Super Smash Bros. Melee

When it comes to multiplayer "party" games, fighting sims have usually been relegated to the older audiences for games such as Mortal Combat or other more graphic experiences. With "Super Smash Bros. Melee" for the Nintendo Gamecube, however, the contestants are none other than the colorful characters from Nintendo's cannon of crazy caricatures participating in some cartoonish smash-and-dash.

Besides the tight controls and great visuals/locals, the true hallmark of this game is the attributes of each individual character, which provides "something for everyone". If you just like mashing people? Go for Donkey Kong. Love to shoot a bow & wield a sword? Then Link is your character. The list could go on and on, as each character has abilities that make them unique to the game and allow for almost endless combinations.

Overall, "Melee" is perhaps the most engaging multiplayer GCN game ever created (with the possible exception of Double Dash). Literally hours of fun can be had pummeling your friends with Nintendo's characters and earning the bragging rights to go along with it.

Wow. This game is so perfect. The animation is crystal-clear, the stages are fun, the events are good, single-player mode is entertaining, and the characters and the scenery is completely accurate. This was my first game for Gamecube. Then I got LoZ:OoT and oh my God, the characters were even better in Melee than in the original Zelda game! I mean, Zelda's hair and her dress were exactly right, Link's sword was on the correct side, Young Link had a Deku Shield (He's not supposed to shoot Fire Arrows, though), Ganondorf was exact replica and Sheik was a clone. Then I got Majora's Mask and oh my God, Great Bay was and exact copy! Melee had the pirates cove, the columns in the water, the canoes on the beach, the Ocean Spider House, the umbrellas, the cave to Zora Cove, EVERYTHING! I'm sure if the cameras could turn all the way around, they would have included Pinnacle Rock and the Dragon Cloud too. Aside from the accuracy, the game itself is wonderful. The characters are so well animated, their moves are perfect, their taunts are cute, and they look so...upgraded. Every bit of it is fun. There are different modes to play with, trophies, training, event matches, melees against wire frames, Classic, Adventure, and All-Star single-player mode, it's all perfect! So, to sum everything up, perfect animation, perfect precision, perfect characters, perfect stages, perfect fights, perfect fun. Your all-around perfect game! 11/10!

We all have heard the saying "I bet Mario could beat Link in a battle." and then it continues on into a huge controversy. At least Nintendo invented this game. Now you can see just who would win in a Baddy vs. Baddy competition. Not only just a simple battle but you can test them out in many a different mode, from Tiny Melee to an RPG like Stamina Battle (One of my favorites, namingly because you can kick the corpses around after you defeat them =P). The wide range of extra's instead of 4 secret characters and 1 level is now 12 secret characters and 10 secret levels, making gameplay more different and extensive. Music is perfect (Fountain of Dreams is amazing!) and sound is crisp and fresh. Now I know many are going to get angry at me because of my title, but hey, I don't like XBox at all except the exception of Halo (Which I have not tried but looks cool) but if you ask me, which I know you won't, I think the Microsoft people should stick to computers.

Anybody who's played the original Super Smash Bros. should know how fun it is to smash your friends as popular Nintendo characters. Not only are the controls so simple even a 5 year old could play, but it's also fast, furious, and most of all, fun.

A little bit after two years after its release, Nintendo announced a sequel to the best-selling fighting game. Shown at E3, it passed Star Wars Rogue Squadron 2 as the most anticipated Gamecube game. Over the next 6 months, Nintendo tortured their fans by revealing saliva-inducing options such as 292 trophies, 25 characters, 28 stages, an much, much more. Finally, the wait is over, and fans are treated to the greatest fighting game of the year.

The graphics are magificent. People claim the backgrounds are terrible, but they look fine to me. The character design is so detailed you can see the furs on Fox and the curves of the cloth for Mario. And most importantly of all, it goes at a blistering 60 frames per second. That's an amazing feat considering most of the things documented in this site goes at just 24 fps.

If anybody's a fan of Nintendo music, then this is the game for you. It remixes many popular tunes from Zelda's Overworld Theme to Pokemon's Battle Theme. The sound effects are wonderful, and best of all, there is none of the sound editing that plagued the first version.

Super Smash Bros. Melee is not a rehash of the N64 version, as it has been often called. It has brand new moves. Now, if you grab somebody, you have a choice of attacking the victim, or throwing them up, down, forward, or back. There are 4 Special Attacks instead of the usual 3, and you can dodge projectile attacks and mid-air attacks.

In the original Super Smash Bros., the one-player mode was going through a fixed set of 13 stages. In Melee, there is Classical Mode, which is a lot like the original, only the stages are mixed. There Adventure Mode, where the player goes through scrolling world with hazards before fighting your enemy. There is Stadium Mode, where you can play your character's target practice level, beat up a beanbag before seeing how far you can hit it with a bat, and fight against up to 100 computer characters. There is an event mode with 51 events where you fight in special pre-set circumstances. And then there are the 292 trophies which include people like Misty from Pokemon or the go-kart from the Mario Kart games.

But the truly amazing part of this game is the multiplayer mode, which is what makes Super Smash Bros. one of the classics for the N64. You can play the usual stock (lives) or time mode, but you can also play coin mode, where you knock coins out of your opponents and collect there. Then there are the special melee modes, with special battles like Giant Melee (where everybody is big), or Special Sudden Death Melee, where everybody starts off with 300% damage. This game WILL last you over 500 hours if you are a fan of the original.

This game is a perfect example of why Nintendo is so successful today. Like what has been mentioned earlier in this review, this game is fast, furious, and most of all, fun. If you are a fan of fighting games or Nintendo, then this game is a must.

Forget the Pc, Dreamcast and XBox. There's two consoles: GameCube and PlayStation2. The XBox is meant to make Bill Gates richer, the Dreamcast is short on games and is no longer being given games anyway, and the PC games come in three choices: 2-D, blocky or educational. The PlayStation2: great variety, online gaming and DVD player. GameCube: old reliable Nintendo favourites and extremely varied, original ideas. Just look at Super Mario Sunshine, Animal Crossing, or, a favourite, Super Smash Bros. Melee. Unfortunately brought up the wrong way, SSBM is not about "let's see who beats whom" when talking about whether Mario can cream Samus, or is Pikachu stronger than Fox. Because even if you match yourself against a computer, a compter versus a computer, or a human versus a human, you'll always get different results. No, the reason for this game is the features. 4-player versus. Adventure mode full of variety. Collecting trophies of Nintendo trademarks(not literally, I mean characters and things created by Nintendo), and much much more. The unknown of many things, like what Pokemon will be in that PokeBall, who will win this fight, is a bomb in this crate, and many other things make this game a sure win. It's meant o be played to have fun, not to settle arguments. And one of the reasons it's a hit: there's a character for everyone.