As some of you may be aware, Super Smash Brothers: Brawl for the Nintendo Wii received a good deal of hype prior to its heavily-delayed launch. Nintendo employed just about everything from radio announcements to billboards to ads at the movie theater to introduce Brawl to the general public. Not that this was unmerited, of course: the Super Smash Brothers franchise constitutes by far the largest portion of Nintendo's console multiplayer market. The game released this Monday, and I got a chance to play it earlier today.
I briefly gave Brawl a try using a Wiimote controller, but soon found this to be quite daunting. Thankfully, Brawl allows for GameCube controllers to be plugged into the Wii console and used with the same controls as were used for predecessor, Super Smash Brothers: Melee, on the GameCube. Apparently using the Wiimote takes some getting used to: my friend was able to control using the Wiimote without any particular problems, managing to beat both me and the CPU a number of times over. Since Brawl was designed with multiplayer in mind, Nintendo included a netplay feature, which is a first for the Super Smash Brothers series (excluding the select few that run the original N64 version in PC emulators and netplay using Kaillera).
Brawl carried over some of what I perceived to be Melee's drawbacks, most importantly the game's camera. While virtually all 3D fighting games zoom out to keep all players visible on the screen, most of them also use smaller stages so that players on the screen will not become irrecognizably small. SSB, on the other hand, makes use of larger stages, meaning that if two players are on opposite extremes of the stage, the only indicator of your character is the colored player designation above the actor. As a result, it's often difficult to tell which direction that highly symmetrical characters such as Link and Mario are facing. I wouldn't be surprised if Nintendo had designed the game with huge TV screens in mind, such as people seem to be buying nowadays, such that this would be a nonissue.
SSB and Melee both had some pretty good stages. For example, Melee's Hyrule Temple made use of a very rough landscape that made a fight effective mostly at close quarters, and took things a step further with four or five distinct levels on which one could stand. When I saw that Brawl had a rendition of the Bridge of Eldin from Twilight Princess, I'd expected the same, though I quickly found that the Bridge of Eldin was just that - a straight, narrow, one-level bridge. In stage terms, this is a straight line, with a fancy bitmapped backdrop. The same held true for a number of the other stages. Perhaps the only truly creative stage was "Picto Chat", which is better known as a feature of Nintendo DS handhelds that allows to players to graphically participate in a chat via Wi-Fi. In this stage, the map is literally drawn as you play it, which can really keep someone immersed in trying to discover and modify a strategy.
One of Brawl's redeeming graces is Stage Builder, which at first glance is essentially a 2D ripoff of Forge in Halo 3, which in itself was a ripoff of the Park Creator in Tonk Hawk's Pro Skater. I didn't get a chance to actually build a stage, though somewhat disturbingly I found some of the stages that my friend built within the past week to be more enjoyable than some of the new stages in Brawl. Some other interesting variables include constant fire-breath, moon physics, and so forth.
Graphically, I was a bit disappointed by Brawl. Nintendo's trailers seemed to promise a high-end redesign of Brawl's graphics, much like Melee improved noticeably over the original Super Smash Brothers for the Nintendo 64. Perhaps this was because I was viewing the game in 480i (even though the Wii maxes at 480p anyway, which offers no real resolution boost), but the only indication that Brawl was being played rather than Melee were the newer characters on the screen and the Wiimotes rather than GameCube controllers in the players' hands. Some of Brawl's textures, music, and stages appear to have been directly ripped from Melee: some appear to have been resampled, while others are plain-out copies. Other details were completely redone instead of enhanced, such as the updated Link model and textures made to resemble his Twilight Princess rendition.
To be honest, I don't know what to say about Brawl. While I personally don't think it lived up to its hype, a number of other people have disagreed with me just within the past few hours. Given, I only played the multiplayer mode of the game for a few hours, so I could have missed quite a bit. At the moment, though, Brawl isn't enough to convince me to spend $249 on a Wii console. And whatever you do, don't get me started on Kirby.