LogFAQs > #951508092

08. Super Smash Bros. (N64, 1999)


It is imperative that you read this writeup while listening to this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mRCe5L1imxg

Sometimes, as weve seen throughout this topic series, the best version of a game, or of a style or genre of game, isnt always the highest ranking.

For me, thats the case here. The original Super Smash Bros. was the game that hooked me into console gaming. I was 11, a relatively late arrival to non-handheld, non-PC gaming, and they had a demo kiosk set up at Best Buy. In the spring and summer of 1999, I would go with either parent, any time they went to the Liberty Tree Mall, and post up at the Smash kiosk. I tried to save up money from my paper route, but M:tG kept sapping my money. Thankfully, my parents, as Ive mentioned earlier, got me one for Christmas. Im not sure how they made it happen - we didnt have a lot of wiggle room then - but they did. And by then, Id socked away enough to buy myself Super Smash.



It became a staple in my house, and later, my college dorm, and still was a game I played occasionally post-college. I still have a few functioning N64 controllers, and Ill still plug everything in and challenge my brother to a few matches every now and again. Now, as ever, he almost never wins. For whatever reason, this, this is the game I am better at relative to my peers than all others. A game which I almost never have the opportunity to play against anyone in person. Figures, right? (Dear Nintendo: Put this on the Switch with online play, you cowards)



I initially took to Kirby, because who didnt? Kirby was the obvious powerhouse, with better recovery than everyone else and more of what became known as meteor smashes than any other character. Final Cutter remains one of the most devastatingly broken moves in gaming history when executed correctly. Eventually, though, as my friends caught on to Kirbys wiles, I expanded, and became a Pikachu main for a while. Like Kirby, Pikachu was unassuming. And deadly. No particular moves were obvious killers for Pika, which made it a lot harder for my opponents to anticipate what was going to do them in. The third character I adopted as a main, who, like Kirby, has only gotten worse over time, was Ness. Nesss moveset became emblematic of the type of characters I would grow to love in fighters - weird, technical spacers. The thing with Ness is that if you can avoid the distancing game, he can still punish you up close. Those yo-yos and that homerun bat are especially nasty, as is the short-hopped down-air, the tidiest killshot in the game imo. But the thing that puts Ness over the top is his throws. Huge launching capabilities, which open up a lot of possibilities for pain. They tried to compensate for Ness ridiculously strong moveset by making his recovery exceptionally hard to execute - I never managed the muscle memory for it in any of the subsequent Smash games due to the increased speed required - but once you get it down, its surprisingly usable, and, surprise surprise, also surprisingly dangerous. Im not sure there is a single more gratifying way of KOing someone in the entire series than successfully connecting with Ness himself as a psionically-charged missile.



---

The Thighmaster