Super Smash Bros. for Wii U

Super Smash Bros. for Wii U is just plain excellent. The bittersweet tone this post will soon take has nothing to do with the quality of the game itself. But playing and "beating" this game all weekend long has left me reflecting on my history with this franchise and, by extension, with video games in general. Basically I just need to lament growing up for a few paragraphs here.

I didn't own a Nintendo 64 until well into the 2000s, but Super Smash Bros. was immediately my favorite game for the console. It probably still is. Back in fifth grade, I was just so impressed by the idea of all these Nintendo characters duking things out in a fighting game. When I got a GameCube for Christmas in 2002 - freshman year of high school - the first game I bought was the year-old Super Smash Bros. Melee. And man, I beat the ever-loving shit out of that game. Classic and All-Star mode, each cleared with every single character. I collected every trophy that didn't require some special condition like "have a save file from such and such a game on your memory card."

And most importantly, I played it frequently and often, with everyone I knew. My friends, first and foremost, but also my sisters and occasionally their friends. Cousins. Neighbors. Completely "random" people that I wouldn't call friends or even acquaintances, but who would be in our house for one reason or another back in those days. And what's crazy is that I can remember distinct "eras" of playing Melee, even though Brawl would come out just six years later. Early on, I was flat-out awful at the game, but so was every friend I had, so I could win matches fairly easily by spamming Kirby's down-special brick move. Kirby was my first main, I guess. Then came the Young Link era; his down-aerial, a "sword pogo" if you will, was quicker and more potent than Kirby's brick was, and in addition to that Young Link had projectiles and quicker movement. After logging something like twenty hours with Kirby, I put in fifty-plus with Young Link. All of this happened within my first year of owning the game, I'm sure.

Somewhere along the way - and it's not even clear to me when or why - I began dabbling with Jigglypuff. I distinctly remember playing so, so many one-on-one matches with an old neighbor and friend, who with Marth was, at the time, easily the best player I'd encountered. He made me better, and I made him better. By '05 or '06, my Jigglypuff was in absolute top form, and boy, was I an insufferable asshole at Melee. The unconventional movements of the character, along with overpowered moves like rest and rollout, made him (her?) a nightmare for my foes. Multiple times back then and later on in college, I made people rage quit over zero-to-death combos and perfectly executed "wall of pain" aerial kicks. Those were the days! Except, keep in mind, this was 2006 or so; I had only just gotten my driver's license and certainly had little reason to ever leave my hometown. I may have been as good at Melee as anyone I knew, but in those pre-Internet days, it was nothing but greatness in a vacuum. (It's worth mentioning that my second-most played character behind Jigglypuff by this time wasn't even Young Link, but Bowser. Bowser, often considered the very worst fighter in all of Melee.)

All of this changed when a few friends and I decided to spend a summer Saturday in '06 or '07 at some independent video game store a forty-minute drive away, competing in our first (and last) regional video game tournament. We showed up, certain we could hang with anyone. And then all four of us just got obliterated. It wasn't even close. My Jigglypuff, who had been wrecking hometown fools for years, got absolutely smoked by two of the three people I met in group play. I did manage to beat one person in my group - a Dr. Mario who went by the moniker "Dr. Tubbs" - only to later find out that he had been deemed the very worst player in the entire tournament. It was humbling and sobering for the four of us, to head into a seventy-man tournament and all find ourselves placing somewhere in the sixties. But it was also pretty damn inspiring! After all, we were the biggest Smash nuts we knew, and here was this much bigger and far deeper scene of immensely talented players. I learned that day that I could play Smash forever and still never be as good as some of those guys. Rather than dishearten me, it gave me all kinds of incentive to get even better. I thought I'd been atop my game all along, but I had so much farther to climb!

Except, I never really did. Life got in the way. College started, and even though there were tons of new people to play Smash with - plenty of them great - I just never found that video game to be nearly as important as I once did. I still obsessed over the impending release of Brawl, eating up every new piece of information that came my way for a good year or so. And when it came out in the spring of 2008, I was right there with several of my hometown friends on release night, giddy as hell. We played the living hell out of Brawl that year, and while today many people will frown on Brawl and say that it was terrible, trust me, we ate that shit right up back then. I can't confirm that I beat classic and all-star mode with every single character again, but I do know that I organized my own little tournament that summer and hosted twelve friends or so at my place. Brawl interest never quite hit Melee levels after a year or so, but it was alive and well back in the summer of 2008, where we'd often find ourselves playing Smash until dawn on the weekends.

And then it just sort of faded away. A lot of that has to do with Brawl not being quite as good as Melee, I'm sure, but strangely I can't really recall any specific Smash-based memories for most of the Brawl era. We played it - I know this - but never religiously. I wonder how much of this has to do with me starting up this blog in 2009. Probably quite a bit, really - who could play so much Brawl when there were so many other games to beat? (And books to read and movies to watch, too.)

2014 has been a big year for Smash. A lot of us got into the fan-made Brawl modification Project M, which sought to take Brawl's characters and make them play more like they did - or would have - in Melee. Then of course Smash 3DS came out in October, and now here's Smash Wii U. And it's great! And yet I know I'll never come close to beating all-star and classic mode with every single character, nor will I devote a particularly large amount of time to becoming great at the game and ruling online play. I know this because I am not the 14-year-old kid who bought Melee. That guy could spend all afternoon playing it after school. All afternoon! And I'm also not the 20-year-old college student who could play Brawl between classes and all summer long with nothing else but an internship to worry about. I'm now the 26-year-old fully-employed married homeowner taking part time classes. I probably played something like fifteen hours of Smash for Wii U this weekend - meaning I wasn't playing it for forty of the fifty-five hours between 5:00pm on Friday and midnight on Sunday. And still I feel like I played it too much. I raked some leaves, watched a lecture for class, did some homework, went grocery shopping, went out to dinner, watched a lot of football, and still I can't shake the feeling that I "wasted" the weekend playing Smash. I guess that's just what it means to grow up. (It sucks, but it beats the alternative!) Anyway, I just don't think I'll play a boatload of this Smash game. There's too much else going on in my life, and frankly, I'm strangely okay with that. Up ahead is a four-day weekend and strangely I really hope not to spend more than ten hours of it playing Smash. I wish I could!

If Nintendo continues putting out a new Smash game every six or seven years, there's a good chance I'll be a father by the time the next one comes out. And once that happens - being a father, I mean - I know that it'll pretty much be curtains for my free time. This blog itself comes with an unspoken time limit of sorts - yeah, the goal to just beat everything is open-ended, but when I take a step back and realize how infrequently I play video games these days, I grow very skeptical about whether or not I can actually finish off the seventy games still in my backlog.

This was very long and rambling and I apologize to you, dear reader, if you've made it this far. My long-winded point was merely that playing this Smash Bros. game has filled me with nostalgia for simpler times when I had all the time in the world to play Smash Bros. games.