Nintendo Wii - Super Smash Bros. Brawl Review

SSBM or Super Smash Brothers Brawl is the 3rd entry in the series.  It is a unique fighting game.  In the fact it takes nintendo characters and pits them against each other.  It even has Solid Snake from Metal Gear Solid and Sonic the Hedgehog as guest characters.  If you ever wondered if Sonic could beat Mario, if Zelda could beat Ganon, if swords could beat guns you have found a game that lets you find out.  Although all these cases rely on the skill of the players it's still fun to set up a scenario for the battle.

Battles revolve around 2-4 players trying to knock the others off the stage.  If you get knocked off a stage you can attempt to jump back on, but if you fail you'll be blown off screen.  Also, with each hit a character takes a damage percentage.  As it gets higher the attacks on the character will send them further and further until eventually recovery becomes impossible.  For the basics every character has special attacks that are activated by the B button or whatever button you assign it to.  Each character has 4 specials one.  One for just pushing B, and then 3 for pushing the control stick up, down, or the the side.  The same works for standard attacks.  If you lightly push the control stick and the A button on the ground you will do a tilt attack.  Neutral A for some can be pushed multiple times to do a basic combo.  Stronger attacks called smash attacks can be used by hitting the control stick to a direction and the A button at the same time.  These attacks are a little slower and can only be used on the ground.

You can also throw characters in 4 directions by grabbing with the Z button and then pushing the control stick in a direction.  As you can see the battle mechanics are very basic for a fighting game, but its a combination of various attacks that make this game more interesting.  Also, this game allows characters to jump in midair, and the up B moves are a final jumping attack for the character after the character has used up their normal jumps.  The jumps are reset once the character hits the ground.

Also, there's about 50 items to use and the highlight of them all is the smash ball.  When a character breaks the ball they are surrounded by an aura, and if they push B they can activate an extremely powerful attack.  But if they are hit hard enough before they activate it they lose the ability and it's another scramble to break the ball.

This game features a classic battle mode where you fight a series of characters and a boss at the end, an adventure mode dubbed the subspace emissary which plays like a platformer and an rpg (like megaman but with smash mechanics), an event mode (has co-op on some) that has battles with certain conditions or occasionally outrageous but fun scenarios, a training mode for practicing, and when you unlock the 30 or so fighters you get an all star mode where you fight the entire roster one after another with breaks between each match.  During those breaks you can choose the reset your damage, but you can only do it 3 times.   

The highlight of this game is none of those, but rather the vs mode.  You can set items, pick from 30 or so stages, set up teams or free-for-alls, time matches, stock matches(lives), or coin battles (each hit releases coins and the one with the most coins wins).  Also the online vs mode is free.  If you want to play with a friend you can just register each other's friend codes which appear on the register a friend page(online).  Also, there are 4 controllers to use the wii mote sideways, nunchuck with wiimote, classic controller, and gamecube controller.  I tend to play with the gamecube controller and sometimes the nunchuck.  I see those as the easier ones to use, but everyone can choose their own.  Overall, if you're a nintendo fan, or just like fighting games this is a definate title to look at.