a Nikita missile, and waiting for people to jump in at him with a mortar. As an added bonus, Snake can crawl along the ground like the sneaky infiltrator that he is.
As we all picked up on the new characters, new items, and new fighting system of Brawl, we started thinking about what else we could do. With more than nine hours to go at this point in the day, we didn't have to worry about running out of time.
