Super Smash Bros : A Smashing Retrospective

By: Benjanime

A long, long time ago during the Spring of 1999 during a slow going weekend afternoon, I made plans to go outside when I took notice of a hilarious Nintendo commercial involving a group of Nintendo characters starting a beatdown as an ad for Super Smash Bros., a new fighting game that just hit the market. It was an ordinary sunny day so I ran outside to let my friends know about it. I had an N64 myself, but one of the friends amongst talking to also had one, though it was going to be a while before we could rent it for ourselves, as somebody else had beaten us to the rental, but we were hyped.

Production art for the game

Come next weekend, my friend chanced upon nabbing the rental, but on the same day we scheduled to do some Pok'emon trading card playing/trading. So our plan was to bring the other friends over, play just an hour of Super Smash Bros., and then go back outside for our Pok'emon card game business. To our dismay, we were hooked and we set our other activity aside. The previous guy to rent the game did kind of ruin the surprise of character and level unlocks though, as everything was already there, but it didn't hold us back. To see all these fighting stages based on Nintendo's gaming library was like a love letter to fans, and beating the snot out of familiar characters like Yoshi, Samus and Donkey Kong made for a thrilling and fun experience, and for its time it was like a fighting game like no other.

Ness being included in the roster had some players scratching their head for those who had never played Earthbound on the Super Nintendo, and from what I heard those who didn't play it saw this as their first time being introduced to the character.

We did rent the game a couple more times, but eventually the novelty did get tiring after playing so frequently. I rented the game for myself one summer just to play through the story mode with different characters, and obviously the experience wasn't as fun as multiplayer with friends, but it still made a good time waster. The fight against Master Hand is still a challenge even on hard difficulty, and it made for a good closing of the book upon finishing my time of enjoying an otherwise great game in the N64 library. As fun as it was playing other multiplayer games with my friends on the system, none matched the competitive rivalry of fighting with the many characters in Smash.

What are your memories of Super Smash Bros.? Leave a comment and as always, see you next article!

Looking for more from Benjanime?

READ 87618 TIMES

There are no comments yet.

Glover - A Trial and Error Platformer

When Super Mario 64 launched with the Nintendo 64, it paved the way for 3D platformers in the mid to late 1990s. Bringing together elements of prior M...

I Was A Preteen Video Store Clerk for My Dad's Shop

Originally, I was going to make a list of the top 500 reasons we went out of business after 5 fruitful years renting VHS tapes and Nintendo games in W...

Why I Love Classic Sonic

Video game character franchises have always had a good and bad track record with staying relevant out of popularity. A franchise like Bubsy could...

Super Mario Land 2: A Bigger Sequel

When it comes to sequels, whether in movies or video games, they may leave you with the opinion that they performed better than their predecessors, or...

TMNT III: A Farce of a Finale

There comes a time in our childhoods when we were thrilled to want to watch a movie, only for it to not meet our expectations.... in a bad way. When T...

MOST RECENT RETRORATING FEATURED OFFICIAL

Go to page: