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Preview  Super Smash Brothers Melee
- By Rob Schlicht
5/21/2001
Smash Brothers was one of the most played games at the show, especially by me. The game shows quite a bit of promise, but still falters in some areas.
The game is visually very impressive. It retains the same look as the N64 version, but everything is much cleaner and rounded. Pokemon from Pokeballs emerge as fully 3-D Polygonal characters, rather than just sprites. Nowhere is this more apparent than when Snorlax appears. The background are very impressive, as well, and true to the original, framerate is never an issue.
Sound is amazing. The music is similar to the original, but sounds far better. The Star Fox level features music from the SNES version, which brought a tear to my eye, and the Pokemon Stadium level featured the Pokemon theme, with a full choir in the background, and was easily the most impressive soundtrack of the show. Goodbye, cartridges. Hellllllllllo, optical discs.
In the playable version, nine characters were from the original game, and the only new one was Bowser. Several stages were available, with many more locked out. Overall, the new stages are good, but the F-Zero one was, in my opinion, nearly unplayable. It seems to be put in more to look great on commercials and in demo reels than to play well in an actual environment. The platform you’re fighting on flies around the race track, which is visually impressive, but distracting. If you get knocked off while it’s moving, it’s very hard to find your character to get him back to the platform. When fighting on the track itself, the guardrails are electrified, which is a nice feature, and race cars periodically zoom by in packs of a few dozen, throwing everyone sky high. That stage definitely needs to be tuned up, all the kills there are usually stage kills, not player kills. It was very rare for me to see anyone come out of that level with a positive score.
Gameplay is the question mark. That’s the meat and potatoes of every game, and in Smash Brothers, it’s also the entrée, drink, and dessert. I was the biggest fan alive of the original, and if anything’s different, it’ll throw my entire game off. Which it did.
Items seem to hurt far less. Hitting someone with a Pokeball now barely slows them down, whereas in the original, it was more powerful. The Bob-omb, which used to send players scurrying in fear, now barely budges them. Throws seem infinitely hard to pull off, and the triple jump appears not to be nearly as integral as in the original. More often than not, if you’re thrown off the platform, you’re not coming back. The Smash Brothers feel is not quite there yet, at least in my opinion. HAL wanted a faster, “cooler” looking game, and they accomplished it, with a very good arcade feel. But was it what should’ve happened.
Still, not all the changes were bad. Each character has far more moves. New is a hold move, where you can grab your opponent and just hold them and pummel them, rather than just throwing them. Special moves have been increased. Hitting B yields one, B Up is another, B Down is a third, and new are B Left and B Right. Also, throws can now be directed in any of the four directions.
Smash Brothers still has a lot of tweaking before September, but it seems in good shape.
5/16/2001
Rest easy, friends. Not only is a sequel to Smash Brothers coming to the GameCube, but it seems to be keeping all the things that made the N64 incarnation great, and augmenting whatever weak points it has. Get ready, because Super Smash Brothers Melee may give Rogue Leader a run for the title of best launch title.
Great points include the multiplayer, and Nintendo has taken steps to insure that it stays that way. Four player multiplayer is definitely still in, and it includes a new tournament mode that can handle 64 entrants at once, a very cool feature, one that would’ve been used very often by myself in the original Smash Brothers. Smash Brothers also had a very thorough training mode, and according to the current info, the GameCube version has an improved training mode, which can judge specific skills and patterns used by players, improving specific strategies or making you a better rounded fighter. The items have been improved, with 30 new offensive and defensive weapons to use to your advantage. The character variety of SSB was very good, although very limited. SSB Melee is keeping all 12 of the original characters (although Luigi was noticeably absent), plus adding four confirmed characters. Bowser makes a much deserved appearance, filling a current lack of enemies rather nicely, and providing a nice counterpart to Donkey Kong’s playing style. Princess Peach also appears, as does Shiek, from Ocarina of Time. Last but not least, are the Ice Climbers, from the classic NES game (Tariq pointed this out in a very gleeful fashion). There are other fighters that can be unlocked. Kid Icarus seems likely, as well as Ganondorf, Wario, and possibly Princess Zelda (yes, Shiek is Zelda, but in SSB, Mario could fight Metal Mario).
The original was often criticized for it’s single-player mode. SSB Melee Seems to have fixed that, with an all new single player mode , that progresses in a side scrolling fashion. During the demonstration, we saw several instances of playable characters fighting enemies that weren’t announced. In one scene Samus was fighting against Ridley, and in another Link is battling through multiple Redeads. What does this mean? Is every stage a side scroller populated with a certain game’s enemies, and at the end, is there one of the playable characters standing guard as a boss-type enemy? Is this the only single player mode, or is the original single player mode included as well? We’ll be able to tell you tomorrow, after we’ve extensively playtested it.
- 5.21.2001 |
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Release Date:
12.03.2001
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